City pop
[9] In the early 2010s, partly through the instigation of music-sharing blogs and Japanese reissues, city pop gained an international online following as well as becoming a touchstone for the sample-based microgenres known as vaporwave and future funk.
"City pop" referred to the likes of Sugar Babe [ja] and Eiichi Ohtaki, artists who scrubbed out the Japanese influences of their predecessors and introduced the sounds of jazz and R&B—genres said to have an "urban" feel—to their music.
[1] Pitchfork's Joshua Minsoo Kim called it "a vague descriptor for Japanese music that incorporated jazz and R&B",[6] while PopMatters' Chris Ingalls categorized it as "a type of soft rock/AOR/funk".
[4] The catch phrase for the Japanese promotion of Terry Melcher's second album "Royal Flush," released in 1976, was "Mellow (Mexican Country Hollywood) City Pop!".
[14] Also in July 1977, an article in the music magazine "Record Geijutsu" introduced Minako Yoshida, Takao Kisugi, Tatsuro Yamashita, and Jun Fukamachi, Yoninbayashi, Junko Ohashi (Minoya Central Station), and others as "city pops" musicians.
Musically, city pop applies songwriting and arranging techniques commonly found in jazz – such as major seventh and diminished chords – that are drawn directly from the American soft rock of the era (bands such as Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers).
[9] Yutaka cited the band Happy End as "ground zero" for the genre,[10] whereas Motta traces it to the mid-1970s with the work of Haruomi Hosono and Tatsuro Yamashita.
[23] In the mid-1970s, Hosono founded the band Tin Pan Alley, which fused southern R&B, northern soul and jazz fusion with Hawaiian and Okinawan tropical flourishes.
Some of the Japanese technologies which influenced city pop included the Walkman, cars with built-in cassette decks and FM stereos, and various electronic musical instruments such as the Casio CZ-101 and Yamaha CS-80 synthesizers and Roland TR-808 drum machine.
[1] According to Blistein: "An opulent amalgamation of pop, disco, funk, R&B, boogie, jazz fusion, Latin, Caribbean and Polynesian music, the genre was inextricably tied to a tech-fueled economic bubble and the wealthy new leisure class it created.
[4] According to Vice, the most popular figures of the genre were "accomplished composers and producers in their own right, with artists like Tatsuro Yamashita and Toshiki Kadomatsu incorporating complex arrangements and songwriting techniques into their hits, ...
"[9] Since the 2010s, city pop has seen a resurgence with artists such as Mariya Takeuchi gaining an international online following, as well as becoming a touchstone for the sample-based microgenres known as vaporwave and future funk.
[9][25] Kim credited "Blogspot blogs and Japanese reissues" circa 2010 with "introduc[ing] music nerds to a strain of AOR, funk, disco, and yacht rock trafficked under the amorphous term ...
