The Imagined Nostalgia of City Pop
Enamoring a generation of listeners who have never experienced the 1980s, Japanese city pop creates a mysterious link to the past for its present-day fans. Its ability to evoke nostalgia for a world they never lived in is a curiosity that can possibly be explained in three ways, each personal to me.
Written by Wonjune Lee
Photo Courtesy of the Coca-Cola Company
A few years ago, a YouTube video of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love [プラスティック・ラヴ]” went viral, gaining nearly 45 million views to date. The track has become one of the best known examples of city pop, a loosely defined genre of 1980s Japanese pop music often featuring melancholic, easy melodies. The popularity of city pop has since grown internationally, with more tracks becoming viral successes, and with neo-city pop artists like Yukika gaining popularity. The genre has become associated with one emotion in particular: nostalgia. Something peculiar about the resurgence of city pop is that the genre’s rediscovery seems mostly driven by internet-savvy millennials and Gen-Zers — in other words, people who have never experienced the 1980s. I'm one of them.
In high school, I came across a VCR-recorded compilation on YouTube of “I Feel Coke,” a series of Coca-Cola commercials that aired in late ‘80s Japan. I absentmindedly clicked on it, thinking the worst that could happen was wanting to fill myself up with sugar afterward. But somehow, the video struck a chord with me, and I became absolutely obsessed. I was in a pretty bad place in life at that point, away from home in a boarding high school, not dealing particularly well in the competitive environment. To me, “I Feel Coke,” felt like a window into another world. From its intense, almost comically optimistic imagery of life to the uplifting backing track (also titled “I Feel Coke”), the commercial presented to me a world without worries, a world that was sure of itself and optimistic about the future. It felt like such a far cry from what I had at that time, and from that point on, I found myself looking for more videos and music like “I Feel Coke.”
I came to realize that it was a part of a genre called city pop. Just as I became engrossed with the genre, another video popped up on YouTube, this time enchanting not only myself, but people my age all over the world. Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” went viral, and city pop was back.
Photo courtesy of Alan Levenson
But what is it about 40-year-old music in a language most people don’t understand that appeals so much to them? I have three theories.
The first possibility is that maybe, as the children of Generation X, Generation Z has had a longstanding love for the style of music from the 1980s. (Think about how tracks like "Take On Me" by A-ha and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)" by Whitney Houston have maintained an evergreen edge over the years.) City pop also happened to be a breath of fresh air for newer listeners, in that ‘80s music that hasn’t been overplayed for four decades. Like the ‘80s music already familiar to young people world wide, city pop utilizes era-defining synthesizer sounds like that of the Yamaha DX7 or the Roland 808. The genre also is not afraid to take inspiration from disco, in its use of string sections and pronounced basslines to move the melody forward. These familiar aspects of city pop may ease the barrier of entry to the genre for younger listeners, while simultaneously allowing it to be accepted as an extension of music they already held fond memories of, handed down from their parents. It would be an understatement to say that ‘80s music is still mainstream. Pop music from that time remains one of the most widely loved genres of music today. City pop’s rediscovery could be driven by an audience who wanted more of the same, in the form of the confidently melancholic melodies the genre offers.
Another possibility is that the music of city pop was written with the objective of evoking nostalgia from the very beginning, and that aspect of the music filters through to this day. One striking aspect about city pop is its clear inspiration drawn from‘50s and ’60s Americana in terms of the visual design, as well as the music itself. Many city pop albums like Makoto Matsushita’s “First Light” and Tatsuro Yamashita’s “For You” feature album art that clearly depicts famous places like California or Hawaii as they appeared in the heyday of surf rock and doo-wop. Both of these albums feature tracks sung exclusively in English, directly suggesting that Matsushita and Yamashita were both deeply inspired by the American music of their youth. Another one of Yamashita’s albums, Big Wave, one of the seminal works of the city pop genre, features multiple English-language tracks, including “Darlin’” and “Your Eyes,” that are essentially attempts at doo-wop and surf rock styled ballads rooted in nostalgia for mid-century Americana. It’s interesting that these tracks evoke nostalgia in today’s audience as well, considering that the original memory these Japanese artists created them from was likely an imagined version of American culture. Perhaps city pop, by its very nature, is based on secondhand nostalgia, and that somehow resonates with today’s audience, this time reinterpreted in a nostalgia for an imagined, positive view of the world as it was in the ‘80s.
The last theory, and one I personally subscribe to, is that city pop exudes the excess of 1980s Japan, and that today’s youth are mesmerized by its confidence. As is the case with “I Feel Coke,” there exists a very specific visual identity to city pop. The genre is associated with hyper-optimistic imagery reflective of a Japanese society that was on track to become the wealthiest in the world. This might have been the result of city pop often being paired with commercial imagery, which intentionally juxtaposed the music with positive emotions in order to sell products rather than to make artistic statements. And true to their intentions, Japanese commercials of the 1980s repeatedly used the confident or melancholic melodies of city pop to link their products with positive emotions, highlighting those associations before the virtue of their commodities. It was not the advertisers’ explicit goal to offer their audience a romantic, worry-free view of ‘80s Japan, but in trying to sell certain emotions, they irreversibly bound the music of the time to an imagined positive view, or “aesthetic," of that era of Japanese culture. One of my favorite examples of such a commercial once again features Tatsuro Yamashita's "Christmas Eve" in a very successful attempt to intertwine the late-night Shinkansen service between Tokyo and Osaka to a longing for company and love during the holidays. While definitely not the main intention of the advertisers, the commercial ultimately paints a romantic picture of city life in ‘80s Tokyo. Are these commercially motivated images true to reality? Probably not. Still, although these skewed presentations of Japan definitely turn the positivity up to 11, they are still somewhat grounded in reality, and reflect the confidence of an optimistic society.
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. The‘80s wasn’t without its issues, and Japan continues to recover from the devastating economic crash the glut of the decade brought about. 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. It’s just a dream, a handed down memory at best, but would it be so bad to remember something fondly? To choose to remember the best of something?
As Seiko Matsuda croons in her 1983 single, “Sweet Memories:”
失った夢だけが
美しく見えるのは何故かしら
過ぎ去った優しさも今は
甘い記憶
I wonder why lost dreams
Look so beautiful
The kindness of the past
Is now a sweet memory
November 2, 2021