Japanese City Pop – A Quick Introduction To Tokyo’s 80s Soundtrack

I love City Pop with a burning passion. The only adjective you can really use to describe the genre is vibey. However, beyond the dreamy synths and beautiful album art, City Pop also reflects a time in Japan's history when fortune and opportunity felt limitless.

Music journalist Yutaka defined the genre as “urban pop music for those with urban lifestyles,” in his book “Disc Collection: Japanese City Pop”. The uprising of the genre coincided with Japan's economic boom in the 70s and 80s, which allowed for vast pools of label funding and greater outputs of new music. Artists turned away from tradition in search of western sounds, spanning R&B, funk and soul. Much like Yoshoku cuisine, the blending of east and west produced something fresh and new, however unlike the love the Japanese adopted for tomato sauce, the genre lost appeal relatively quickly, garnering criticism for its cheesy nature.

The genre's revival really came in the early 2010s when artists drew inspiration from it to create vaporwave and futurefunk music. The Youtube algorithm has also undoubtly played a massive role in maintaining the uprising of this genre, because I think we've all at some stage been blessed by the algorithm with a groovy slapper or a goose bump inducing AMV. Current favourite track is "ANRI - I can't stop the loneliness" - Listen in for a good time.

P.S. RIP to the original Plastic Love video on Youtube, you will be missed but your legacy will live on.

- Jeff