Album: Paolo Nutini - These Streets

One of the popular essay title (Chinese) in exams back in primary school was A Lucky/ Bad Day (美好/倒霉的一天). You start to cram in the good/ bad things as many as possible in that 120 words essay. I don't really believe that so many surprising events can happen in one day but what happened yesterday kinda changed my perception towards it, until something else happened.

It's about good luck btw. I received my pay (RM 95 only) after being treated like some cheap labour for 2 days. If you wanna get slim fast, this is one of the more efficient way. I had to reach KTM station around 5 pm so I 'quited' one hour earlier.

However I didn't go to the LRT station asap, went to Kinokuniya instead. I bet you know why. I can't believe that I actually saw 4 magazines I might want to buy siting on the book shelf. Especially ROCKIN' ON JAPAN (Natsumi: Sorry about that lol). That's a first. Normally it's either 1 or 2 of it or none at all. After flipping through the content (comparing which has more YUI), I used more than half what I've earned for the past 2 days and bought 2 magazines.



The one on the left is Nikkei Entertainment.

When I reached home, my mom told me that there's a package for me. !! My CrossRoads Mylar3 has arrived~ That was kinda unexpected.



Sorry about the flashlight. Too lazy to configure it. I was 'over burning' this new little baby for 24 hours. The packaging is kinda ugly but this is what we called affordable entry IEM, with this price it's impossible to buy Shure, Sennheiser or even the ultimate E something.

Continue. I tell you go get yourself a copy of ROCKIN' ON JAPAN now, even you can't read Japanese, as long as you love dear YUI. It roughly contains of 15 pages of pictures + 12 pages of interview, total 20000 of words.



We have pictures of YUI playing piano, and roughly 10 pages of words (took me an hour to finish it) as displayed above. The 'larger' magazine at the back is Nikkei Entertainment.

That's just a preview of it, the content of ROCKIN' ON is soo intense, filled with lots of untold histories, things about YUI might 'shocked' you after you found it out. A lot of Japanese fans cried after reading it. Well for me you know I'm just a JLPT level 3 first year student, can't really FULLY understand it but I can roughly know what's going on. I didn't cried though, again language barrier. But I was really impressed by YUI all over again and made you think again and again before you judge somebody without knowing them. I'll dedicate a few new posts about this magazine soon. Hope by then I can write it in a more serious tone, minimise my errors as little as possible.

The actual interview lasted for 3 hours, YUI talked about herself chronologically since she was born up till the moment before her 20th birthday. The interview was on 25th of March, yea the day she performed her last teen street live.
(NOTE: IT WAS YUI WHO CAME UP THIS STREET LIVE THING)

Today we're going to talk about Nikkei Entertainment. Something light before the big thing. You can skip the whole thing if you don't listen to Jpop. You can still read it though. As usual, don't believe in everything I wrote.



This magazine is really something, no wonder a lot of foreign media using the reports made by this magazine and 'create' some news from it. Especially the one above. So called 4 New Divas (新四大天王). I kinda explained about this here, lets not talk about how bad foreign medias adapted the report. From the report apparently the previous 4 divas were:

Hamasaki Ayumi, Koda Kumi, Otsuka Ai and Utada Hikaru. Because their albums managed to sell more than 500k copies at the moment.

In the past 6 months, another 4 female artists who achieved huge breakthrough will be Ayaka, Ito Yuna, Kimura Kaela, and of course dear YUI. They might be the 4 new generation divas (I used divas because Four Heavenly Kings/ Queens sounds so wrong LOL, I LOVE wikipedia haha)

First they compared 4 of them based on their fan base. Ayaka is balance type, Ito Yuna has more female supporters, Kaela is more appeal towards males. The age for 3 of them will be mostly fans in their 20s, and 30s too but very few in their 10s.

Here's why YUI is so special. Not only she has a lot of fans in 20s, she has a lot young fans too (10s). Maybe it has to do with the wonderful lyrics she wrote which manage to attract younger listeners. They can connect with the meanings/ messages behind it.

The ratio between male and female fans of YUI will be in 6:4. Normally for female artists, male will go for looks more, female artists who are too idol-ish will have less female fans. For YUI, she managed to gain support from a wide range of people, regardless age or gender.

Judging from the voice YUI can have an innocent/ idol-ish sweet voice yet delivers powerful performance at the same time because she has street performing experience. As for looks she can be the rock chick in Rolling star rocking out with her electric, to wearing a dress, dressed in a girly way, singing CHE.R.RY accompanied by her acoustic.

And that might be the reason why she's loved by so many people. Versatility?

Music wise. Look at the chart below:



They divided present female artists to 4 parts. Left is vocalist, right is songwriters. Upper part will be female artists who are more focus on the sound (I don't really get it anyway), below is the ones who are more focus on vocal performance (tell me if you don't understand). And artists were arranged according to the time they debut. Means the ones who debuted earlier will be placed further from the center point.

Hence,

Vocalist + Sound
hitomi
Tommy heavenly6
YUKI
Kimura Kaela
Takahashi Hitomi
Tsuchiya Anna

Vocalist + Voice
UA
Namie Amuro
Kuraki Mai
Hamasaki Ayumi
Koda Kumi
Crystal Kay
Nakashima Mika
Hajime Chitose
Hitoto Yo
Hirahara Ayaka
BoA
Ito Yuna
Salyu

Songwriter + Vocal
Cocco
MISIA
Onitsuka Chihiro
Utada Hikaru
AI
Katou Miliyah
Ayaka
Angela Aki

Songwriter + Sound
BONNIE PINK
aiko
Shiina Ringo
Yaida Hitomi
Otsuka Ai
YUI

You might disagree their categorisation but somehow I think it kinda makes sense. Give me a concrete reason if you disagree (I disagree at certain point to when I first read it, still don't really understand the position of Hikki lol). Lets just say that we can't really categorise these stuff, this is just a guideline.

Then they said that Ayaka is Hikki's type (balance type), Yuna is Koda's type (famous among females), Kaela will be YUKI.

What about YUI? Otsuka Ai.

Calm down. The reason they said so is because both YUI and Otsuka posses both idol and artist's characteristics. YUI towards rock, Otsuka towards pop, even though they might not 'clash' between genres, YUI's biggest rival still might be Otsuka Ai. However YUI has a strong fan base among younger generation, as a rockish singer songwriter, she has her own position in the music industry.


What do you think?? Please don't give me YUI's the best/ hail YUI responses. I'm well aware of that thank you. Even though I was forced to write these analysis back then in school, it was in BM so if my writings are confusing, sorry about that. I still have a long way to go =.= I shall go and read the rest to discover more interesting 'phenomenon'. Ueno Juri and Nagasawa Masami~~~~~

Now I don't really know why I wrote this at the first place. Should be a day in my life but turned out...Anyway about that day, when I thought that I was the luckiest person in the world, my mom asked me to bring her to some place in PJ, in the end I was stuck in traffic jam for 1 whole hour (even morning rush hours are better than this, wonder what happened). Since I drive a manual car, imagine the fun switching gears every 15 seconds.

Guess there's no such thing as my luckiest day after all.

Till then, au revior.