Spring in Tokyo Belongs to a Cartoon Snow Queen

In the spring of 2014, walking through Tokyo felt like being trapped inside a loop of the Frozen soundtrack. Japanese versions, English versions, inevitable remixes with an 808 crashing underneath—and between those, One Direction staring blankly from every magazine rack. The city had surrendered completely to a cartoon snow queen, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Which made the stuff happening in the margins more interesting. Passepied were doing something genuinely odd with their synth-pop—all clean angles and unexpected chord movements, city pop reimagined by people who also grew up on prog. Passpo☆ were doing the opposite: idol pop refined to a kind of disciplined absurdity, a group of women executing choreography with military precision, which in Japan somehow never gets tedious. And then there’s the whole AKB48 industrial complex, by this point metastasized into its own genre, its own economy, its own philosophy of manufactured devotion.

The charts always tell you less about what people love than about what they’re escaping into. Tokyo in April was escaping into Elsa.