(utada.com, by Y. Kikuma)

Utada Hikaru has been doing her In The Flesh 2010 tour since the beginning of the year and every city she stops in leaves a gaggle of satisfied fans in her wake. Utada’s show in her hometown, New York City, was no exception. At one point in the night she remarked that she thought that the fans in Las Vegas were the loudest, but it was nothing compared to NYC (cue ear-splitting scream from proud crowd).

The crowd was lively and the venue, The Fillmore at Irving Plaza, was packed, the concert sold-out. Cameras inside the venue were strictly forbidden and this rule heavily enforced. Not only did you have to check your camera separately from your bag and coat (no doubt to stop people from being the camera to a future event), if found taping during the performance you were taken out of the crowd to check your camera. Bigwigs from American music companies were there, sitting comfortably in the VIP section which also held, friends and relatives of Utada’s, staff, some fans and yours truly.

In Seattle (Source: Utada.com)

Before the show starts, the crowd goes crazy at sporadic moments: whenever there is a break between songs the DJ is playing, whenever one person starts cheering, whenever they suspect Utada is coming out…any minute now… any minute. And finally she does, she opens with three semi-fast, English-language numbers and by the 3rd song I am convinced that even if someone confined Utada’s performance to a 2 by 2 ft space on stage she would still rock it. She had the audience in the palm of her hands. And you may say, “Well, all famous singers have excited audience members,” but that would be missing the essence of her fans. They love her not because she’s gorgeous or sexy or would totally bang if she let them. They love her and respect her because she’s great at what she does. And when there’s a crowd like that at a show, so diverse and proud to call themselves fans, it shows and it was a really nice atmosphere to be in, especially as an Utada newcomer.

As in most concerts, every question is answered with a yell, the primitiveness of concerts has never been so splendid than at The Fillmore, watching Utada talk to her crowd. In working for Seoulbeats, and, more recently, AA Theory, I have been to a lot of great concerts and performances by artists of Asian descent, but of any of them Utada had the most diverse audience I had ever seen. Something about a giant black man swaying slowly side-to-side, glow sticks erect, singing along to a Japanese-American’s songs tugs at the heart strings.

In LA (Source: Utada.com)

She moves into her Japanese songs and then into more mellow territory, sitting behind a piano and playing. She writes all of her own songs and they start with just the keyboard and her voice and she shared that with us. The songs become more upbeat, they go from English to Japanese and back. Here, her voice becomes whiny, and I don’t think I like it. But that’s irrelevant because the mob below me knows that she is the greatest. When a song ends they cheer, when the next begins, a high-pitched wail rips through the decaying sound of their last collective yell. It’s madness.

Utada remarks on the diversity of the crowd and everyone is proud of this fact. From the Japanese-American girl who came from another state to the white guys from Canada,  from the ripped Latino dude in the white tank to the old Asian man up front singing along to every song, from the gay couple embracing as they croon with their favorite crooner to the parents of the kids just dying to see Utada. And very suddenly, I’m in love with Utada, I’m in love with New York, I’m in love with America, I’m in love with music. I’m in love with any force that makes anything like this possible.

The show ends with an extended encore. Utada and her band (Keyboard player, bass player, guitar player, drummer, percussionist and piano) all performed a great show. It is as the show ends that I realize that BoA and Se7en, as great as they are, aren’t what Asian-Americans need to represent them right now. It’s an Asian-American, it’s Utada. Someone who doesn’t need to fake it, someone who knows how to work a crowd, someone who knows what it’s like being an Asian in America and not from the privileged altitude of their hotel rooms in between public appearances. If you want to convince a music executive that Americans (and not just Asian-Americans) are ready for a singer of Asian descent, let them got to an Utada concert. Not only are we all ready, we’re dying for it.

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