Switched on Pop - 40 Years Later, Japanese City Pop is Still Crashing the Charts (with Cat Zhang)

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

If you listen to a lot of music on YouTube, you may have been recommended a video. The thumbnail image is a striking black-and-white photo of a Japanese singer named Mariya Takeuchi. The song, “Plastic Love,” is a lush disco track with deep groove, impeccable string and horn arrangements, and a slow-burn vocal performance from Takeuchi. When the song was released in 1984, it sold 10,000 copies. Today, it’s racked up over 65 million views since its posting in 2017.   How did the relatively obscure genre of Japanese City Pop, an amalgam of American soul and funk and Japanese songcraft from the 1970s and 80s, become the sound of the moment? For Pitchfork’s Cat Zhang, City Pop’s heart-on-its-sleeve emotions and slick production resonates with the nostalgic leanings of much contemporary pop. Sampled by artists like Tyler the Creator and inspiring original material from bands around the globe, City Pop has much to tell us about cultural exchange, technology, and the enduring universal power of slap bass.  Songs Discussed: Miki Matsubara - Stay With Me Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love Makoto Matsushita - Business Man Pt 1 Tatsuro Yamashita - Marry-go-round Anri - Good Bye Boogie Dance Boredoms - Which Dooyoo Like Toshiko Yonekawa - Sōran Bushi Takeo Yamashita - Touch of Japanese Tone Mai Yamane - Tasogare Young Nudy ft Playboi Carti’s - Pissy Pamper Tatsuro Yamashita - Fragile Tyler The Creator - GONE, GONE / THANK YOU 9 Sunset Rollercoaster - Burgundy Red Check out Cat’s article The Endless Life Cycle of Japanese City Pop on Pitchfork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charles, at the end of last year, a song shot up Spotify's viral charts to number one. And it's an unlikely entrant. It's got a kind of dreamy groove and a chorus sung half in English and half. in Japanese. Let's listen to a little.

This is strange because it sounds like a Philly record label in the 80s produced a late disco hit in Japan. And I don't know what that's doing on the charts. It's Miki Matsubaras, Stay With Me from 1979. It's an example of city pop. And to answer your question, why is this Japanese genre from the 70s and 80s suddenly surging in popularity in the United States and around the world, we need to bring in a special guest. It's friend of the show, assistant editor at Pitchfork, Kat Zang, who recently wrote the endless life cycle of Japanese city pop.

Kat, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I feel like this won't have a simple answer, but can you help us understand why Japanese pop songs from the 70s and 80s are suddenly all over Spotify, all over YouTube, Like, why is this sound suddenly in everyone's ears? So this most recent surge of interest in Japanese city pop music, which is like music from Japan's boom era where they were just flourishing.

There was the second biggest economy. They were kind of living a luxurious lifestyle. So music from this era became popular on TikTok because anime lovers and like Japanophiles generally started using the videos and their TikToks. But its real peak happened in December because young Japanese Americans would show the songs to their moms who kind of grew up with that era of music

and then their moms would light up in recognition and sing along to the song as if they were kind of doing karaoke. And they would record the whole interaction and people just got so much joy out of these moms kind of reliving their youth. So that's why it shot up to the number one of the Spotify viral charts at the end of 2020, but City Pop actually has a long history of virality.

For a long time, it was known as, or it's still known as YouTube Recommendation Corps, because there's one song in particular that's a City Pop hit that just keeps on appearing in people's YouTube recommendations. Oh, right, this is Plastic Love by Maria Takeuchi. Maybe to help ground the conversation, it would be helpful to get a sense of what does City Pop sound like? What are its defining characteristics? So city pop borrows from a lot of American genres of music.

At the time, like, Tokyo was becoming this global city. Japan's economy was doing really well. They were, you know, making cutting-edge technology, and all of this kind of factors into the sound, which feels super kind of dreamy and luxurious. The lyrics are often kind of nostalgic and about, like, love that isn't quite attainable or, you know, has kind of like a city feel. which is why it's called city pop,

as you might be able to hear in the Miki Mitsubara song, it borrows from funk, it borrows from disco, there are often some really bright horns. It's very slick, and personally, I think this palette that we hear in city pop is not something that is unfamiliar to Western audiences. Personally, I think that if you're a fan of Carly Ray Jepsen, like, city pop should be very instantaneously kind of recognizable to you,

or even if you're a fan of, like, Doja Cat's, or something like that. You know, there's a, and 80s revival is already so big within that kind of music landscape. So it's just very easy. It's a very likable kind of sound. I totally agree. And one of the things I loved about reading your article was just being introduced to all these songs and artists that I'd never really heard before.

And hearing the different facets of all these musical styles, you're saying pop up in these city tracks. So I thought we could just listen to a few of these. to kind of get our heads around the sonic landscape of city pop, which, you know, goes from that kind of upbeat disco vibe of Stay With Me that we were just listening to. You mentioned the influence of yacht rock, like hall and oats, and I can hear that in a track like Businessman Part One by Makoto Matsushita. I feel like we're on our boat right now.

It's great. You mentioned funk, Cat, and I hear that influence strongly in a track like Marry Go Around by Tatsuro Yamashita. Tatsuro Yamashita is considered the king of city pop, and you can hear these kind of funky basslines everywhere within the genre. You know, when I listen to this, I think of the connection you drew between the Japanese economic boom of the 70s and 80s, and this music. It sounds expensive. I mean, I hear a studio full of like state of the art equipment populated with like dozens of musicians. It just sounds rich to me, literally rich. Yeah, and they were studio wizards and a lot of this stuff is so masterfully crafted.

And then you think about the city pop iconography and it's all about, you know, being at the beach, palm trees, expensive cars. There's something so blissful just even looking at the cover images. Let's listen to one more track you mentioned. It's by Henri. It's called Goodbye Boogie Dance. And when I hear this, I hear Earthwind and Fire. I hear all sorts of influences. Let's hit play.

We've got horns. We've got strings. I can hear how this is capturing the excitement of urban life in, say, Tokyo in the 1980s. It's all there for me. And if you look at the YouTube comments in a lot of city pop videos, the people comment like, oh, I feel like I'm in 80s Tokyo and I'm like driving in my car and like the wind is blowing my hair. And then suddenly there's a pause and it's like, oh, wait, I'm 18 and I live in America.

Like, I've never had that experience before. Okay, I love that. It's really telling that this music is having a moment based on nostalgia. Clearly, it was extremely popular at one moment, but these are new sounds to me. I'm just discovering them. What happened to City Pop? Where did it go? So if you watch any sort of man on the street interview with, like, average people in Tokyo,

and you ask them about City Pop, they have, like, no idea what you're talking about. Not necessarily because they don't recognize the music, but just because a lot of, like, one of the most popular City Pop songs, Plastic Love, by Maria Takuuchi. When it was released, it wasn't really that popular. And then, you know, after City Pop's heyday, it kind of disappeared because it was like music for yuppies. And it was just a little out of touch because after Japan's boom period, it entered

what is called the Lost Decade. And basically it went into recession. And so all of this kind of wealth and luxuriousness just felt not right for the climate. And so it kind of faded into obscurity for a way. while and then in more recent years has become very popular in the West. And after becoming popular in the West, and in a variety of other countries as well, then more Japanese people, I think, are kind of attuned to this and the kind of global appetite for it. Yeah. And I want to talk more about the sort of surging popularity of this music. But I also found this a fascinating part of the

story because, you know, like Charlie, I wasn't really familiar with Citipop. If I was familiar with Japanese music. It was Japanese music of the 90s, of that economic downturn. And it was like pretty antithetical to everything we've been hearing in city pop. I think of bands like boredoms that I was, you know, obsessed with when I was in high school. And it's not lush. It's not orchestrated. It is like angry and punky and rough around the edges.

Wow. This is like a... I had no friends in high school. Okay. There, there. I know it's what you're all thinking. All to say, I was really excited to discover city pop in this completely other side of Japanese popular music tradition. And yeah, Charlie and I were not alone.

Everyone is suddenly seems to becoming aware of this music. Like, you mentioned this song Plastic Love, and this seems to be a sort of key piece in the puzzle of why city pop has become so popular. And when I read about it in your art, I had this media trigger of seeing that thumbnail in my YouTube recommendation algorithm like every time I logged on for, I think, a period of months. Why did Plastic Love by Maria Takeuchi become this YouTube viral hit with, I think, as of this writing, over 65 million views? Like, what is it about this song in particular?

You know, it's really hard to tell. There's like a long kind of backstory to it. It's not clear who was the first uploader of this song because I think people tried to upload it and it kept on getting struck down by the record label in Japan and then suddenly one person broke through one person being like a random teenager in South America who I interviewed recently.

And the cover art to plastic glove that is attached to the YouTube video is not actually the cover art that was originally released with the single. And the photographer of it had no idea that it was going to be associated with that album cycle or that project. But somehow the combination of the song and the image has really stuck with people. It's just a black and white headshot of Maria Takeuchi. And she looks very youthful and kind of radiant. And, you know, it's like no matter what angle you look, she's always kind of looking at you little coyly. I talked to the photographer who took that photo, who, you know, who wasn't, who didn't even.

know that the photo was going to be so popular. And he said that they had taken it in the 80s in Hollywood, and she was going for like this classic Hollywood look at the time. Then there's also the fact that the song is just like really good. It has all of the kind of hallmarks of a of a beautiful kind of wistful city pop song. So it's just the dreaminess of the thumbnail, the beauty of the song, the humor of some of the YouTube comments, which are still all about, like, having nostalgia for 80s Japan, even though you never lived there. All of that plays a factor. And then there's another

key context, which is there's just a lot of Japanese music from the 70s and 80s that has a surprisingly large YouTube following, like Japanese new age music, electronic music. And there's not a clear reason for why. Lane, the new collection elixir. Three new elixir is perfume intense. Solar, Magnetic, Ball. Pulsa in the banner, do you know,

and discover your fragrance, euphoria. YouTube is not the only place that Citipop has a resurgence. There's also your report an important role for compilation albums from labels like Light in the Attic in City Pop's resurgence.

What role did they play? Light in the Attic, which is a reissue label based in Seattle, just gave people like a formal way to access city pop music that wasn't off of YouTube that wasn't like ripped and kind of illegally uploaded. You know, these Japanese record companies were very kind of vigilant about knocking down uploads that that went up on YouTube. And so with an official compilation album, with with the rights cleared and everything, like people had a kind of a more formal and official introduction

and maybe a kind of a more cohesive one as well. But the thing with that, that compilation album is they actually started work on it around 2014, 2015. One of the curators had gone to Tokyo and found some of these records at Tower Records. And so they had no clue that this was becoming popular on YouTube until much later, until much further into the project. So it took a long time because it was really difficult to get the rights cleared. And it's funny how its release kind of coincided with this, this like, boom and popularity of city pop.

Kat, you also cite an important precedent for the kind of rediscovery of city pop. And that's a concept and idea known as Wamono. Can you help explain that, break it down, and why it might be related to the rediscovery of city pop? Yeah. So I think Womonos just translates to like vintage Japanese music. And I was kind of thinking, well, like, what's, the starting point of the city pop revival. It had to probably start in Japan, especially because

a lot of Japanese music isn't that accessible. So it had to be someone inside, kind of making it accessible to people outside of Japan. And so basically Japanese DJs started becoming interested in old kind of like disco and funk records and just general vintage Japanese music and sort incorporating it into their sets. There is a compilation album called Womono A to Z where you can feel like you feel like you are getting some of the influences that will later kind of percolate into city pop. Yeah, your reference to this Womono A to Z compilation album

was kind of like a lightbulb moment for me because it shows that Japanese artists weren't just assimilating American influences but incorporating their own traditional forms of music. Like on the first track by Toshiko Yokoawa, you hear Akoto laid on top of these disco groups. And then on a touch of Japanese tone by Takeo Yamashita, you hear the traditional Japanese flute, the Shakalachi, on top of this kind of undulating funk group.

One of the big takeaways that I had from your piece relates to that YouTube comment that you were talking about earlier, the American teenager imagining themselves driving through Tokyo. You state that city pop's popularity in the United States probably has a lot more to say about how Americans view Japan than Japanese culture itself. Could you unpack that a bit? So like I mentioned before, I think people in Japan, if you kind of talked to them about it, I mean, besides like record collectors and people who are more steeped in the music industry. But if you talk to the average person in Japan,

like there's no huge like city pop craze within Japan. And a lot of this, at least in recent years, is more kind of like Western influenced. And, you know, people have said that the appeal of city pop is kind of like it's all the things that are familiar to you, but it operates at a slight remove and becomes a little kind of exotic or more interesting because the Japanese offers this element of like foreignness to it.

and gives you the possibility to kind of project what you want to. You know, it's just like it's less quote unquote basic to say like, I'm listening to like Japanese pop music from the 80s. And it is to be like I'm listening to like American pop music or, you know, whatever. Every time we're dealing with music from another country and there's like kind of a history of the relationship between that country and the U.S., I think we've got to look to that kind of historical context and see like what what about this music makes me identify with it what about my own assumptions makes me identify with it and in the u.s there's a lot of japanophilia a lot of people

who had self called themselves webes or or identify with like otaku culture in america but also you know a variety of other countries too and so that is i think part of the context and the appreciation for this music. There seems to be a larger sort of cultural translation and mistranslation scaffolding that our ears are interpolating this music through. Yes. And I'm definitely, I don't mean to say that people who like city pop are doing so for insidious reasons or that it's not genuine or that no one has, you know, that you don't have the right to like city pop. Like it's a very likable music and it's extremely well produced. And, you know, there are a lot of great. things going for it. But with all music, you know, all music is subject to kind of a sort of

politics and that too is very interesting to impact. I totally agree, Kat. And that's why I appreciate you know, you titling this piece, the endless life cycle of Japanese city pop because you do paint this picture of it being this exchange across borders back and forth, back and forth and perhaps you know, mistranslated with every exchange. But perhaps that's also why it's so. It's so compelling and an important part of the story is the way that contemporary musicians are incorporating the sound of this city pop revival into their own original tracks and you provide some really compelling examples like an unreleased track from young nudie featuring Playboy Cardi called

Pissy Pamper something I've always wanted to say on the show which samples a big brass And you also I like this stance Which samples a city pop track from 1980 by Mai Yamanay

called Tasogari And you also point out that Tyler the creator samples another Tatsuro Yamashita track, fragile Thank you for your love Thank you for the On Gone Gone

slash thank you from his album, Igor. So this is kind of, this is not mentioned in my piece, but there's a musicologist named Ken McLeod at the University of Toronto who has written a really interesting paper about the concept of the Afro Samurai and the specific kinship that, like, hip-hop artists

and kind of black fans in general may have to Japanese culture that I think is worth exploring in the context of, like, rappers using city pop, but also city pop has just a really long or a decently long history of being sampled in other music, you know, in the early 2010s in vaporwave and future funk songs, offshoot of vapor wave. Kat, you point out that it's having kind of a revival among live bands in Japan and even across Asia. Yeah, if you, you know, if you go on YouTube, there are actually a lot of playlists that are like Indonesian city pop, Korean city pop, Taiwanese city pop and various bands who are kind of affiliated,

who are upheld as like examples of their country's city pop, even if maybe they wouldn't nicklist themselves as such. But they are all influenced by people like Tatsur Yamashita. So this includes like the Taiwanese indie band, Sunset Roller Coaster, or the Indonesian band Ikubaru. There's also a Japanese singer who is in Korea named Yukika, who had this kind of concept of like a retro girl based on city pop. I loved getting introduced to this Taiwanese band Sunset Roller Coaster,

and I felt like they were really channeling the city pop's sound on a song like Burgundy Red. All of this suggests to me that city pop isn't going anywhere. Kat, what do you think is the future of this sound? You know, I'm not sure because it has its origin in the 80s. So I think people are just going to keep on listening to what's been uploaded online. And I know that Warner, Japan, like, released a music video for Plastic Love like two years ago. So so many years after it was originally released. So I think people will just kind of continue, like, delving into this nostalgia aspect.

I think in general, nostalgia is just a huge thing. theme of TikTok and YouTube and the internet in general. So Kat, finding this music through the world of TikTok and the Spotify viral charts to going into these Japanese crate digging cultures, how has your relationship to Citipop changed through your research? You know, I'm not really sure that it has because I, like, I came into Citipop as an observer. Like I knew a lot of other people, like my coworkers and my friends were really into it. but I was very interested in like kind of digging beneath the surface and being like what is with this identification.

And now I have sort of tracked all these different kind of historical and social factors that are involved in this. I'm still just like this is this is really fun music, but it's not something that I'm going to make like my heart and soul. There's still kind of this sort of scholarly distance with it. But it does make me think a lot more about the dynamics underlying like how we kind of consume this music. and also the geopolitical aspects as well. I kind of mentioned in my article about at the time that, you know, Citipop was coming out of Japan

and Japan was experiencing this economic boom. There's also a lot of anxiety in the U.S. about this kind of looming Asian presence and whether Japan would take over the U.S. And, you know, there are a lot of kind of Japanese cars coming into the U.S. Japanese companies had acquired, you know, Hollywood production companies.

and the Rockefeller Center, and I think the Senate even voted, like, 92 to zero to condemn, like, Japanese trade practices as unfair and kind of curb Japanese imports. The way this relates to contemporary, like, Asian-American discourse is that, like, for example, when, you know, workers in the U.S. were really concerned about the Japanese takeover, there was a Chinese-American man named Vincent Chin,

who was actually murdered by two auto plant workers, because they thought that he was Japanese. And so a lot of times the fear of kind of superpower abroad means that the people at home are affected. And that's kind of the rhetoric that we have with China now. Even with TikTok, it's like, you know, TikTok is a Chinese company. Like, what does that mean? We're seeing a lot of xenophobia in the U.S. And so it's been illuminating trying to also study the way that like a music abroad somehow is also

relevant to like what it means to be an Asian American person like in the U.S. Wow. Kat, this is why I think we enjoy your writing. It is both a deep dive into music and then emerges on the other side with insights about why we care so much about music. And as, you know, I would say 90% of the time that has everything to do with our identities and the way we relate to each other. Kat, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. We'll put links to Kat's pitchfork features the endless life cycle of Japanese city pop and what is Asian American music really in our show notes. Kat, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan, me, Charlie Harding, and we're engineered by Ben Montoya this week. And Jolie Myers is the intrepid producer behind this episode. Illustrations by IRS Gottlieb, social media, Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Nishon Kerw.

and Hanna Rosen and remember of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can list a Switched on Pop on Apple Podcasts app, Spotify, anywhere else you get podcasts or our website www. www.Switchonpop.com. We'll be back every Tuesday with a piping hot, fresh new episode for you and we'll make a playlist of our favorite city pop songs to share with you on Spotify.

Hit us up on the Twitter, on the Instagram, at Switchdown Pop, we love talking you, even when you disagree with us, especially when you disagree with us. It's the best. It's the best. The listener posted a transcription of the J-Cole drumbeat on the climbback because they wanted to prove us wrong like that. It doesn't get any better than that. So we look forward to seeing you there. I believe that only leaves us to say, thank you for listening.