As I explained in my previous post detailing Perfume’s “Polyrhythm” single, two packages arrived for me the other day. One of these was my very first Hello! Project purchase, Goto Maki’s fourth and final album How to use SEXY. I’ve been a fan of Maki pretty much since I became a fan of H!P, so I felt it was only natural to get ahold of her last album with them while I still could.
It is, in a lot of ways, symbolic to me because it marks the end of an “era”. At the moment, there really is no concrete evidence that she will be returning to the music scene at some point — I don’t want to dupe myself into believing she’s going to make a stunning comeback on, say, avex trax and take over as primary diva for Hamasaki Ayumi (whose recent tragedy regarding her hearing seriously brought me down for a day or two, it was such a big deal to me), but I don’t like to think she’s finished with her singing career. She truly has a beautiful voice, and out of all the girls to ever come out of H!P, I would have to vote her the most likely to succeed out of the comfort of an agency she’s been with for almost nine years now. She’s really got talent, compared to her “successor” in Morning Musume, Kusumi Koharu, and still has a lot of the charisma that she did when she was a newbie. If she plays her cards right, she could have an immensely successful career. It’s unlikely to just happen overnight, but I’ll support her either way you look at it.
