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Top of the City Pops: Happy End (from left, Eiichi Ohtaki (in hat), Takashi Matsumoto, and Haruomi Hosono) perform in a parallel pop universe at the Shibuya Seibu May Carnival, 1970.
Courtesy of Mike Nogami
THE LOOSE term ‘City Pop’ was coined in Japan in the 1990s to describe the music forged in the previous decades of prosperity and productivity for the nation, a sophisticated sound that felt vibrantly modern in its moment, urban and neon lit. Growing out of the early-’70s pop known simply as “new music”, City Pop leant heavily on American jazz fusion, disco and electro. It’s a term vague enough to encompass a broad spectrum of artists who maybe sounded unalike – from lounge jazzers to synth sequencers – but who operated within a similar zone of deluxe musicality, the world of silky chord voicings designed to lubricate the slipway towards a feelgood moodswing, sometimes with a hint of pastiche or homage. In his 2012 book about J-pop’s origins, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, Michael K. Bourdaghs describes City Pop as “deconstructing the line between imitation and authenticity.”