City Pop for Girls
Before We Begin
Want a very experienced and authoritative opinion on this stuff? Please do take a look at:
http://kayokyokuplus.blogspot.com/
This writer writes with a conciseness and pragmatism, has a huge collection and was at ground zero some while before myself; he’s also far less likely to be telling you that If you listen really closely, you can pick out bits of Throbbing Gristle and Gang Of Four in songs where it probably doesn’t matter.
Also, thanks to Wayback Machine, what I believe was the very first dedicated kayo kyoku English-language web site, dating back to at least 1999. Long-since offline, and self styledly ‘dedicated to the Silver Age of J-Pop’, but another terrific resource by a guy who was actually there (and bought the souvenirs to prove it)
I came to Silver Age of J-Pop by means and routes that are so lost and forgotten to me now that I actually choose to remember them as some sort of supernatural experience (Perhaps I was possessed by the spirit of a black ninja). But even though I had heard of City Pop from my very first steps into the Kayo Kyoku, I came to the real thing much, much later (unless I’m allowed a head-start for the starters-for-ten that come as part of your J-Pop Foundation Course), in the same way that thousands of other people did, via the odd little movement called Vapourwave. This in turn was brought to my attention by one of my smartest acquaintances, who knew of my love of all things exotica and Konishi Yashuharu, and fundamentally wanted to know what I’d make of it. It turned out, I wasn’t expected to like it very much; I think I was supposed to find it too ironic, too smart-arsed and too hipster. Over-privileged, over-entitled brats mocking the past as a means to an end, to prove how smart they were and how dumb their source material was. (My reactions to certain things can be very, very predictable, it turns out.) This turned out to very, very far from the case. A little ignorance can go a long way, and ignorance of Hipster Runoff and its attendant subculture meant that when I first heard Saint Pepsi, I had no idea that there was any irony intended. I thought that the source material sounded delightful, and the recycled products of the source material were not merely delightful, but actually the thing that twenty years of Sampling Culture and Dance-music-as-bricolage and Simon Price advocacy had never actually delivered as far I could ever see (I do, by the way, admire Price’s writing greatly and have done since about 1990, but his terrible failing as a cultural commentator and music journalist is that he writes so persuasively about the records he clearly, genuinely adores that his commentary frequently surpasses the records he’s commenting on. I tried and I tried, and I never did Get Jungle, D&B or ‘Ardkore.) I could appreciate the slightly detached, slightly arch, slightly knowing assemblage, but more than that, I believed that I could see, in the assemblage itself and in the process of assemblage, a shaping encounter with an alien culture taking place. The Hipsters of the Hipster Runoff readership might have set out to plunder cheese and bashful disco and white-flour funk, but the process of them going native, falling for the very thing they’d set out to exploit, was tangible within the records even as they made them. And by the time Vapourwave called time on itself, before the joke stopped being funny, or stopped being a joke at all, or before people had time to figure out whether or not it had ever been a joke (Hipster Runoff was supposed to be a joke, but traumatically mutated into the shrewdest cultural commentary of its age, to the great and lasting detriment of its own writer. What do you do when you set out to take the piss out of the late-00’s even as they are happening, but everyone takes the mockery and derision dead seriously? What do you then do when you realise that your funny in-on-the-in-joke project has not merely been taken seriously but has accidentally become the defining critical work of the decade?)
It was, you see, supposed to work something like this: Hipster Runoff would satirise the then-contemporary hipster culture by inventing excessive numbers of made-up, non-existent micro-genres and styles and clothing fads, and ascribe them to whatever desperate-for-publicity hot-new-thing band or performer was desperate for publicity that week. The writing would be done with far too many scare-quotes and single-quotes (a style that fooled me completely, and convinced me that it was the work of a forty-ish Quality Rock journalist who’d turned his back on Mojo and the latest Eric Clapton Remaster Box Set and decided that he wasn’t too old to be down wit da kidz.) and the micro-genres and mini-fads (‘Slutwave’, for christ’s sake!) would be so outlandishly and / or offensively named that no-one would possibly mistake it for anything even approaching real journalism. This turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Lots and lots of people were not so much fooled, as they were wanting A Voice to articulate them, that many, many of the invented microgenres had real people in real creative activities self-identifying themselves as belonging to them. I suspect, that the small number of artists and musicians who self-identified as Vapourwave had, in fact, blown the joke already, but thought it was a fun name, and regarded themselves with sufficient lack-of-seriousness that they didn’t mind going along with it. In fact, even the name ‘Vapourwave’ is quite clever joke, referring to ‘Vapourware’ , meaning a promised software product, often by a VC-funded startup company, which was hyped before completion and had so much hype that it could never live up to it, much like those records whose expectations were inflated so astronomically By Simon Price. Much of the hype took place in the pages of Wired magazine which, now that I think of it, Simon Price also wrote for (and so did Mark Fisher), and it’s not hard to see the process of [small software company has a good idea] -> [good idea gets hyped beyond whatever it’s ever capable of delivering] -> [not only does miraculous world-changing software never appear, but no software at all appears, largely because the original expectations for the software have now been inflated beyond any conceivable deliverable] -> [small software company is then summarily despised for letting everybody down so badly] as being in itself a desire to see the promises of Cyberpunk and the early days of the Internet come to fruition, a desire which mutated into a longing and then a loss, and then a disappointment that the software industry had not delivered what the culture industry had promised that it would, on its behalf, without even asking it if it could. It was, inevitably, only a matter of time before Hipster Runoff found itself accused of hype; then excessive hype; then hype that was impossible to live up to; and, escalating the insanity still further, it then began actually manufacturing the hype that it had been incorrectly accused of manufacturing, and the process entered what electronic engineers would call a high-gain positive feedback loop, and what aviation engineers call ground resonance. The nomenclature is different, but the result is always the same, Chronic Hysteresis, a ton of noise and the sound of someone barely-audibly shouting “Oh Shit…” before the speakers melt or the helicopter disintegrates.
So Hipster Runoff wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously; but was taken seriously; which led to it taking itself seriously which resulted in its main writer having an identity crisis and some sort of breakdown, and the whole thing whirling out of control and wreaking a whole lot of damage as it did so. But what we got out of it was quite a few delightful Vapourwave records, some of which deserve to be considered Hauntographic objects in their own right, and we got something approaching a re-ignition of interest in the source material (much as had happened with Exotica some fifteen years previously). For the record, we also got some great journalism and not merely poignant cultural commentary but a fully-codified new form of cultural commentary. Would I have ever come to City Pop by myself, following the Silver Age back to its Lake Victoria? Who knows. I would have had access to some lovely record stores where the stuff could be bought, that’s for sure, but I wouldn’t have had a clear idea where to start in J.J. Records or Disc Pier, and at JY2000 a go, I don’t think I’d have endured many misfires before determining that I was on to a loser. But thanks in a very large way to the hideous joke that got out of hand that was Hipster Runoff, here I am and here we are. And if, by the way, I’m not completely correct about every aspect of the history that’s been related above, full disclosure now: I wasn’t there. Hipster Runoff had already gone dark and mostly unavailable by the time I caught on. The internet may have led to a Loss of Loss, but some things really are lost, for ever, and their loss is even more poignant for that.
Fig.1. The VIP Room, preferred habitat of City Pop for Girls
Which brings us, by circuitous routes, to out Topic For Today. Having already stated somewhat rudely that I don’t care for boundary-defining demarcation of things that aren’t even really genres, I’m now going to sketch – as broadly as in as many wishy-washy watercolours as is possible – a loose set of signifiers by which City Pop can be identified. By ‘identified’, it’s helpful to think of this in terms of (say) Aircraft recognition (“Soviet Helicopters often use coaxial rotors” [with the obvious caveat that not all of them do]) than anything else. A definition that’s often heard is ‘music made by City People for City people’, which is either half-wrong or completely wrong (you will also hear some flummery about ‘AOR’, ‘Funk and Boogie’ and ‘Soft Rock’, which is….not incorrect, but about 25%, max, of the picture.). City Pop is music for migrants: for the huge swathes of rural and small-town Japanese people who rotate through the big cities or end up staying. The urban experience, of course, needs no explanation for those who have been brought up in it, and as such is no different to any other tribal culture, and the experience has spent so long not being needed to be explained that at some point it became inexplicable. In one way, it’s compatible to Enlightenment in the context of Zen Buddhism: if you don’t get it, it can’t be explained, and if you do get it, it doesn’t need to be explained. In strict Structuralist terms, it has ceased to actually be a meaningful explanation except as a system of differences from other experiences. Ask a generational, born-and-bred New Yorker what exactly that means, and they’ll exhaust every definition of what it isn’t before even attempting to define in the affirmative. Conversely, suburban folk, and rural folk especially, have no difficulty whatsoever telling anyone what’s so great or so terrible about their neighbourhood or village or estate. City Pop addresses hopes, fears and anxieties, and pleasures and excitements that are the exclusive preserve of people who are Comfortably Alien. It’s not music for refugees or exiles, the uncomfortably alien and the true strangers. City Pop would never address the angst of never hearing your own language being spoken; or trying to maintain the morals or standards of the Old Country when cut adrift in Gomorrah; or being flat broke in a place that has no use for your skills or experience; or just flat-out doesn’t want you there. City Pop addresses the concerns of country people or suburban people simultaneously excited and trepidational, left simultaneously at-home and yet far-from-home by the move to The Big City. The experiences it describes are rarely extreme by the standards of Immigrant Songs, and they are not often very unusual either. This is by no means accidental. It’s a mistake to ascribe social responsibility to a product made for commercial purposes, and no City Pop record was ever made for the purposes of counselling or therapy or even self-help. (The Japanese Migrant Experience is, like Warrant Officer Training, or A-levels, a shakedown culture, which aims to wash out the non-hackers who are better off working in their auntie’s general store or driving a truck or….any of the hundreds and thousands of dignified, societally-imperative jobs that have to be done, but don’t involve the often crucifying self-abnegation that humbling oneself before the power of the Big City often entails. ), but it seems impossible to image anything other than that hundreds of thousands of people derived great amounts of comfort from these often sentimental, often pathetic (but almost never indulgent or lachrymal) songs.
Not that it’s all bad news, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night stuff, either. A confusing note seems to be: why are so many of these songs apparently only-mildly fictionalised versions of narratives that folks living in big cities would be experiencing every day anyway? Why construct apparent exotica for an experience which is not even remotely exotic for anybody living it? The answer to that is that the upbeat, hit-the-street songs function as both soundtrack albums, lifestyle guides and training manuals for those people for whom the urban experience is not the experience in which they grew up. Many of the archetypal City Pop songs name-drop real, actual neighbourhoods, restaurants, clothing labels, shoes, cigarette brands and jewellery (and oh boy was the advertising industry slow on the uptake in product-placement there!). The album cover to ‘Space Opera’ by Yamaguchi Momoe is a catalogue of such things, and as such function as handbooks on how to fit in, how to be taken seriously, and not just another corn-fed Nagano hick in a recruit-suit and Heiwado shoes. Isn’t this all terribly aspirational, though? All of that buy-this trash-that style-mag consumerism that punk rock told us how to hate? Only inasmuch as it suggests some way to move beyond / between the two polarising extremes that are all that’s on offer as 2019 stutters epilectically to a rictus-grinning end. Choices, choices, we have so many choices….between the paranoiac excess and fragile vulgar-wealth of a certain strain of hip-hop on the one hand and the mock-self-denying scolding piety of weekender-environmentalism on the other. Here’s an idea: why not buy some decent consumer items that are going to last and don’t have to go to landfill after eight months? What is remotely reprehensible about spending money that’s your own on stuff you couldn’t normally afford? City Pop is apirational in the sense that, since you’re living in an interesting place with great clothes, great food and wild experience, yes, you should probably ‘aspire’ to wearing, eating and having some of that. It’s not ‘aspirational’ in the truly loathsome, class-jumping, wealth-flaunting, coke-nosed mode that characterised the overcooked Hedge Fund Manager stereotype.
Fig.2. The City at Night, un-threatened habitat of City Pop for Girls
City Pop is soaked in the imagery of water and modernity: not just the brands and products, but the other aspects of the Unhomely that function as sources of both comfort and anxiety for the country mice lost in the big city. Airports figure prominently (although – and it’s possible to guess why – globalism and actual travel destinations don’t), as do subways and railway trains, and the views and cityscapes that are described are exclusively those which are only available from the totemic symbols of the modern: from bridges, elevators, and most frequently, the pricey-but-not-too-extortionate 35th-Floor Sky Lounges that are a fixture in Japanese super-high-rise mixed-use buildings (Wealth is never, ever flaunted or weaponised in City Pop; the iconic symbols of prosperity seem calculated to be expensive but obtainable with reasonable diligence, another way in which we are dealing with the approachably alien.)
(I’d argue at this point that there’s a second answer to this question. Once an urban centre hits a critical mass, it exoticises itself, and if you happen to be one of those comfortable aliens, the Big City takes on an organic aspect which, due to its constantly-changing biological make-up becomes an object of the exotic – or the Un/Homely / Unheimlich even as it becomes one’s home. The environment and experiences which are soundtracked in City Pop for Girls are by no means mundane, although they may be earthly and even earthy, and nomatter the quotidian reality of an Office Lady’s job, it’s made exotic by virtue of being located within an environment which is itself constantly changing. Truly wealthy urban folk are the subjects of this narrative, the ones making the decisions and changing the skyline, but the comfortably-alien are the social class who are participating in it; crucially not the objects, but rather the predicate. Emotion is never, ever considered separate from the Comfortably Alien Urban Experience, and neither is the specific and persistently recurring motif that the Comfortably Alien is an exemplary way of dealing with loneliness, despair, betrayal and heartbreak, and immeasurably superior to the claustrophobic homilies of friends-and-family and small-town life. If you’re one of those people for whom the title song from ‘Cheers’ [“everyone knows your name”] summons spinal chills of a social police state where village-pump gossip takes place a bit too close to the village pillory, it’s unnecessary to explain the catharsis of being lost in the biomass. What we’ll call Tristesse Urbain is very, very far from introverted depression, and is presented in the context of City-Pop-As-Ideal-For-Living as a therapy for introverted depression.)
Fig.3. The City at Night, after 4:00am. It is recommended to be in bed by now.
Another factor that can’t easily be glossed over is that City Pop needed to adapt itself, constantly, to available technology. Teleologically, this initially seems like an odd statement, since essentially the same technology of music production was available in 1974 and 1989, but small and subtle shifts took place that greatly influenced the choices that recording engineers were obliged to make. It’s relatively easy to record a track that will sound good on an expensive stereo; much harder to record one which will also sound good on a portable record-player. Twenty year old office ladies were not about to go into debt to buy a best-of-breed Hi-Fi like the one their dad had as pride-of-place in the Casual Living Room back in hometown; the silly boys might have gone broke for the very best they could stuff into their 1DK, but they didn’t have Chanel handbags and Ishida Junko suits making irresistible demands on their disposable income. So if a record was going to get bought and played, it had better sound at least listenable on a National SF-320 (the production tricks to do this became so identifiable that was possible to identify a ‘Pioneer Record’ from its production style; not because of the studio that recorded it, but because of the mid-range audio equipment it was maximised for). Then, in 1975-ish, you throw cassette tapes into the mix, and then the car stereo, and then, a couple of years later, the ultra-light cassette player.
If there was a kind of music destined from birth to be played on car stereos and personal stereos, it might be City Pop. After all, if you’re going to make a song about struttin’ out into Azabu-Juban or a lazy stroll to watch the lights come on in Bayside Sannomiya, or a ton-up along the Hanshin Loopway, you’re probably going to imagine that people are going to want to listen to your song whilst doing exactly those things. Just as UK Glam Rock derived its signature sound in great part from the need to sound at-least-OK on the kind of pocket radios that children could reasonably ask for as birthday presents, City Pop evolved and changed to adapt to the technology that would be used to reproduce it; and given the ultra-concentrated relationship between Japanese technology and media producers, changes in one drove changes in the other. This, of course, is one of the three reasons under discussion here for the essential, inescapable modernity of City Pop and why it is in no way subject to Nostalgia or retro-remarketing. Do a proper pressing of a Miles Davis record from 1953, and you get something that sounds like what the musicians would have been playing, and not a tinny, tin-eared simulacrum. Re-master a City Pop record from 1982 to sound good on Beats By Dre headphones and you’ve lost approximately 50% of whatever made it whatever it was in the first place.
An oft-overlooked but apparently true statement is that music has sounds as well as signifiers, so it’s probably worthwhile to consider what the most median, easily recognised City Pop sounds like, and the reason for choosing median (and not mode or mean) is that the datum that falls exactly in the middle of the sample is surrounded by examples that are very far away from that median. Standard Deviation is very high in City Pop (but not as much as in Bronze-Age J-Pop, where the deviance is quite staggering, especially when we get to Onyanko Club. There. Joke. Don’t get your hopes up.) What’s inescapable, listening to this music, is how woefully unprepared we have been left by postmodernism for understanding things that aren’t in on the joke. That statement will stand some unpacking, so here goes: the long cancellation of the future has left us with stopped time, “time out of joint” as it’s usually expressed. This had led to a set of critical faculties that tend to view everything as spectacle, either détournement or recuperation (put with excess simplicity: grabbing things out of the hands of The Man or The Man snatching things back). We expect to be able to read everything as a set of references, codifiers or signifiers. This can be very helpful in terms of understanding historical process, but can have a terrible effect when trying to understand something that can’t be explained in terms of well-understood references. It’s a matter of history that the High Concept Movie was explicitly a narrative which could be explained, with nothing more to say, by reference to one previously-proven property and one modification. This worked well for the Italian Knock-off Industry for whom “Jaws…with a bear” or “Jaws…with an Octopus” was as much of a shooting script as was ever needed. The formula became increasingly problematic when it became not merely an elevator-pitch tool in the overcocainified offices of Los Angeles production companies (where even getting to speak to a studio executive is an Herculean task), but a method of production. The way I heard it, even the studio execs realised how silly the situation had become when one of them found himself seriously considering a movie pitched as “Die Hard, but the twist is, it’s in an office building”. (of course, fast-forward a decade or so, and Reboot Thinking has eliminated even the most facile Twist. I’m currently waiting for Industry Speculation to reach fever pitch as it’s rumoured that the Next James Bond will be a white man.)
Most commentaries on the subject will say something along the lines of “…influences from AOR and Soft Rock but with funk and boogie elements too…”, which is not precisely incorrect, but is only really correct inasmuch as saying “human beings are Living Organisms of the Kingdom Animalia and the phylum Chordata” is indisputably correct but not exactly useful. The whole previous paragraph here was basically a long way of saying “if you’ve let yourself, as I have, get into the bad habit of trying to define things according to what grave they’ve dug up, you’re going to be on a loser here”, and then “and for this, rejoyce, because you’re about to be reminded (or even learn for the first time) that this sorry state of affairs need not be that way!”. There’s a joy in hearing something that, whilst not sounding-like-nothing-you’ve-heard-before, doesn’t sound like a pampliset of things you know very, very well (however ingeniously and loving that bricolage is assembled). So yes, the baselines here are AOR and Soft Rock, and cocktail jazz, the lighter(-skinned) end of the Funk spectrum and, ostentatiously, whatever was popular the month that particular album was recorded. This can result in unintentional and affection-engendering hilarity, when you’ll catch a particular lick or beat or fill or inflexion that isn’t so much influenced by a bit of The Carpenters or Carly Simon or Madonna or Prince, but is, in all likeleyhood, a member of the band having a laugh, and slipping in a phrase of two they’ve admired, and the producer letting it slide with a sly wink. At the risk of getting boring on this subject, it’s important to note that these things are in no way ‘references’ or ‘influences’; they’re quotes, in the old-fashioned Jazz tradition of such things, from very able musicians at the cutting edge of their status as tastemakers and style leaders.
If the quotes are ostentatious, the charming take-away from the vocals is how ostentatious they’re not.
Fig. 4. An example of City Pop Lady (c.1990), seen here in her natural environment. The suffix ‘vulgaris’ or ‘gardenia’ should never be used.
The reason the discussion topic here is ‘City Pop for Girls’, and not just ‘City Pop’ is that what we’re discussing is a form of popular culture which is not only marketed to women, but about women, and not (always) in the crassly lachrymal, platitudinously audience-identification mode of undermining and exploitation that characterises far too much cultural product which wants women to buy it. City Pop for Girls is a medium of story and mythology, including but by no means limited to the stock characters that women are allowed to play in mainstream music. If it’s about women living at the very edge of – or slightly beyond – their comfort zones, it’s because it was addressed at real women in the same situation, but crucially, the identification it makes is nothing as cock-obvious as ‘You had a breakup: here’s a song about a breakup’ or ‘you had a bad day at work, here’s a song about how awful bosses are’. The outer-limits experiences are staged, like wartime propaganda, to make every Grunt on the Front feel like Audie Murphy. Or Captain Midnight. If you fancy yourself as being A Bit Edgy, you might feel entitled to sneer at a form of expression which posits such mild and homely borders for its comfort zones, but I don’t think that’s quite correct. John Rambo may have been trained to eat things that would make a billygoat puke, but I don’t fancy his chances doing a nine-five in the General Affairs department of National Electric.
If the above thesis about City Pop for Girls is correct, and its primary target was single women who had migrated to the huge cities to do-or-die (or worse, end up lonely); or if not exactly get rich or die tryin’ , then Do Quite Well or have to return to their home village with a thick coating of egg on their face, then couching their quotidian struggles in the language of epic romance, thermonuclear passion or monstrous tragedy is a simultaneous challenge and comfort. After all, quotidian struggles only look banal from a distance; when the routine everyday is your routine everyday, those struggles and successes and defeats and little victories are important to you. So in casting the small dramas and small pleasures of the lives of each member of the army of Office Ladies, not in the patronisingly ‘relatable’, but in the context of Olympian passion and desire and tragedy, City Pop for Girls for Girls is nothing as banal as ‘inspirational’, it’s macrocosmic. The women of City Pop come in all shapes and sizes, and all manners and temperaments, too. Anyone who comes expecting a confirmation of the fundamentally racist prejudice that it’s bland elevator music to placate the toiling masses in their thankless jobs is in for, what is to be hoped to is be, a pleasant surprise. From the homely amibility of Yagami Junko to the tremblingly-nervous but daringly-adventurous protectivity of Miyamoto Noriko and Fuji Mariko; from the grounded but imaginative vulnerability of Kikuchi Momoko to the trip-over-her-own-feet bashful eccentricity of Kobayashi Izumi and from the perfumed exoticism of Nakayamate Yuki and Mizuhara Akiko, to the scandalous not-sure-I-believe-it luchtime-story healthy-imagination automythological anthologism of Ashibe Mariko and Koshi Miharu, all the way to the dream-for-an-evening Proletarian Jet Set fantasies of Ohashi Junko and Kazami Ritsuko, the polite but upapologetic carnal aggression of Ida Rie and Miyamoto Noriko and the apocalyptic, terrifying, barely-restrained magnesium-flare beyond-passion of Nakamori Akina, there’s a huge and marvellous world hiding in plain sight. I’m aware that I’m doubtless missing some touchstones here, and I don’t think that’s problematic. This isn’t supposed to be any kind of exhaustive or definitive guide to what, after all, is a genre covering anything up to forty years of the cultural production of one of the most culturally productive nation-states in the world, and in a very real sense, I don’t want my journey through it end any time soon. Conversely, I am covering things that may not strictly be considered ‘City Pop’ by this or that definition. And the only real response I have to that is: get the hell over yourselves. There are lots of pastimes where taxonomisation and precise definitions are important (aviation history is a fascinating one where that stuff matters) This isn’t Talmud we’re studying here; at no point was a diligent quorum of scholars assembled and tasked with determining which tractates and oral histories were or were not ‘City Pop’ or ‘Kayo Kyouku’ or ‘Idol Music’. In each case, they were loose designations at best (just like nobody ever set out to invent ‘The Slasher Movie’ or ‘The Giallo Movie’), and in an area as under-researched as this, no-one is doing anyone any favours by excluding research material because it doesn’t fit in a prematurely-defined definition.
(I expect there’s City Pop for Men, too, but since I’m not a dilligent researcher and I don’t care about it much, it gets ignored and marginalised here.)
Fig.5. City Pop Lady in preferred habitat; dating may be attempted by careful examination of colouring and plumage (white shirt, tricolour scarf)
–A mistake I made early on in this project was to attempt to contexturalise the albums I was listening to, a task I normally set about by attempting to identify influences and topic markers. It wasn’t until approximately two weeks in that it became apparent that – with a very few exceptions – there were almost no influences to discover, and the realisation of exactly why this was, and what it signified, provided the final clue as to why City Pop for Girls should be considered as Hauntographic, and not Nostalgic: the producers and singers employed very competent, very skilled session musicians, composers, arrangers and songwriters for reasons both artistic and economic, but so skilled and experienced were these people that they utterly distained the idea of being seen to be copying anyone. Refusal to copy, refusal to risk the accusation of being a rip-off (an even worse condemnation for a Serious musician than being considered a sell-out. However if a mundane explanation must be given, music publishers are notoriously litigious, and a plagiarism suit wouldn’t have looked good for anybody – not for the original works’ copyright holders obliged to defend their IP in a tiny, separatist market, and not for the captains of Japanese New Industry, determined that their country should be recognised for more than cheap copies of U.S. and European innovations; in in this, let us not lose sight of the fact that City Pop was at least in part a showcase/marketing pitch for Japanese recording technology), equates to a refusal to admit to influences, which in practical terms manifests itself as constant and radical re-invention. So whilst it’s true that no artist or craftsman can ever acquit themselves of Being Influenced, it’s important to try to rid oneself of the Pop-Postmodern idea that everything is to be understood in terms of memes, tropes, quotes, nods, winks and slogans.
I’m reminded of a possibly-apocryphal story once related to me by a comics fan acquaintance of mine, who recounted an instance when a neophyte apprentice of Jack Kirby’s asked his mentor for some tips on how to get ‘the Jack Kirby Style’. The old pro promptly replied that ‘the Jack Kirby Style’ would be to make a new style for the work in hand, and if I had only one thing to thank and adore City Pop For Girls for (and in fact, I have so much more than that), it would be for that moment of shocking revelation that what we’re looking at here isn’t nostalgia, tributary or simulacrum of any kind; it’s a modernism so aggressive that it not only defies its past but its future as well. It progresses with such momentum as to keep ahead of being influenced; but it’s a product of a modernising force that moves with even greater momentum and velocity than it does, leaving every artefact as what a Geologist would call Ground Moraine: an unmistakable product of not only the glacier which brought it to its current location, but a record of the conditions and climate at the moment of its deposition. (we can have fun with this analogy: possibly, where the two glaciation fronts of Idol Music and City Pop meet, we have examples of Edge Moraine, and where the glacier terminates – somewhere between 1994 and 2007 – you have Terminal Moraine, as the glacier can’t proceed any further, but continues to deposit material from its terminus). But in rejecting a pernicious side-effect of Postmodernism, it is important to understand that we owe to Postmodernism precisely our ability to appreciate artefacts in terms of the culture and history which produced them, and only through Postmodernism have we come to identify a way of describing the space between “timeless classics” and “dated trash” (and, in fact, recognise those terms as the sort of needlessly reductionist False Dichotomies that we’re trying to un/do with this project.)
If there’s a defining characteristic to the outstanding examples of City Pop for Girls, it’s the songs’ ability to capture an imagined essence of what the moment-in-question sounded like, without actually sounding like anything else from that moment. The music’s resistance to copying lies in the intrinsic vanity of musicians which is this case doesn’t manifest itself in working with sounds, time signatures or structures more radical or extreme than those that had gone before (as is the case with Modern Jazz, Progressive Rock and Post-Punk), but in the endless effort to make music more beautiful, more complex and more different than anything that had gone before. And like the restrictions imposed on aircraft design by aerodynamics, or even (and possibly even more relevently) the restrictions imposed on a Tani-Naomi-in-Bondage, the strictures of form and function forced those musicians to experiment and stretch within a narrow and tightly-circumscribed set of limitations (Demonstrating that, when motivated by Modernism, Conservatism can itself be a Radical force, of which, more later.). On the other hand, the music’s resistance to being copied lies in its intrinsic difficulty and complexity, which is underplayed to an almost alarming degree. No flash here, no dick-swinging, but try picking out almost any of these songs on a piano, and what becomes immediately apparent is the Swiss Watch level of hidden complexity and exquisite craftsmanship involved. City Pop for Girls grounds itself in the very moment it was made and as such can never be nostalgia.
Fig. 6. The City almost not at night. The subway will begin running in 30 minutes, but you may consider calling a taxi.
Vapourwave appropriations of City Pop for Girls are likewise immune from criticisms of Necrophilia and Restorative Nostalgia. There is no inference than Vapourwave requests or demands a return to the Era Of City Pop (by its very innate existence, Vapourwave is unable to Grandfather Paradox itself to a pre-Internet era, just as an Industrial society can never consciously decide to return to Eden by re-inventing itself as Agrarian, because it could never make that decision without the experience and education and understanding that only Industrialisation can offer), and after consideration, it’s by no means clear that Varourwave even approaches its source material with the sneering of Postmodernism-for-idiots. Even if the approach was initially sneering or ironic, or with the intention of mining some kitsch or naive artefact from a bygone age, there is no evidence that the icy detachment of irony lasted beyond the warm embrace that greeted it. If the relationship began with the intention of being parasitic, it became symbiotic. It’s not even correct to observe, as some have done, that Vapourwave or the modern re/appreciation of City Pop for Girls is Nostalgia for an Age Never Experienced by people not even born in 1985. Is it even possible to be Nostalgic for a period you never experienced? I remember 1985, and I’m not all that nostalgic for it. The only answer to this question is the answer we keep coming back to: the Longing or Voidation is not for an era that has passed and for which there is a longing-to-return, but for the processes that enabled that age. Processes are dynamic and do not age; only their product-artefacts age. Modernism means Moving beyond the last thing, thinking about the next thing. Is a process and not an artefact or an aesthetic: a way of doing or a way of seeing and not the thing which is done or seen. If we’re going to understand Modernity as progress, we need to find ways of seeing that don’t whitewash the horrors of Thatcher-and-Reagan or the fear of Nuclear War or AIDS, but enable other perspectives – maybe even perspectives that weren’t available to us during the period of time as it was happening. If we can decouple the progress and modernisation that happened between 1979 and 1989 from Neoliberalism, and not leave it mired in Reagan/Thatcher/Nukes/AIDS/Famine (blights on humanity, all of them), then it may even be possible to confront the myth of Capitalist Realism, and to demonstrate that Neoliberalism was not ever and is not now a Precondition for Popular Modernism.
What is put forward here is the suggestion that it is the loss of process/progress itself that motivates what people mistake for the nostalgia of City Pop for Girls, and that the narratives of Loss and Desire and Cut are re-read by us as spectropic entities which have transcended their original narrative functions and become commentary on a cultural loss/cut/desire and not merely a personal one. And if there is a fearful condemnation of the Age Of The Postponed Future, it is that culture-at-large has imagined that what it is feeling is the dead-but-walking state of Nostalgia. It is not Nostalgia that is being felt. It is not the long-vanished age that is being mourned, it is the loss (or theft) of the processes which enabled this or that longed-for age to exist in the first place, and it is the restoration of this libidinal impulse that is hoped for. City Pop mythologises Escape into Night. But in this reading, City Pop offers, in and of itself, not escapism but exit from Formal Nostalgia; and as Marianne found out, Escape Into Night is only desirable when exit itself is a possibility. The fictions of City Pop – which are only fictions, after all, because they were never conceived to be owned or possessed – function as not merely (say) the anticipation of a date, but the anticipation of date resuming its function. (How can there be a date, of any kind, when there’s No Time Here, Not any More?).
The obvious way to approach progress, as represented by the gently-aggressive modernism of City Pop for Girls, is sampling, and this is actually not a bad way to go. Acquiring the skills needed to play as well as even one of the musicians on any of these albums is a serious commitment, and assembling a whole group of such musicians, arranging recordings and arrangements is very, very far beyond the scope of amateur and part-time music-makers. So sampling here fulfils the dual role of making very capable musicianship available to Vapourwave artists, and, frankly, Sounding Nice. And if Vapourwave does not fulfil City Pop’s enactment of modernism in action, it functions at least as well as a protest or call-to-action which is far more effective for centring the modernism it demands instead of merely demanding it. And the demonstration of a demand, a longing or a need is best expressed in a prototype: lacking proper tools or jigs, and having had their birthright of Understanding Industrial Production taken from them, and not accidentally, either, the Vapourwave artists built prototypes – many of them crude, some (for sure) as Situationist or Dadaist mockeries, but a surprising number being unaccountably beautiful fusions of Form and Function – from the abandoned and neglected output of some of the most accomplished and refined products that industrial society has ever produced. This is possible because City Pop for Girls has never been subjected to the Classic Rock conditioned-zombie dancing-bear exercises in necromancy that the vile scourge of Nostalgia and Retro has brought to so many other things that deserved careful archaeology and sensitive curation.
If you’re determined to sneer – at the absence of hardness or adolescent Radicality, or at tame-by-todays-standards Daringness, or at some trying-too-hard definition of ‘appropriation’, do yourself a favour and skip right over. But if you have a lot of patience, and you’re interested in a pop-culture millieu that exists within the realm of emotions and experiences that are not strange in themselves, but rendered strange and exotic and epic and romantic, then it’s a journey that’s worth taking.
Fig. 7. 1975 Vintage Yamaguchi Momoe charms, Iga Ueno Electronics Museum, 2009.
FOOTNOTES.
1. Without getting too far into the smug passive-aggressive tedium of discussions of the sameness/difference of ‘Japanese Culture’, I don’t think it’s a very radical statement to suggest that ‘mainstream Japanese pop culture’ is a very alien landscape: far more alien, in fact, than the endlessly over-fetished ‘Japanese extremity’. Boredoms, Merzbow and Takashi Miike are not, in fact, all that surprising if you’re already familiar with John Zorn, Throbbing Gristle and Abel Ferrara, but a great deal of what’s unmooring, bordering on the Uncanny (as opposed to Unheimlich) of pop-culture products for mass consumption is that they are clearly reflective of the Perfectly Normal, but a different Normal to the one experienced by anyone who grew up in Western Europe or North America [which of course, is not so say that everyday culture is even remotely homogeneous across the seven-thousand-some-odd miles between Tacoma and Frankfurt]. Not a radical difference: not enough of a difference to put it into the realms of the Fantastic (or, indeed, The Realms of the Unknown), but enough to confuse certain relations of signifiers and signified.
2. “The Three Reasons” that City Pop for Girls is Modernist and not Nostalgic or Reactionary:
i. It is the product of, and the driver behind, the technology that was used to produce it
ii. It is made with very high production values and great human craftsmanship, which disdained repetition or copying for vain/artistic and also legal reasons. This makes it Modernist and not Postmodernist.
iii. It a both a document and prescription of a lifestyle which is enabled by and which further enables social progress (specifically, women leaving home, becoming somewhat financially independent, and separating sex from marriage and reproduction.
3. “Water and Modernity”. City Pop for Girls has two main loci: Downtown and Ocean Side. There are many, many actual songs whose titles are variants on these two loci, and it would be obvious but not completely correct to identify these as symbols of ‘home and away’. It’s not correct because for the Comfortably Alien, Downtown isn’t home. It might be where your apartment is, and is almost certainly where your Friday Nights take place, but it’s Un/Homely or, better yet, Unheimlich. The concept of the unheimlich contains within it concepts of the ghostly; whether because it lacks the geist of heimat or because it possesses a spectral or haunted quality of its own. Oceanside is not ‘away’ in the same way that ‘downtown’ is not ‘home’. Harbours and Airports naturally carry with them the connotation travel; vacation; escape; repatriation (willing or unwilling) and reunion, but in the world City Pop, they are immersive backdrops, places of romance and imagination. In the days when ‘Jet Set’ still meant something (which is more recently that is generally imagined), harbours and airports were genuinely romantic places. Pilots and Air Hostesses were figures of desire/admiration, and such was/is the figurative adventure of merely being close to that sense of dynamism, that going to the airport cocktail lounge (where City Pop and the light lounge-jazz it derived from were often played), or for a stroll around the harbour, to watch the aeroplanes taking off or the ships docking, was a legitimate location for a date.
4. The Tristesse Urbain which forms so much of the emotional mood of City Pop for Girls is often very libidinal in expression; startlingly libidinal for listeners who might have been primed to expect a certain kind of conservatism WRT gender politics in mainstream popular culture, and especially for people who have become disconsolate about the antilibidinal and erotophobic popular culture of the post-2012 period. For now, and before we begin examine songs and albums in more detail, considering that City Pop is the product of some 30 – 45 years ago, it seems libidinal in the manner wholly different to the slovenly, unhygenic, clap-addled, by-men-for-men Free Love advocacy which was still the predominant stench of libidinality in the ’70’s (no, Abbie Hoffman, you never fooled me, ever, and I never once trusted a hippie.), but more like an accompaniment to Ellen Willis or Shulamith Firestone. The temptation to include Susie Bright in the roll of honour is best left to the readers’ idle speculation on exactly what ‘Plastic Love’ might really be about.