Discovering City Pop 36 years too late, or maybe not?

Youtube is a wonderful platform, you discover things that you never thought you would. So this weekend, I accidentally discovered a “new” sound called City Pop from the following youtube video.

The first song on this video was pretty amazing, it’s called “Plastic Love”. It sounds very retro-modern I thought and I like the feel of it. So I started to dig.

As I started to dig, I found out that, I am about two years too late into the City Pop resurgence, but the entire story about the City Pop resurgence is really amazing.

Basically, Someone posted an old 1984 song called “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi 竹內 まりや on Youtube, and for some reason in 2018, the Youtube AI started to recommend it to everyone. It got so viral and huge that, they even finally make a music video for it 35 years after the song was released. And there were so many copycat and translated version of the song. Just look up Plastic Love on Youtube and you will see what I mean.

If you want to dig into the rabbit hole, check out the following video.

There was also the drama about the awesome bow tie picture which was never used as the plastic love song cover, but it is forever associated with it on the internet.

and how the original photographer Photographer : Alan Levenson – http://alanlevenson.com filed a copy right claim on the video and got the video pulled down. That is another deep rabbit hole, take a look at the video below.

But yeah… so now I have a 36 year old earworm and my mind craving for more of this type of music from so many years ago!!!

The good thing is … City Pop spun off things like vaporwave and future funk. What the hell are those? I guess that another dig for another weekend.