What is City Pop?

"City Pop. The Lost Genre. Music built on the 1980's promise of a bright future, naive optimism, and glamorous lifestyles that would never last. It's not so much a genre as an amalgam of many other styles wrapped up in highly stylized commercial packaging of champagne synths, mystical melodies, laser sharp instrumentation crowned with catchy English chorus sections that both excite and confuse the unassuming listener. Memories flood your mind when you first hear it. Are they your memories? Who's memories are they? Why does it feel like you've heard these songs before? Maybe you have heard reminiscences of them somewhere on the oldies radio station or on a commercial advertisement exploiting classic western music. There is an undeniable element of vague familiarity.

It's been said that City Pop can evoke ghosts of lives never lived, and pasts waiting to be freed from the spectral chains of obscurity - like the soul of a sound begging to be heard and appreciated as if needing to feel loved once again... That could just be hippie talk though, but maybe there actually is something more to the frequencies, vibrations, and carefully arranged words that the music brings together to cast a spell over the listener's mind and get their feet tapping. Much of this style was inspired by its western counterparts, but there is more to the story than just copying production techniques and chords from Steely Dan or Micheal Jackson hits.

Many would ask why. Why is it called City Pop? Why do they sing parts in English? Why does it sound so familiar? The answers are all pretty vague, and those who lived the era in which City Pop flourished aren't in a rush to tell the whole story. Like much of Japan's intimate history unknown to outsiders, City Pop also might remain an enigma left in time for someone try to explain, but only ever grasping at silhouettes of ideas, thoughts, and expressions impossible to ever really understand completely. Unless you were living in Japan at the time and knew what was going on in these artists’ minds it’s hard to say for certain their motivations.

Sometimes music is left forgotten in time, but like sonic necromancy, once reanimated from the tombs of time it can roam the mortal plane of existence once again among the living. Like all things mysterious, City Pop continues to enchant the world with it's powers of unstoppable rhythms, genre fusions, and unapologetic cosmopolitanism. If nothing, the genre serves as a stark reminder that sometimes things that seem too good to be true, really are too good to be true. - Van Paugam"

Van Paugam is an internationally credited DJ who specializes in Japanese Disco, Funk, and Pop from late 70s to early 80s Japan. Read more…