I like Harry Styles. He’s handsome. He dresses well. He’s got a couple of bangers. But it probably would have taken me a lot longer to get to his new album, Harry’s House, if not for Kyle Chayka at Dirt alerting me and the people smart enough to subscribe to the newsletter that the new Styles album is heavily influenced by something I’m particularly obsessed with, Japanese city pop. You’ll hopefully click the link and read Kyle’s explaining what city pop is if you’re not familiar, but if not, here is what he writes:
These days, City Pop is something of an algorithmic genre. A handful of tracks from the era were heavily promoted by the YouTube recommendation algorithm over the past few years, including Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” and Haruomi Hosono’s transcendental “Sports Men.” Generally, it takes the vocabulary of more traditional R&B and replicates it with a palette of only synthesizers, like a live nightclub band of robots. It’s not a flawed copy of American pop; it’s a style all its own.
I don’t know when I first got hip to city pop. I think it came after I became familiar with Popeye magazine being “for City Boys” and wondered if the two things had anything in common. I’m still not quite sure where or not they do, but the whole Japanese version of American yuppiedom is incredible to me, and a few years back I asked W. David Marx to write about the country’s “Juppies” from yesteryear. There’s a connection there. As Marx wrote:
Japan never experienced a moral uprising against consumerism like we see in the Patrick Bateman Yuppie folk devil and the “Yuppie go home” Williamsburg anti-gentrification graffiti of the early aughts. The Juppies’ only crime in Japan was being caught indulging in outmoded aesthetics and superficial tastes. But with the contemporary revival of glossy city pop and Bubble nostalgia, their sentence has been commuted, with today’s economic anxiety making the Juppie star shine even brighter.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start, Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976-1986 is as good a place as any. That one has been on the turntable for some time around these parts, but I have a feeling I’ll be dialing up plenty of playlists and looking for more vinyl this summer since there’s something really comforting about what usually ends up sounding a lot like the Japanese version of Spago rock.