It was a rainy Monday morning in the middle of the pandemic year 2020, as I got ready to work from home. I was looking for a little background music while I made my way through the day when I spotted Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” in the corner of my screen. YouTube had been recommending it to me for a while, but I never really bothered clicking. When I finally gave in and checked it out, I fell into a rabbit hole I’ve yet to emerge from. My introduction to the City Pop genre turned out to be pretty typical.
Most people are roped in by songs like “Plastic Love” or Miki Matusbara’s “Mayonaka no Door (Stay With Me)” and then stick around to discover that there’s so much more to this music niche. City Pop occasionally goes viral, but it’s still worth digging into this great genre that just keeps giving. So let’s dive right into all the ins- and outs of these urban classics from the Japanese 1970s and 1980s. Next time a song inevitably goes viral, you’ll have the glorious bragging rights that you already knew the song.
A Time Before The Lost Decades
In the 1970s and 180s, Japanese society underwent rapid modernization and expansion. The Great Economic Miracle of the 1950s and onward catapulted it to the second-largest economy in the world. Naturally, with the changing and booming economy came a lifestyle change. Japan modernized rapidly, and Tokyo gained the image of an uptown, lofty, westernized metropolis filled to the brim with American-style consumerism. With that lifestyle came new music. The music that is nowadays referred to as City Pop is distinctively cosmopolitan and caters directly to this Western-style urbanism. City Pop draws from music styles from the West, particularly R&B, Jazz, Funk, and Soft Rock. However, it’s distinctive through its use of Japanese in its lyrics. That said, many of the songs have small portions of their lyrics in English. Usually, it’s just a few words, or a phrase at most. Both “Plastic Love,” and “Stay With Me” are perfect examples of this.
City Pop is very clearly a product of the economic boom during the Japanese 80s.
So, City Pop was a new sound made for a high-end, luxurious, glamorous, and Westernized lifestyle in Japanese urban culture. It fell out of favor alongside the very lifestyle for which it was made. In the early 1990s, the Japanese economic bubble burst, leading to a long time of economic stagnation referred to as the Lost Decades. The laid-back optimism and carefreeness of City Pop no longer matched the economic reality in Japan. It had become mainstream over the 1970s and 1980s, but now found itself challenged by cultural reactions influenced by the new economic reality, like Visual Kei and techno. Younger Japanese culturally reacted against its cheesy nature, decried it as “shitty pop,” and moved away from it.
But of course, City Pop never died or went away. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be discussing it and listening to it today. City Pop remains fantastic at evoking those exact feelings for which it was created – high-end, relaxed, cosmopolitan urban glamor. There’s a reason so many listeners associate it with night driving at a tropical beachfront or through a neon-lit metropolis like Tokyo.
A White Boy’s Nostalgia to the Japanese 80s
So here I am, not remotely the target demographic. Like quite a few City Pop fans, I’m born way after the heyday of the genre. I’ve never been to Japan, and I can’t speak a word of Japanese. Why then, does City Pop resonate with me, and with a Western audience in general? That’s due to a lot of factors, chiefly among which is everyone’s personal preference for the music they choose to listen to. However, the fact that I’ve never been to Japan and haven’t lived through the 1980s enables me to imagine a version of 1980s Japan. And therein lie City Pop’s greatest factors of appeal: relaxation and escapism.
City Pop makes you imagine relaxing at a 1980s beach near the big city.
- Let’s start with what’s immediately obvious. City Pop tends to be very inoffensive, laid-back, and often even calming. The melodies are catchy and breezy. The use of Japanese makes it easy to tune out and use it fully as background music. However, the little bits of English that many of the songs use enhance their uniqueness and make them easier to remember (assuming you don’t speak Japanese, of course). This entire vibe of relaxation makes sense within the cultural context of City Pop. It was intended for urban leisure back in the 1970s and 1980s. This ties perfectly into the second part – escapism.
- City Pop, like all music, communicates a certain feeling. For this genre, it’s the carefree optimism. It’s a specific Western idea of the Japanese 1980s, characterized by a projected sense of positivity and cosmopolitanism. So many commenters below videos and in the dedicated forums state that the songs make them imagine driving through Tokyo at night, as they feel a sense of peacefulness and freedom. It’s hardly surprising that amid the pandemic of all moments, City Pop soared to 1st place on the Spotify charts that December. As Wonjune Lee puts it on the digital and print music publication website Afterglow:
City pop offers today’s audience an imagined view of a world that is no more, an optimistic fantasy realm where idyllic music is accompanied by pure joy. Is this just fantasy? Certainly. But sometimes, it’s fun to daydream, to imagine running to catch the last Shinkansen to Osaka, through a crowd of smiling, relieved faces walking along a neon-drenched city that seems like it never sleeps.
Your Road Into the Rabbit Hole
So lastly, let me give you a few recommendations to get you going down the rabbit hole. Here are some of my favorite City Pop tracks of all time. So sit back, imagine yourself driving at night through a neon-lit Tokyo, and thanks for reading this article!
