marcocsb wrote:
Quote:

Shurikid wrote:

Agreed; I think this is key to any future success Utada will have in markets outside of Japan. She has to start promoting herself based on her appeal as an INTERNATIONAL music phenomenon- not writing for an "American" audience or a "Japanese" audience but for a global audience.

I think with TITO people felt let down because Utada proved that she could write and sing with the best of the mainstream, but to her existing fans...that isn't very impressive. We expect her to make an art that is all her own, which is, perhaps, a misplaced expectation; I think the intention behind TITO and the reception of it were very different. For Utada, and the way I personally view TITO, the album was an exploration and redefining of her roots after taking so many steps into the experimental- from "Deep River" onward, persistently. I think Utada wants to avoid feeling contrived and in order to do that she has to remind herself of the rote basics at times. The timing for this exercise just happened to conveniently coincide with an English-language release. For her listeners, I think it was harder to swallow. The transition from "Exodus" to "This Is The One" is not exactly smooth, but if you put it into the context of her larger body of work, it makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is just me reading too much into TITO in order to justify it because I shamelessly adore it, but we all know Utada is in a constant mode of discovery and play and curiosity. I think she's also intelligent enough to know when she needs to step back and ground herself to some kind of foundation. In that regard, she could have done far, far worse than TITO.

I couldn't agree more, i'm not Japanese but i like way more her work for japanese audience rather than her work for american audience and i think that's the case for most of her fans worldwide, so yeah she should focus on international audience. She should focus on the kind of people that really appreciates music and not on americans that only listen to hot girls music.