NOTES
52 weekly updates means that I’ve been writing this for an entire year. The ultimate goal here is something for posterity - whether your definition of ‘City Pop’ is a continuum meant to track the evolution of (originally, Japanese) AOR over the decades, or something very specific to the 70s, of which we’re just witnessing an updated version of - I’ve made the case that there is a very specific music scene with named players, who all interact in one way or another; For example, Tokimeki Records does a City Pop revivalist record with Hikari from Mime as the vocalist. Mime’s keyboard player TiMT works on maco marets’ rap album. maco marets performs with Maika Loubte. Maika Loubte sings backup for KIRINJI on their Tiny Desk Concert (!!). YonYon - a DJ - sang backup at that same concert, and has duets with SIRUP, VivaOla, Sagiri Sol, and so-forth… It’s a scene, not just a marketing gimmick. Nobody called “Yacht Rock” Yacht Rock in the 70s, but that doesn’t mean Michael McDonald didn’t play with Steely Dan or that Steely Dan didn’t try to get Christopher Cross to play with them1. While many of these artists are signed to majors, or an ‘indie imprint2’ of a major, there is at least some semblance of creative control on the part of the artists - a far cry from the index of writing credits associated with the typical modern day pop song. Ghostwriters do exist, but it is usually the artists I’m talking about who are doing said writing - ASOBOiSM is a good example of this! Heck, iri and TAAR wrote a song for Sexy Zone!
Who knows what, if anything, in the ephemeral era of the Information Age will survive in terms of archiving. A Google search for an old interview or review today is going to be a “cold-call the author to see if they kept a copy” tomorrow. YouTube is going through a laissez faire era with Japanese artists and labels, at least compared to say… 5 years ago even? - but there’s always the possibility that the artists themselves will ghost the internet as we know it. There is for me an immediate and personal urgency to this, simultaneously as someone who lived through the mixtape era that wishes every day he’d recorded just one more tape, and someone who recognizes that the glut3 of music that is cramming its way into every internet orifice is beyond archiving, much less capable of being consumed in a rational way at this point. Sure, there are weekly playlists, sometimes cleverly curated (though rarely sequenced), but also intimidating in scope - are you really listening to 4 hours of anything, much less 400 hours4? A final note on this: I’ve witnessed “the death of Hip Hop”, like, four times. Things are becoming history as quick as they come into existence. Does “Neo City Pop” even exist anymore? Hell no, we’re on to 5G Pop5 now!
A secondary goal, and somewhat related to the first, was consistency. Rain or shine, good music or not-so-great music, complete lack of sleep and ability to say anything helpful about music at all or not, I wanted to create something that was consistent, always up to date, never languishing in the past - that’s what the college DJs did when I was a kid - they found the new music, the B-Sides, the cuts that were sometimes made specifically for college radio. Outside of actual music publications (which are all in Japanese6), the options to learn about the artists in a cohesive manner are pretty limited - where they exist, I absolutely credit and link to them! One thing that discouraged me recently was a website that aggregates and machine-translates every last bit of label press information from every Japanese artist imaginable. I can’t possibly compete with something like that, dubious as it is - I don’t steal other people’s work, even if, ultimately, whoever (or whatever) runs that site is technically giving them free press. But I can make a few assumptions - the site will be gone within a year or two, it’s unlikely to be archiving anything, and it probably only exists to generate 3rd party ad revenue. It is not, like random bits of AOR oral history you find on ancient html-based pages strewn throughout the internet, attempting to document anything. All of this to say, if the layout or content of this newsletter has seemed stilted, it was only for the sake of consistency - there is no better way to break a habit and not keep doing something than to constantly be trying to change it up.
That said, now that I’ve got the consistency part down, I would like to make some changes. Preferably something that makes my least favorite part of the process easier: Finding the songs for the playlist, researching the artists I don’t know anything about, or styles of music they’re trying out, listening to them over and over to find a good sequence, listening to them in sequence to make sure it still sounds good - that’s all fine… but trying to come up with something to say when so-and-so has released their 5th single of the year, and it sounds exactly like all the others, and the lyrics are the same-old same-old, and it’s not bad, but it doesn’t represent anything other than a good song that goes with the others for that week? Miss me with that!
One specific change I’m going to make for sure comes out of me personally reading through my old posts7. Over time I noticed that if you were to read anything but the latest newsletter, you’d have to go out of your way to hear any of the songs I’m writing about because I update the same playlist every week. That’s annoying! It was by design though. For one, the playlist always has to be new - never anything more than a week old. There are a ton of playlists out there that don’t change, or update once a month or whatever - there is no benefit to listening to mine over theirs if you just want a sampling of older stuff. Second, the playlist is a playlist. I don’t want people to just pick and choose to listen to one song and not another based on how well I wrote about it (if they do, whooo, go me!) - my skill (or rather the skill I’m trying to hone) is putting songs together that go together, not writing about them in an appealing way8. There are many songs that, if I heard them one-off, I’d completely ignore. Hearing them in a playlist with other songs can sometimes bring out their unique qualities, even if, as a whole, they all kind-of blend together. This also makes a good case for listening to full albums (Mizuki Ohira’s “Howling Love” is a good example), over obsessively consuming singles week after week. I will begrudgingly put some obnoxious song on the playlist just to round out the 10, only to listen to the playlist together later and realize, “hey this song wasn’t that bad!”. MUCH later I might find out I love that song!
BUT with preservation being the goal, it makes more sense to put a link to each song instead of just the cover image. With that comes another dilemma - link to YouTube or Spotify? Bandcamp, always, if possible. Will those platforms even survive, or look the same way a year from now? I’ll worry about that a year from now.
RYUSENKEI: Illusions
It may come as a surprise to some, but I am not a huge fan of City Pop (that is, “classic” City Pop). Yes, I appreciate it, and like listening to it if I’m in the mood, but I don’t know much about it other than the big names - Yamashita, Hosono, Matsubara, what I’ve heard on the pioneering English language podcast Primer, and a handful of albums fed to me by YouTube’s algorithm during the pandemic lockdown which probably weren’t supposed to be on YouTube in the first place.
One such album reached seemingly everyone by coincidence - TOKYO SNIPER by RYUSENKEI, then styled 流線形. Like any normal person, I was drawn in by the album cover - a model wearing pristine vintage running gear, giving sass in the middle of the freeway, bright white and blue of said gear contrasting heavily to the night highway scene9 - but I stayed for what was seemingly a Hitomi Toi project that I had missed! I knew Hitomi Toi from her solo work with Dorian and Kashif, but can’t claim to have known anything about RYUSENKEI until “the algorithm” decided it was time. Like Toi’s other work, TOKYO SNIPER is revivalist music - not in the religious sense, but in the sense that a bunch of people were sitting around listening to records from the 70’s and someone said, “Man they don’t make music like this anymore!”, and some wiser person said, “I think there’s something we can do about that!”
RYUSENKEI, the working name of Cunimondo Takiguchi’s City Pop revivalist project, has employed a number of singers for their run of albums and EPs - the two most famous co-starring Hitomi Toi. As of April of this year, RYUSENKEI has rebranded, no longer utilizing kanji for the name, and bringing in a new, permanent vocalist - Sincere - for their new album, “Illusions”. This is the same Sincere I’ve been hyping up since the outset of “The Neo City Pop Cycle”. Now to diverge a bit from the information provided in the liner notes (I am deliberately not posting those here, but they are brilliantly written - go buy the album yourself to see! Spoilers, ‘Illusions’ is an allusion to the sequel of Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”).
Maybe it’s the few short years of watching Asayan, but it would seem to me that a group so pivotal to the City Pop revival abroad would have some kind of big election process for its new vocalist. You know, auditions, vetting, there’d definitely be a short list of names of singers who already paid their City Pop dues (Hikari from Mime, for example). But no, instead it is Sincere, whose career spans but a few years and consists of a noteworthy R&B album, a few pop-leaning EPs, and most recently, a contender for song of the year which is a hybrid of alt R&B and dance pop. The shift toward pop was deliberate, as she stated in Spincoaster interview, potentially to capture a more mainstream audience. When revisiting her work this past month, I’m struck not only by her capable stage presence, but also versatility, poignant if simple lyrics in both English and Japanese, and a unique sweetness in her vocals (it’s the latter that likely drew Takiguchi to her). By all accounts, she should be much more popular than she is, not languishing in the indie R&B branch of Pony Canyon. And so it was very exciting for me to find out that she would not only be chasing western pop trends, but also riding the crest of the City Pop wave with one of the scene’s biggest names.
Ironically in the Information Age, where I have done my due diligence and followed Sincere on multiple social media platforms and streaming services, did I only find out this huge development when I went hunting for a Vinyl copy of her 2022 album, TIME. None exists, but what I did find was the new RYUSENKEI album, immediately ordered it and did not bother listening (again, it has been streaming since April) until I could put the physical disc on my record player. Happily, Sincere does not just mimic the City Pop vocalists of yesteryear, but allows those freshly sweet vocals to cut through the timeless ensemble music. There is a bit of that old-time flavor on songs like “Super Generation” (watch above) and personal favorite “Monkey Business pt. 2”, but we get the full Sincere experience on the two English tracks, “Moon Beams” and “Quiet Love Melody” - both penned by the singer herself (cute anecdote about that in the liner notes, btw). I’ve listened to the album in all three prime modes of music enjoyment:
Intently. Just me and music. Again, I’m not a huge City Pop fan, and so the delicate sounds of the band did not hit me any more than say, the handful of 70s soul and funk I grab every time I’m at the local record store. I was focused more on how Sincere fit into the picture - did the young singer’s pop vocals create an anachronism?
While cleaning. At a minimum, the crumbs are off the floor, so it passes the test! Yes, part of this is how well do the grooves keep me focused on the task while not wearing myself out, but the other part is how does the album sound, say, when I turn the corner to the bedroom and the vocals become muffled? How does it feel getting a hit of flute as I move from the bedroom to the bathroom?
While writing the 3rd-5th paragraphs of this post! I never write and listen at the same time - I listen, stop, jot something down, listen again, stop, form a new idea, and so forth. I was able to keep this running as background music - likely the default mode for many new City Pop listeners (I mean, how else were all those YouTube hits were generated?) - and still form coherent sentences!
So it passes the test of being breezy relaxation music, a potential retreat into serenity away from the workaday world as the album cover suggests (both literally and figuratively). I had one singular thought about the lyrics before checking the liner notes, but many more after, so it rewards repeat listens. That’s a nice bonus, even in a world where we are inundated with new music week by week.
Shenanigans! You can only imagine what kind of drama goes on in Tokyo (SIRUP never named names, but made it clear he had some issues with people which prompted the BLUE BLUR EP), and everyone uses stage names so you don’t know who is related to who (annual reminder that Del the Funkee Homosapian - one of the most eclectic names in underground rap - is Ice Cube’s cousin).
As someone who is brand new to music in the sense of how it is written about, produced, marketed, and discussed in general - genres and sub-genres, etc. I feel like ‘indie’ is the most egregiously used term in contrast to how often it’s called out (never?). There is a stark distinction between indie and DIY - indie implies you borrowed a studio, DIY means your bedroom is the studio and you’re doing all the mixing and so-forth - but also more often than not you borrowed your parent’s equipment (or credit card) to have an MPC, software, in the first place.
Yeah that’s right, I’m glut-shaming!
Over my dead body will I put a playlist on shuffle!
Spoilers - it’s just Neo City Pop again.
Not that that should stop anyone. I learned a small amount of very basic Japanese from a LIBRARY book so that I could read the Oricon charts when I was in high school!
I said this was for posterity, but also people with bad memory, or who just listen to a whole bunch of stuff and can’t remember what released a month ago!
There was a great writer/blogger whose name I won’t mention (insidious swerve toward social conservatism brought on by ‘too much internet’ - you hate to see it!), that often wrote about how terrible a certain music critic in a certain famous print publication was (this was like 10 years ago, do the math). It was constructive, if hateful, criticism - nobody wants to hear what flowery jumble of words you’ve come up with to describe something decidedly not-flowery. Music is visceral, so talk about your gut! “Does it make you want to shake your ass?” From what I’ve read in passing about its rise and fall, that seems to have been part of the appeal of Pitchfork.
Oh you heard it was an homage to the cover of Deadly Drive by Ginji Ito? Call me when 200K people willingly click on that one without knowing what they’re about to hear!