Tel Liyanto was not yet born at the time of the boom of the 1980s in Japan, but she loves “city pop”, a musical genre that was all the rage at the time and that young fans around the world released from the world. oversight. These glamorous hits were the soundtrack to Japan’s economic and technological miracle, and were heavily influenced by American soft rock, soul and funk.
Signs of the return to grace of city pop, the Canadian artist The Weeknd has recycled the melody of the title of 1983 Midnight Pretenders by Tomoko Aran for the song out of time from his latest album, and record companies are rushing to release vinyl from this musical trend.
“It’s like disco: a nostalgic sound, but also modern”explains Tel Liyanto, a 27-year-old Indonesian who works for a communication agency, while dancing to the sounds of city pop in a bar in Tokyo. “I listen to this when I dance, I listen to this when I relax”, she told AFP.
Starting from private online music circles, the revival has been amplified by YouTube’s algorithm, which spots a song when it’s liked and shared, and then recommends it to the world. The most popular titles, like Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi, have tens of millions of views on YouTube. The funky bassline and blazing horn section of this song evoke the joy of Club Tropicana of Wham!, but the Japanese lyrics tell a whole different story, that of a broken heart.
Kei Notoya, a 33-year-old Japanese DJ, was bewitched by city pop the moment he first heard it at a college party. He has since collected around 3,000 records of the genre, some of which sell out in seconds on his Tokyo Condition online store. “Japanese music at the time copied a lot of American rock, soul, R&B”he told AFP. “It sounds fresh but, at the same time, it’s familiar. People who weren’t born can feel the energy, the atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s, listening to these songs.”
And while the buzz has prompted Japanese record labels to upload more of their old catalog to streaming platforms, the sheer number of gems yet to be rediscovered keeps interest in the genre alive, according to the DJ. He boasts of “make new finds every week” at second-hand record stores, and released a compilation, Tokyo Glowin December.
Gary Ieong, co-owner of record store White Noise Records in Hong Kong, explains that while fans prefer to seek out city pop originals, the vinyl reissue of Plastic Love has been “very popular” in his shop. Young people who have listened to the title on YouTube want to buy its reissue “as a souvenir, or as a work of art”he told AFP.
City pop is also popular on TikTok, where fans pair their favorite tunes with snippets of old Japanese cartoons, or film themselves dancing in 1980s clothes.
But beyond the fun, new listeners to city pop are also drawn to “the element of melancholy that hides there”says Patrick St. Michel, a music critic based in Tokyo. “It’s something that creeps into all city pop songs and gives them a certain virality. There’s something sad about them too, it’s not pure hedonism.” However, the early trendsetters who began reviving city pop in the early 2010s have already moved on, like chasing 1990s nuggets, according to Patrick St. Michel.