T3-21

I was reading some of the comparisions between ULTRA BLUE and HEART STATION on a fan forum (which was one of the better ones actually, a couple other ones were just...terrible), and I was actually quite surprised by the comparisions.

To me, it seemed that everybody had just outrageously high expectations, expectations like that every single album has to be absolutely PERFECT, diverse, interesting, not using synthesizers, not in her upper vocal range, and that she shouldn't have hurt her vocal cords, songs have to be more 'emotional (aka not happy, must sound depressing (doesn't matter about lyrical content, even if its top notch these people dont care))', have absolutely wonderful promotional videos that only her ex-husband can make, and so on and so forth. By the way, it CANNOT be simplistically nice, it MUST be complex and EVERY SINGLE TRACK must be thought-provoking.

It also doesn't really matter to these people what Utada Hikaru as an artist really feels when she's making the album. They all assume things, take what they think as the absolute truth and reach conclusions based on conjecture.

Most people don't seem to care that her album is about what she feels, and if she's not feeling it, then she's not going to do it.

Of course, there are still many people who understand that (and for some reason their posts are almost always short, unless if they're ranting against the other posters).

Sometimes I'm confused when other people say that 'all the pop princesses out there who are at the top of the charts have no talent, etc.' Well, sure, they might not have talent bursting out of every single pore, but they MUST have had SOME talent for some A&R person to choose them (I'm not talking about Asia, I'm talking about North America). They may not be a lot better than the average person, but they're definetly NOT average.