The Other Eighties Were Happening in Tokyo
The best pop music of the 1980s was recorded in Tokyo for highways nobody outside Japan would ever drive. Japan’s city pop era—roughly 1977 to 1989—produced some of the most purely pleasurable music the decade had to offer: sleek, warm, gliding across funk and soft rock and AOR like a car with good suspension on an empty expressway at two in the morning. Whatever was coming out of Western radio at the time, Nena or Billy Ocean or Rick Astley, there was a parallel universe of sound on the other side of the world that was considerably more interesting, and almost nobody noticed.
The genre name is almost too literal. City pop was music for an urban fantasy of affluence—cocktails on rooftop bars, rain-slicked neon, the feeling that everything is within reach if you can just stay awake long enough. Japan was in the middle of its economic miracle, and city pop was the sound of a country that had convinced itself the good times were permanent. You can hear it in Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love, in Anri’s Last Summer Whisper, in Miki Matsubara’s Stay with Me—a specific quality of romantic melancholy that somehow refuses to feel sad, because the production is too beautiful and the beat too insistent for you to stay unhappy long.
Then there were the aidoru: Japan’s golden idol singers of the mid-eighties, young women fed into the pop machinery with industrial efficiency. Momoko Kikuchi, Yukiko Okada, Takako Mamiya—they sang about love and longing over pink disco production that demanded nothing heavy from you. The formula was strict: light music, light lyrics, no difficulty whatsoever. Within those constraints, some of them managed to be quietly devastating anyway.
The internet found city pop the way it finds most things: through an algorithm rabbit hole, usually starting with Takeuchi’s Plastic Love, which ended up on YouTube recommendation feeds in 2017 and promptly went viral. The borrowed nostalgia hit something specific—homesickness for a place you’d never been, a decade you’d experienced entirely wrong, a bubble economy whose aesthetics outlived its collapse by thirty years and counting.
For anyone who wants to go further, the blog JPOP80SS is essentially a cathedral to the era—nearly every album with any city pop relevance, catalogued and available. A genuinely useful place to get lost for several consecutive nights. Sugoi desu ne.