by Bella Lara Blondeau (@hellsbella68)
What Is City Pop?
When the opening bassline of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” kicks in, it evokes a smooth, calming sort of sensation. There’s a distinct laidback sound to it, a wistfulness that’s hard to put into words. One can almost picture themselves cruising down a seaside road or wandering a neon city while this plays. “Plastic Love” is a song that’s gained an online cult presence for this very reason – for both the time and the place it conjures when one listens to it. It feels like a snapshot of a better time, a better place.
Mariya Takeuchi, however, is far from the only 80’s Japanese singer that has gained an online following. Junko Ohashi, Marlene, Kaori Akimoto…the list goes on. These are musicians whose mainstream pop heyday in Japan ended quite some time ago – over thirty years or so, to be a bit more precise. They were part of a very specific trend of Japanese popular music that had a unified, but not derivative sound to it. This trend, a type of music held together by thick beats and jazzy bass riffs, is known as city pop, and in recent years, it’s seen a revival in the West through a different genre of music altogether.
It should first be made clear that city pop is, above all, two things. First and foremost, it is a genre of music born out of post-WWII Western colonialism. An increased presence of American occupiers in Japan following the war led to what is commonly referred to as Japan’s “economic miracle.” America’s fear that an impoverished Japan would turn to communism fueled an influx of economic protections and business ventured, with the underlying agreement that Japan would act as a producer economic state. With this came a forced overhaul of the entire country, which affected all aspects of Japanese life. From the devastation of WWII’s climax to the death throes of the Cold War, Japan experienced an overhaul in image and cultural mentality. This became more prevalent in the 70’s and 80’s, when popular media began a shift towards a futurist cosmopolitan aesthetic.
Which ties into the second major hallmark of city pop – deliberately modern and cosmopolitan. Much like the danchi (public housing) that popped up in metropolitan areas en masse, city pop was something meant to appeal to a new generation of Japanese citizen. Its funk-fusion sound ditched hallmarks of past popular music – gone were the strings and soft beats of enka, in their stead of a procession of synthesizers and drum kits. While enka itself had seen a resurgence in the 50’s and 60’s, it was still tied to a long lineage and tradition dating back the Soshi enka of the 19thcentury. These similarities were both lyrical and stylistic, and despite the modern sheen added in by the implementation of horns and electric guitar, it was still a genre with a long pedigree.
City pop, as it came to be known, represented a sort of new start in the Japanese music industry. It deliberately implemented a more Western sound in terms of instrumentation and tempo. Slick and production, complicated beat patterns, elaborate synthesizer and saxophone riffs. At the time, there was a futuristic sound to it that was unique – a soundtrack to Japan’s economic miracle and global reputation as a futuristic, technological wonderland.
Vaporwave’s Backwards Future
Vaporwave is a modern genre of art obsessed with the past. For all of its thoroughly modern production methods, not to mention its widespread popularity as an internet meme, its trappings and ideologies are rooted firmly in the 80’s and early 90’s.
Its spiritual predecessor, chillwave, had begun to go mainstream with the likes of MGMT and Tame Impala. Modern pop music and mainstream “indie” music had begun to take advantage of what was perceived as a new sound, and a select few early pioneers of this sound gained a wider audience. What was a vaguely nostalgic, fairly underground scene was becoming a staple of popular music, and has continued to be well into 2018. As its offshoot, Vaporwave is a sardonic celebration of mainstream junk – an appropriation and recontextualization of easy listening and pop music through a thoroughly modern lens.
Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, a 2010 work that is arguably the earliest vaporwave album, is a piece that very much encompasses this philosophy. Its album art is a distorted cover of the cult classic video game, Ecco the Dolphin, its track listing composed of chopped-and-screwed remixes of Toto’s “Africa,” Phil Collins’ “Separate Lives,” and Jojo’s “Too Little, Too Late,” to name a few. By cutting these songs to bits, then applying copious amounts of pitch-shifting and echo, Lopatin completely changed the tone, meaning, and sound of every track he touched. He went one step further by putting the album on cassette and releasing a digital rip of that cassette as the sole version of the album when it first came out. What was once slick, often vapid pop music had become a dizzying, distorted, and frequently nightmarish collection of repeating loops and disturbingly mellow synthesizers.
Eccojams served as a baseline for what could be perceived as a clapback to chillwave’s newfound popularity. That baseline was then expounded upon by what is arguably the most popular vaporwave album to date – Vektroid’s 2011 Floral Shoppe. It expounds upon the ideals set forth by Eccojams, while offering a somewhat cleaner sound, something a bit easier to listen to. The glitched-out, chopped and screwed takes on adult contemporary and easy listening were still there, as was the visual implementation of corporate imagery on the album art, but it came together as less of a concept and more of a fully realized idea.
For this piece’s purpose, however, Flower Shoppe introduced what is perhaps the most vital link between city pop and vaporwave. Every track of Floral Shoppe was titled in Japanese, as was the album title itself. This added another level of obfuscation to vaporwave – katakana and kanji as another layer for English-speaking Western listeners to decipher. As vaporwave evolved out of Floral Shoppe, which really helped bring the genre to a wider audience, this appropriation of Japanese language would become an integral part of the genre.
Eventually, however, the hiragana and katakana would not be the only component of Japanese language implemented.
A Plastic Love?
My first introduction to vaporwave was, in fact, none of the artists that I’ve mentioned so far. Macross 82-99 was my first real experience with the genre, something I clicked on a whim while perusing YouTube a few years back. Something about the blend of clean modern production values and pounding beat loops synchronized with old-school Japanese pop tracks spoke to me, and I was instantly enthralled. As a longtime lover of both Japan’s music scene in the 80’s and European techno, it was a bit of a perfect synthesis for my own tastes. On top of that, it introduced me to a whole smattering of musicians in a short period of time thanks to the liberal usage of sampling.
However, something stuck out to me as I continued to dive into the genre. The parallels between city pop and vaporwave didn’t necessarily stop at the sampling found in songs by Macross or CVLTVRΣ. As I stumbled into Western artists like George Clanton, CYBEREALITYライフ, and Laserdisc Visions, there was a distinct parallel between old-school Japanese artists I’d grown up hearing and this strangely relaxed, slightly unsettling new genre of music I’d stumbled onto. Similar tempos, synthesizer choices and chordal patterns between the two genres began to make me wonder if there wasn’t a thematic parallel to be drawn.
To understand that similarity without having it transcribed, one need only listen to Greeen Linez’s 2012 album Things That Fade and Momoko Kikuchi’s Ocean Side and Adventure. There might be nearly three decades between the albums, but you wouldn’t know that if listening them to side-by-side. Both artists’ works implement a distinct beach city motif, which is reflected in not only the artwork on each album, but in the tracks themselves. There’s a similarity present not only in the composition of each song, but in the titling. While the tracks on Things That Fade are devoid of vocals, the titles of tracks like “Palm Coast Freeway,” “Hibiscus Pacific” and “Forgotten Shores” are easily paralleled with Kikuchi songs such as “Shadow Surfer,” “Blind Curve” and “Night Cruising.” Despite the gap of both time and location between the two artists’ works, Greeen Eyez and Momoko Kikuchi produced two works that, while not identical, sound oddly informed by each other – especially with “Hibiscus Pacific” basically being a complete instrumental rip of “Blind Curve.”
This trend continues when one parallels the oeuvres of artists like Macross 82-99 to Marlene and Kaori Akimoto, Luxury Elite to 1986 Omega Tribe, t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 to Junko Ohashi. Some even go a step further and use distorted images of Japanese idols as album artwork, as seen with t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者’s recent album, 夜遊び, and CVLTVRΣ’s NETクルージング. What’s even more fascinating, to me, is that even vaporwave musicians whose influences lie elsewhere still incorporate Japanese pop music imagery into their overall aesthetic, such as the cover art of 18 Carat Affair’s Adult Contemporary. This is a group whose overall musical and thematic influences seem to primarily lie in Western new wave and Sega Genesis music, yet utilize album artwork that’s highly reminiscent of the art that adorns some of 1986 Omega Tribe’s albums.
Which brings up my initial curiosity – is there an actual thematic line to be drawn between city pop and Japanese-influenced vaporwave? Or is the fascination purely based in aesthetics – a “plastic love,” as Mariya Takeuchi would put it? To make a definitive claim one way or another runs the risk of invalidating the artistic intentions of both city pop and vaporwave musicians, so it should be made clear that I don’t think there’s a definite conclusion to be drawn. However, based on what has been established about both genres, I personally believe that the heart of city pop drives the soul of a significant portion of vaporwave for a few reasons.
Yesterday’s Ambition, Today’s Regret
What drives much of city pop’s overall tone and aesthetic lies in the aforementioned “economic miracle.” In crafting a deliberately new sound, producers and musicians alike were hoping to capture a futuristic feeling that could be sold to and consumed by the masses. It was, in theory, to provide a soundtrack to Japan’s newfound reputation among Western countries as a futuristic wonderland. Long nights in neon cities and perpetual sunsets in beachy countrysides, instilled with a celebration of wealth and capitalism – these were the images conjured up and pressed to vinyl, to be taken in by listeners caught in the allure of this promising future.
However, as they are wont to do, Japan’s bubble economy burst. 1991 marked the beginning of what came to be known as Ushinawareta Junen, or The Lost Decade. In recent years, some have even taken to including the years between 2001 and 2010, referring to it as Ushinawareta Nijunen– The Lost 20 Years. While there were a number of factors that led to this economic stagnation, perhaps the biggest was the rampant lending rate. Banks gave out loans with little questioning of the reliability of the borrower, which in turn led to rampant inflation. In order to curb this, the Bank of Japan attempted a sharp increase of inter-bank lending rates, and in turn tanked the economy. Soon, the conspicuous consumption popularized during the Economic Miracle fell out of vogue, with the public at large frowning on the same flashy displays of wealth that had become hallmarks of metropolitan Japanese society. Unfettered capitalism, once considered a boon, had now become a thorn in Japan’s side.
This dovetails all too well with a genre of music arguably created to raise questions about capitalism’s place in global society – vaporwave.
Adam Harper once wrote that vaporwave musicians “can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound.” Harper doesn’t come to a definitive conclusion one way or another, but I certainly believe that vaporwave’s preoccupation with capitalism tends to lie on the critical side – which is why pro-capitalist genres like fashwave and Trumpwave were created as perceived counters. While artists like 18 Carat Affair and CYBEREALITYライフ absolutely utilize crass 80’s and 90’s corporate culture, whether it be commercials, top 40 pop songs or just AOL as a concept, there is a certain degree of discomfort present. 18 Carat Affair, in particular, explores the dark side of 80’s and 90’s nouveau riche culture, with ominous track titles like “My Buried Wife In Nassau,” “Hanged Man,” and “Jon Benet.” Even without words, these tracks have a sinister edge to them. Despite initially coming across as distorted “mall muzak,” their songs play as cynical takes on the era’s obsessions with “greed is good” culture – like musical renditions of American Psycho’s thematic elements. By blending motifs of retro elitism with dark undercurrents in their titles, then putting out music that’s equally parts chilled and unnerving, 18 Carat Affair one of many vaporwave musicians that snidely takes corporate culture and recontexualizes it.
The lineage of this practice can traced back to Eccojams, the aforementioned album of chopped and screwed pop hits, and the rationale behind it is arguably rooted in artistic dissatisfaction with chillwave. Recall that chillwave was beginning to gain traction in mainstream music, and it becomes easier to theorize that vaporwave was a push against that mainstream. By taking the most generic pop music possible and turning it strange, vaporwave musicians were doing the inverse of what was happening to chillwave – a strange and exciting sub-genre becoming generic.
With city pop’s place in contemporary Japanese society and vaporwave’s roots as capitalist critique established, it’s a bit obvious why artists began to utilize the former in their construction of the latter. Vaporwave utilizes Japanese pop from an era where being rich was to be celebrated, where corporations were considered cool – in other words, two things that vaporwave, as a genre, has apprehensions about. The sound of city pop evokes the era that vaporwave critiques, and thus is very easy to reframe within the burnt-out ruins of a post-80’s society. Furthermore, city pop by its very nature has a deliberately smooth and pleasant sound to it, which complements vaporwave’s roots in chillwave – meaning that not only is there an ideological alignment, but a sonic one as well.
That similarity between genres, indeed, might be the most important one. There is a distinct possibility that the capitalist critique aspect of vaporwave has absolutely nothing to do with musicians’ implementation of city pop, and that the two genres are intertwined purely for sonic similarities. However, with katakana being a distinct motif of many artists’ names and albums, with Japanese women and retro anime being featured prominently in the overall aesthetic of the genre, it feels prudent to not ignore the possibility that there’s a deeper connection than one might initially think.
Everything that city pop stands for is what vaporwave was conceived to deconstruct and question. Whether on a whim or through a deliberate focus on the aftermath of Japan’s economic miracle, vaporwave has risen up as a distinct complement to city pop, and that intrinsic connection is one that is likely to remain in the minds of Western listeners for a while to come.
rokku panku 