CITY POP (70s-80s Japanese Pop)

snav

snav

Well-known member
Moving this over from https://dissensus.com/index.php?threads/16297 because, as it was pointed out, this is a different kind of thing than Hosono et al (YMO).

What is City Pop? You could do a lot worse than Wikipedia's description.
In the early 1980s, with the spread of car stereos, the term City Pop came to describe a type of popular music... a breezy, mellow mixture of smooth jazz and album-oriented rock – often with elements of jazz fusion, jazz-funk, or boogie – which appealed to an older and more affluent Japanese audience. Essentially a "mood" or "lifestyle" genre, its themes reflected a life of luxury in a sophisticated urban environment.
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But I want to post some tracks and some history. I'll start with a little overview of the genre's entrypoints, then share some personal favorites. For background: I got into City Pop back in 2013 or so, from a 4 disc compilation just called "City Pop" that I found on a famous and unnamed music downloading site, seeking some background on the sort of music Vektroid/Macintosh Plus was sampling in their vaporwave albums. Like this one:

At the time, this music was very difficult to track down, so I started a subreddit of the same name (https://www.reddit.com/r/citypop/) to try and gather some people around it, and it's gotten pretty popular since. What happened?


There's a generational divide in how people get into this stuff. Most of the older fanbase started with YMO, and then discovered Haruomi Hosono's solo work (like in the prior thread), which occasionally led them to the most popular artist at the time, Tatsuro Yamashita, who was known for his Beach Boys covers. Here's a fun VHS rip of Yamashita's music with background art from Eizin Suzuki, who illustrated many of the most famous album covers:
Millennials tended to discover City Pop through Youtube auto-recommendations, where they'd stumble on Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" (who happens to be Tatsuro Yamashita's wife... coincidence?) and go "damn I gotta get more of this" (the original Youtube video was removed but it had several million views):
Zoomers found out about City Pop through TikTok instead, through a viral meme compilation of "They Say Japanese Women from the 80’s Know This Song", and that song is Miki Matsubara's "Stay With Me" (from a cutely named 1980 album "Pocket Park"):
The first recommendation when someone discovers the genre would usually be either Tatsuro Yamashita, or this far more obscure 1986 album by Momoko Kikuchi, "Adventure" (the record at the very bottom of my photo above), which was seen by many as the epitome of the "driving around a city at night" vibe and relates to a lot of the vaporwave that picked up influence from City Pop. Just listen to that cheesy MIDI intro!
Taeko Onuki's "Sunshower" would take folks in the other direction, toward funkier music from the 70s, with its famous "washing machine" cover art:
Other common early recommendations used to be Hiroshi Sato, who made the album in the other thread's OP with the big synth on the cover:
And Makoto Matsushita, usually his album "First Light":
Toshiki Kadomatsu would show up as well as a more disco/synthpop recommendation, with his excellently titled "GOLD DIGGER ~With True Love~":
There's plenty of other popular recommendations I could list, like Anri, an extremely prolific female vocalist, but now we're getting into idol pop territory, which is one of the hot button issues within the community forming around this stuff. I could write a whole essay about Discord drama relating to the "idol stans" vs the "woke" sects, but I'll save that for another time. Here's some Anri:
...continued...
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
The reason Yamashita, Kikuchi, Sato, Matsushita, Kadomatsu, and Anri were recommended was that their music was relatively easy to find online. But there's a huge amount of interesting stuff out there for the crate digger, more than ever before, especially once this blog "jpop80ss" went online posting tons of obscure albums from various artists. I'll post a few personal favorites from over the years, some rarer than others. Might as well go chronologically, so we can take a look at how the music developed from the late 70s through the early 90s.

Japan had a tradition of jazz stemming back to the US occupation, and also were overtaken by the British in the same way as the rest of the world back in the late 60s, with bands like Apryl Fool as deep cuts. During the 70s, the Japanese interest in folk and rock music developed further to a style they simply called "New Music". The most important band from the mid 70s was called "Sugar Babe", featuring both Taeko Onuki and Tatsuro Yamashita, as mentioned earlier. I can't find a great version of this song on Youtube, but it's my favorite from their first album, "Songs":
Also in the mid to late 70s, you see funk emerging as a style in Japanese pop, with bands like The Sadistics. Rajie was one of the singers of the Sadistics and would go off to become prolific in her own right. Here's a curious live video of my favorite track of theirs, "Tokyo Taste":
Rajie's 1977 album "Heart to Heart" is excellent, and the album cut of Tokyo Taste is a good example:
This kind of thing, the split between the soul groups and the rock groups would continue through the 70s into the 80s, but in the late 70s, jazz fusion influences would start start to appear in Japanese music, still under the realm of jazz and not yet pop. But one very famous band came from that period, Casiopea, which would influence plenty of later pop musicians. Here's a track of theirs off their first album from 1979:
The City Pop sound really starts to come together in the early 80s, with the breeziness, jazz and funk and rock influences all melting together with those fresh-off-the-assembly-line Japanese synthesizers and recording technology. Here's a deeper cut from 1983 that I think is excellent, from Jin Kirigaya's "JIN":
And another from 1983, off Kazuhito Murata's "Hitokakera No Natsu" more on the rock side of things, but still obviously pop:
Here's another track from a fairly deep cut, Ken Tamura's 1983 album "Fly By Night", funk/disco:
In 1984, Ryuichi Sakamoto, famous for experimental synth music with YMO, produced a City Pop album (!!) for singer Mari Iijima, called Rosé, which is definitely worth checking out:
Here's a recent favorite, a somewhat deeper cut, from a group called Stardust Revue back in 1985. You can see that they discovered digital reverb, which was often used to extremely poor effect in albums from 85-86. Unfortunately all I can find is this Spotify link:
Moving now into the mid-late 80s, you start seeing A LOT of ballads, for unclear reasons, and also Hip-Hop and Rap appear, with some hilarious results, like this 1987 album from a group called "Melon", not exactly City Pop but worth sharing, although sadly I can't find it online. Toshiki Kadomatsu also put out an instrumental jazz fusion that epitomizes the late 80s sound, called "SEA IS A LADY":
My personal favorite from the period is "Late Night Heartache", of Ra Mu's 1988 album "Thanksgiving" (perfect for this time of year, in the US): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xinG6W69hUw

In the very late 80s and early 90s you still see some City Pop artists out there, like Nakahara Meiko with her slamming 808s, this track "34Ｆ -雨のSunday noon-" off her album "303 E. 60th St" (yes, they love NYC, I have a whole mixtape on it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOPqHia5a5M

But from what I can tell, much of the popular music was starting to shift toward what we consider a more modern jpop sound, continuing with the idols. One fascinating oddity from that period is this safari themed video of Yumiko Takahashi's "Whisper" from 1990. You can see the synth lines changing, becoming a little more infantile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo4ZdX-0DCs

The other thing that happened in the late 80s and early 90s was the birth of Shibuya Kei, which is was far more popular genre in the Western world, growing out of City Pop's ashes. The biggest artist to make the leap was Pizzicato Five, who were making straightforward City Pop in 1987, like this track "Magical Connection" off their album "Couples": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZK1FnECBx8

But by 1994 were making Shibuya Kei, with the jangle pop and weirdo french shit and house music influences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8FOGAq0ME8

I highly recommend the compilation "Bossa Nova 1991: Shibuya Scene Retrospective" if you want an overview of that scene, which was totally different, a backlash against City Pop's "sophistication", mirroring the Grunge movement in America but with a different sensibility.

A few revival groups appeared throughout the 2000s like Ryusenkei's Tokyo Sniper from 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk2C6hBdlOs

But mainly the genre stayed dead until recent years, and now there's a resurgence of interest and copycats and "future funk" (which is not much more than old City Pop tracks set to house beats). This should give you a lot to dig through, though, if you're interested in checking out this kind of music! Feel free to ask for suggestions, leads, follow-ups, etc, and sorry about the length of this post but I wanted to get it all out while it was on my mind.

I'll leave you with one of my all-time favorites, Mari Iijima's "Portrait of Guy Bennett" from 1987: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXoZTYk7v4o
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i hate it it sounds like living death probably the most enervating music out but having said that i like the visual side of it.
 
V

version

Well-known member
snav said:
The biggest artist to make the leap was Pizzicato Five, who were making straightforward City Pop in 1987, like this track "Magical Connection" off their album "Couples":
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First I heard of them was Adam Curtis using 'Baby Love Child' in the intro to All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace;

 
luka

luka

Well-known member
japanese people should be banned from making music its clearly not for them
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
It's like nostalgic pastiche even though it's presumably from the period it's pastiching, which I guess is why the Zoomers respond to it, because pastiche and nostalgia is something they respond to on such an instinctive level anyway. Nostalgia for things they never experienced. It's their language. This would mean more to them than Jan Hammer.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
craner said:
It's like nostalgic pastiche even though it's presumably from the period it's pastiching, which I guess is why the Zoomers respond to it, because pastiche and nostalgia is something they respond to on such an instinctive level anyway. Nostalgia for things they never experienced. It's their language. This would mean more to them than Jan Hammer.
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good observation actually dunno why Gus is laughing he should be making notes
 
V

version

Well-known member
craner said:
It's like nostalgic pastiche even though it's presumably from the period it's pastiching, which I guess is why the Zoomers respond to it, because pastiche and nostalgia is something they respond to on such an instinctive level anyway. Nostalgia for things they never experienced. It's their language. This would mean more to them than Jan Hammer.
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Do you like it though?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
one of the things me and craner agree on is that there is nothing more fun than seeing someone expressing sincere enthusiasm for something and then just pissing on their chips remorselessly
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
craner said:
It's like nostalgic pastiche even though it's presumably from the period it's pastiching, which I guess is why the Zoomers respond to it, because pastiche and nostalgia is something they respond to on such an instinctive level anyway. Nostalgia for things they never experienced. It's their language. This would mean more to them than Jan Hammer.
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I'll expand on this and say that the fact that it's all in Japanese, a language they/I don't know, is what makes it so resonant in terms of "nostalgia for things never experienced". Weird foreign language, weird foreign time.
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
luka said:
one of the things me and craner agree on is that there is nothing more fun than seeing someone expressing sincere enthusiasm for something and then just pissing on their chips remorselessly
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oh dont worry i think it's hilarious; i don't even like 80% of the stuff (typically there's 1-2 good tracks per album, if that...), i'm just too autistic to stop doing whatever the virtual equivalent of crate digging is. it's also interesting to see why the older heads dislike this stuff.
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
snav said:
oh dont worry i think it's hilarious; i don't even like 80% of the stuff (typically there's 1-2 good tracks per album, if that...), i'm just too autistic to stop doing whatever the virtual equivalent of crate digging is. it's also interesting to see why the older heads dislike this stuff.
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also the production can be really good, not quite steely dan tier but sometimes close, so that's another layer of autism
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
one thing that has been said many times, by me and others, is that the last human future we had was japanese. now the future is china, saudi, dubai... slave labour. survelliance, authoritarianism etc well grim
 
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