Tel Liyanto was not alive during Japan’s 1980s boom, but she loves the “timeless” city pop hits of the era, now going viral thanks to a new generation of young, international fans.
The glamorous soundtrack that accompanied the nation’s economic miracle is exploding in popularity decades after its upbeat synths, influenced by soft rock, boogie and soul, first hit the airwaves.
The retro genre is so hot that Canadian star The Weeknd sampled the 1983 track Midnight Pretenders on his latest release, and record companies are racing to reissue long-forgotten city pop vinyl.
Photo: AFP
“It’s like disco: a nostalgic sound, but also modern,” said Liyanto, a 27-year-old from Indonesia who works for a creative agency, as she danced to city pop in a Tokyo bar.
“I listen to it when I’m dancing; I listen to it when I’m chilling,” she said.
From its origins in niche online music circles, the revival was amplified by YouTube’s algorithm, which detects when a song is being liked and shared and recommends it worldwide.
The most popular tracks, like Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love have tens of millions of views on YouTube.
The song’s funk bassline and flamboyant brass have the optimistic vibe of Club Tropicana by Wham! — but the soaring Japanese vocals tell another story.
“Since the day I was heartbroken, I’ve been living life with day and night reversed,” Takeuchi sings in the track that commenters call a “hidden gem.”
“Why am I suddenly listening to Japanese 80s pop? And why is it so good?” one commenter wrote.
Kei Notoya, a 33-year-old DJ, was hooked by city pop the first time he heard it at a university party.
He has since collected about 3,000 records, some of which sell out in seconds from his online shop Tokyo Condition.
“Japanese music back then copied a lot of American rock, soul, R&B,” he said. “It sounds fresh, but at the same time, familiar.”
“People who weren’t born can feel the energy, the atmosphere of the 80s and 70s by listening to these songs,” he said.
The buzz has prompted Japanese record companies to upload more of their back catalogue onto streaming services.
However, the huge number of “slept-on” songs — ignored for many years, but recently unearthed by music lovers — keeps interest in the genre alive, Notoya said.
He boasts of “new finds every week” in second-hand record shops, and released the compilation Tokyo Glow in December.
The Weeknd’s sample of Tomoko Aran’s hit on his new track Out of Time is “the most mainstream example of any Japanese older music being introduced to a wider audience,” said Patrick St Michel, a Japan-based music writer.
Midnight Pretenders was reissued on vinyl last year, along with other city pop favorites, including Plastic Love, which has also been refreshed with a modern-day music video by record label Warner Japan.
Gary Ieong, the co-owner of White Noise Records in Hong Kong, said that while fans prefer hunting for original city pop presses, the Plastic Love reissue has been “really popular” in his shop.
Young people who listen to the song on YouTube want to buy the reissue “as a souvenir, or for the artwork,” he said.
The music is also popular on TikTok, where fans match their favorite tracks to anime-style sunset illustrations or dance along in 80s clothes.
However, beyond cheesy fun, new listeners are also drawn to city pop by the “element of melancholy lurking within,” St Michel said.
“That’s something that creeps through all the city pop songs and gains them virality. There’s something sad about it too — it’s not pure hedonism,” he said.
Nothing lasts forever though, and early trendsetters who started getting into city pop online in the 2010s are already moving on, St Michel said.
They have “already kind of said clearly, ‘it’s already over for us, we’re moving on to the 90s,’” he said.
“It’s like a race to find what Internet crowds will be into. But they’re the ones to decide,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS