Back to the future music
J-electro and city pop and trying to hold on (an introduction, sort of)
I have piles and piles of books, magazines and CDs spread across my bedroom and beyond, and they keep multiplying.
Each of them seems like the key to some greater enrichment or understanding: things like one-off compilation albums with exclusive and only slightly different mixes of tracks I’ve already heard, or some out-of-print back issue promising rare insights into reclusive musicians. The inconvenient proof of my habitual overindulgence in my own interests, these objects surround me in physical space; whenever I think I’m satisfied, some other passing curiosity inevitably catches my attention and settles itself somewhere in the back of my mind, gathering wayward thoughts like all that memorabilia gathers dust.
What I collect is kind of like knowledge. Some have argued that music speaks for itself, but for better or worse, I’ve always been captivated by the surrounding ephemera of it all, the hidden story pieced together through interviews and hearsay. When I stumbled headfirst into the burgeoning new sound of Japanese electronic music in the late 2000s, at a time when it was still largely undocumented in English and reaching a fever pitch domestically, I taught myself an entire second language just to get closer to that mysterious and fascinating story. Since then, I’ve translated tens of thousands of words in an effort to help others appreciate and feel closer to this music, too.
Born in part from the ashes of Shibuya-kei before it, the Japanese “technopop revival” emerged primarily in response to the work of Nakata Yasutaka, whose production of the girl group Perfume in 2008 made them the first artist in this genre to achieve a #1 album on the Oricon charts since YMO in the 1980s. For one brief, strange moment in history, this created a demand for robotic electropop unlike hardly anything else in the Japanese mainstream at the time. Many of the artists associated with this movement have faded from the public eye in the years since its short-lived peak, but the vibrant scene that once existed around them has remained a passion of mine and an area of great personal interest. Like everyone’s musical first love, it shaped my identity and tastes in ways I still feel today, and I sometimes suspect that I might overestimate its importance as a cultural artifact in light of that bias. But why can’t it be important?
Much has been written about the international rise of city pop, the ’80s sound described by Vice as “lite, easy-listening J-pop that drew on a variety of American and Asian influences including funk, soul, disco, lounge, and even yacht rock.” Once the soundtrack to Japan’s economic miracle, many songs of the era came to be seen by some Japanese as “cheesy” and “disposable” as one trend receded to make room for the next. Still, distance — measured both in miles and years — has a way of making the been-there-done-that new again, and city pop, by some algorithmic magic, found new life on social media and in the playlists of young people overseas. Songs expected to live out the rest of their immortal lives on dusty records, reduced to “golden oldies” for the Showa set, have attained a level of global relevance few Japanese record executives would’ve envisioned for even their brightest, shiniest modern pop stars, transcending previously insurmountable cultural barriers of time and place.
City pop’s intoxicating juxtaposition of foreign and familiar “[gives] Western listeners room to freely project their desires,” as Cat Zhang wrote in Pitchfork, and for these audiences, its antiquity must also shroud it in a certain mystique. Typical English-language writing on the genre seems to hit all the same obvious beats, lingering on the extravagance and optimism of bubble-era Japan and the wistful nostalgia of looking back on a future that never came to pass. But documenting music this old is no easy task, and one can only imagine how much information has been lost to discarded and obsolete media over the years. Wanting that information to survive, and for these musicians and the scenes around them to be remembered as more than just the hollow caricatures they might become without it, is the reason why I’ve been so devoted to the archival and translation of my own favorite genre.
As a product of the digital age, primary sources on the history of Japanese electropop should, in theory, be rich and plentiful. Like most things online, though, that information is vulnerable. Every time I trawl an old website, I encounter something else that is now lost and likely unrecoverable, and I'm eternally indebted to the Internet Archive for preserving what does still exist. With luck, physical media might be discovered on a shelf in a used bookstore or at the bottom of an old box in someone’s parents’ house, but when something goes offline and hasn’t been backed up anywhere people can find it, it's effectively gone for good. Major losses like the demise of Flash have only exacerbated these problems, and as the internet evolves, I fear that more and more of what we considered “saved” will only continue to slip through our fingers. Unlike the common maxim, the internet is far from forever: it’s fickle and impermanent only when we most need it not to be.
Released at the height of the media’s interest in the new generation of electronic pop (and on the same day as the similarly starry-eyed “Wonder,” fellow newcomer immi’s own major debut through the same label), SAWA’s 2009 major debut single “I Can Fly” — as cheerful, glittery and uplifting a pop song as they come — concludes on an unexpectedly disquieting section of English lyrics:
This is not a temporary emotion
Keep in mind that youth is not eternal
I don’t have enough time
When I sift through my piles of research notes and unfinished translations, ignore the mounting stacks of books and music magazines accumulating in my closet and on my bedside table and peruse online auction sites for that one random back issue that might have just the kernel of information I’ve been searching for, my internal refrain is the same: “I don’t have enough time.” I wrote a list of my fears once: There’s too much to do and too much I want to do; I’ll never finish it all. I don’t have everything I need to really do this right. I can’t save everything I care about, and it’ll all disappear. But occasionally when I listen to the lyrics of this song, with all its talk of taking a leap of faith and diving into a “marvelous blue sky,” I think of how beautiful and full of possibilities a blue, blue sky can be. Imperfect or not, I've decided that this will be my testament to everything I love and want to remain in the world’s collective memory.
In a 2016 interview, Nakata Yasutaka remarked, “I think people overseas don’t have a fixed image of ‘the sound that represents Tokyo’ yet . . . [T]here’s still no genre attached to Tokyo’s name.” For myself and many other people I knew at the peak of its relevance, the work of Nakata and his contemporaries was the sound of Tokyo. For a young listener today, that might be city pop, or maybe it’s something else. In the age of streaming and YouTube, the world is more open, connected and accessible than ever before, allowing forgotten, decades-old genres to travel halfway across the world into the homes and ears of those who would’ve never heard it otherwise. Here, I want to make that possible for the music that sounded so much like the future to me all those years ago — to bring it out of the past and back into the present.