Facts about Utada Hikaru, the famous Japanese pop star

News24xx.com - Fans of video game may know Utada Hikaru as the person who voices each memorable theme of Square Enix and Disney’s collaborative series, Kingdom Hearts. However, there are so many things to know about Utada Hikaru. She has been a big hit in Japan since her debut in 1999 with her album First Love. She is one of the most popular J-Pop stars in the world. Here are some interesting facts about Utada Hikaru.

1.       A Japanese music royalty

Utada was born in a family with musical influence. Her mother, Keiko Fuji, is a popular singer of enka, a traditional Japanese music genre. She had sung popular ballads in the late 60s and early 70s. Her father, Teruzane Utada, is a famous Japanese record producer. He had written great songs through the late 80s and mid 90s, and now served as his daughter’s manager.

Read more: Tragic! This Handsome Bolywood Actor Dies, Allegedly Suicide

2.       An American-born musician

Utada was not born in Japan, but in New York City, United States, in 1983. Her father’s work forced the family to move back and forth between Japan and US. This makes Utada grew up with the mixture of both cultures. She attended Columbia University briefly, before dropping out to focus on her family and her career. She began writing her own songs at the age of 10 and started recording them during her early teenage years under the moniker U3.

3.       A successful musician at the age of 16

Although she started her music career as an early teen, she only found success when she was 16 years old, after she released a Japanese album titled First Loveunder her birth name. It quickly became a hit. The unique blend of American R&B and Japanese contextualization was new and exciting to the national audience. She was a self-made pop star with her own style who was in control of her own attitude, and she stood out among the sea of very-controlled “idols”. First love is still the highest-selling album in Japan’s history.

4.       Japan’s “most influential artist of the decade”

In 2009, Utada was named by Japan Times as the country’s most influential artist of the decade. She was revered as the most important person to emerge in the Japanese pop world since Tetsuya Komuro discovered Eurobeat in the 1980s. The news agency also said that her first album, First Love, changed the face of J-Pop and called her 2000 tour as “the biggest Japanese music event of the year”.

 

 

News24xx.com/fik/red