City Pop & Other People’s Childhoods

I found that comment buried in a City Pop video thread—someone wrote This is like living someone else’s childhood—and it’s the only way I can describe what this music actually does.

City Pop is what 1980s Tokyo kids listened to. Industrial boom era. Money everywhere. These were the children of Japan’s economic miracle, listening to smooth funky tracks about love and good weather and why the world felt endless. It’s not really their childhood you’re living—it’s the glossy version of it, the one they probably didn’t even recognize as their own life at the time.

I got to this through the usual winding path: vaporwave, Future Funk, artists like MACROSS 82-99 and Night Tempo who started sampling old Japanese pop and wrapping it in lo-fi beats and scratchy hip-hop samples. But Van Paugam took it somewhere else. He pairs the City Pop classics—Yumi Matsutoya, Tomoko Aran, Tatsuro Yamashita—with anime GIFs. Sailor Moon. Cowboy Bebop. Dragon Ball. None of it should work together.

What he’s created is this perfect closed loop: 1980s Tokyo nostalgia filtered through 1990s anime aesthetics, endlessly repeating on YouTube. You can fall into these videos and lose hours to them. They’re designed to loop, to never quite end, to keep you suspended in someone else’s memory.

There’s something almost unbearable about it. Not unpleasant. Just the sensation of pressing your face against a window at night, watching a life that isn’t yours, knowing the window will never close.