City pop

• 1. Introduction

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  City pop is a loosely defined form of Japanese pop music that grew out of the mid-1970s and peaked during the 1980s. It was music that smelled like wealth: synthesizers tuned to American funk, FM radio drifting from the dashboard of a car with a built-in cassette deck, a leisure class spending a booming economy on new sounds and new gadgets. Then it faded. Later generations of Japanese listeners dismissed it, sometimes harshly, as disposable. And yet, decades later, a single 1984 song found its way onto YouTube and changed everything.

  How did a genre that Japan itself called "shitty pop" become a global obsession? Who built it, and what technologies made it possible? And what does it mean that the same music rejected by one generation became the sonic touchstone for another, born on the other side of the world?

• 2. A Term Looking for a Genre

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  In July 1977, a Japanese music magazine ran an article grouping together Minako Yoshida, Takao Kisugi, Tatsuro Yamashita, Jun Fukamachi, Junko Ohashi, and others under the banner of "city pops" musicians. The phrase had already appeared that same year in marketing copy: the catchphrase for the Japanese promotion of Terry Melcher's second album, Royal Flush, released in 1976, was "Mellow (Mexican Country Hollywood) City Pop!" The single "Orange Train" and the Tomoko Soryo album City Lights by the Moonlight, both from 1977, were marketed with the phrase "city pops" as well.

  Record companies and music magazine editors coined this Japanese-made English term to promote music with what they called an urban and sophisticated atmosphere. Its application was loose from the start. At the time, "city pops" was used more often than "city pop", and "city music" was also in circulation. The term even appeared in articles about Sugar Babe, the group that included Taeko Onuki and Tatsuro Yamashita, whose 1975 album is considered a pioneer of the form, though the label was not yet common when that record came out.

  The question of where the genre truly began was still being debated decades later. Music critic Yutaka Kimura, in a book published in 2002, traced the origin to Happy End, a band active from 1969 to 1972. This interpretation drew criticism as a "Happy End historical view" because Happy End was, at the time of its existence, an unsuccessful band with little influence. Yosuke Kitazawa, supervisor of the Japan Archival Series, put it plainly: there "were no restrictions on style or a specific genre" conveying these songs, but that it "was music made by city people, for city people".

• 3. Sounds from Elsewhere

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  Haruomi Hosono is one of the figures most credited with shaping what city pop would become. In the mid-1970s, Hosono founded the band Tin Pan Alley, which fused southern R&B, northern soul, and jazz fusion with Hawaiian and Okinawan tropical flourishes. Rob Arcand of Vice described him as a "key influence" on the genre, and writer Mikey I.Q. Jones of Fact Mag argued that Tin Pan Alley's blend led directly to the style that would eventually be called city pop.

  Many city pop artists drew heavily from American funk, soft rock, and boogie. Ed Motta of Wax Poetics wrote that the genre borrowed openly from American boogie and funk groups, naming acts like Skyy and BB&Q Band as direct sources. Musically, the genre applied songwriting and arranging techniques from jazz, including major seventh and diminished chords, drawing directly from American soft rock bands such as Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.

  Yellow Magic Orchestra and its individual members are also credited with shaping the genre's approach to mixing and arrangement. Some songs incorporated tropical elements drawn from Okinawan, Latin, and Caribbean music. Carrie Ann Inaba, a Hawaiian singer who briefly worked in the genre in the late 1980s before returning to the United States, later remarked that the Japanese music industry of that era placed little artistic emphasis on the vocalists, reducing them to a "face (that) becomes a logo they sell."

• 4. The Machines That Made It

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  The Casio CZ-101 and Yamaha CS-80 synthesizers, along with the Roland TR-808 drum machine, were among the specific electronic instruments that shaped the sound of city pop. These instruments gave musicians tools to produce sounds that felt modern and polished, and writer Jon Blistein noted that electronic instruments and gadgets "allowed musicians to actualise the sounds in their heads".

  Beyond the studio, consumer technology extended the music into daily life. The Walkman, cars fitted with built-in cassette decks, and FM radio all became associated with city pop. Cassette decks, Blistein observed, "allowed fans to dub copies of albums". Blistein described the genre as "an opulent amalgamation of pop, disco, funk, R&B, boogie, jazz fusion, Latin, Caribbean and Polynesian music" that was "inextricably tied to a tech-fueled economic bubble and the wealthy new leisure class it created."

  The booming economy also had a practical effect on the artists themselves. According to Vice, the prosperity of the period made it easier for accomplished composers and producers, including Tatsuro Yamashita and Toshiki Kadomatsu, to secure label funding for complex arrangements and sophisticated songwriting.

• 5. Rise, Rejection, and Reach

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  City pop peaked during the 1980s and then lost its mainstream following. Kitazawa described the backlash bluntly: "Many Japanese people who grew up with this kind of music considered city pop as cheesy, mainstream, disposable music, going so far as calling it 'shitty pop'." The genre, once tied to prosperity and aspiration, became a symbol of excess in the eyes of the generation that followed.

  The music did travel beyond Japan during its active years. City pop influenced instrumental jazz fusion bands Casiopea and T-Square, which subsequently shaped Japanese video game music. In Indonesia, it led to the development of a local style known as pop kreatif. But for the most part, the genre was, as writer Joshua Minsoo Kim of Pitchfork put it, "largely neglected by Westerners" and shunned at home.

  The reversal began around 2010, through what Kim described as "Blogspot blogs and Japanese reissues" that introduced music listeners to tracks that had been out of circulation. As YouTube algorithms amplified songs into wider circulation, city pop surged again. The Japan Times contributor Patrick St. Michel reported in 2020 that boutique labels were reissuing rare records and releasing compilations, while millions were encountering city pop through seemingly endless YouTube playlists backed by anime snippets.

• 6. Plastic Love and the Viral Turn

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  Mariya Takeuchi's 1984 song "Plastic Love" became one of the central texts of the city pop revival, spreading widely after YouTube's recommendation system surfaced it to international listeners. It was not alone. "Mayonaka no Door (Stay with Me)" by Miki Matsubara experienced a similar resurgence in 2020, eventually reaching the number one spot on Spotify's global viral chart for the week of 10-the 16th of December and breaking into Apple Music's J-pop top 10 in 92 different markets.

  City pop also became foundational to two sample-based microgenres: vaporwave and future funk, both of which drew heavily on the genre's textures and aesthetics. Artist Ginger Root has cited city pop as influential on his music. Observers noted that the city pop boom marked the beginning of broader renewed interest in what is known as Showa retro.

  In 2022, Universal Music Japan reissued limited editions of a total of 107 albums from the 1970s and 1980s under the label "City Pop Selections by Universal Music". Sony Music followed with the Aldelight City Pop Collection in 2023. Compilation albums including Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR and Boogie 1976-1986 from 2019, and several released in 2023 and 2024, charted the ongoing commercial and critical interest. Across the Pacific, Indonesia's dormant pop kreatif genre also found new life, gaining popularity among younger Indonesian listeners under the colloquial name "Indonesian City Pop".