City Pop's Real Rediscovery

Japanese Music

Chapter 6 · City Pop's Real Rediscovery

A song that flopped so badly on release it barely cracked the top 100 became, three decades later, a genuine global viral phenomenon — driven partly by an algorithm, and partly by a thumbnail photo that wasn't even from the right single.

City Pop's Real Origin: Tokyo's Economic Boom in Sound

City pop emerged in Tokyo across the late 1970s and 1980s, born directly out of Japan's own real economic boom. It blended Western funk, jazz, disco, rock, and R&B into a distinctly Japanese, cosmopolitan sound, funded by the lavish production budgets Japan's bubble-economy prosperity made genuinely possible.

Tatsuro Yamashita: The Real "King of City Pop"

Singer-songwriter Tatsuro Yamashita is widely regarded as the genre's own defining figure. His 1980 album Ride on Time is generally considered the first true city pop album, followed by his quintessential 1982 record For You. As cassette tapes and Walkmans spread through the late 1970s, owning city pop cassettes for drives out to Shonan or Kamakura became a real, genuine status symbol among young Tokyo commuters.

Plastic Love: A Real, Genuine Commercial Flop

Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" (1984) was produced by her real husband — Tatsuro Yamashita himself — and only reached number 86 on the Japanese charts on release, a genuine commercial disappointment at the time.

The Real 2017 Viral Resurgence

An Algorithm, and a Photo From the Wrong Single On 5 July 2017, a user known as Plastic Lover uploaded an eight-minute fan-made remix of "Plastic Love" to YouTube. Its thumbnail used a striking photo by Los Angeles photographer Alan Levenson — but that photo was actually taken for the cover of an entirely different Takeuchi single, "Sweetest Music," not "Plastic Love" itself. The video accumulated a real 24 million views, spread by YouTube's own recommendation algorithm, internet memes, and forum discussions, before Levenson filed a real copyright strike that got it taken down. By then, "Plastic Love" had already broken into Japan's real top-10 sales chart, more than three decades after its original release, and Warner Music Japan eventually released an official music video for it.

Levenson himself later reflected on the photo's own real role: "Everybody questions the algorithm, but my feeling is that people looked at the photo and saw something about it. I think it's a great photo." A genuine commercial failure, resurrected by a mismatched photo and an algorithm neither Takeuchi nor Yamashita had anything to do with.

Questions to Sit With

Reflection 1

"Plastic Love" was a genuine commercial flop in 1984, later becoming a real hit decades after the fact. Do you think that gap between initial and eventual reception says something specific about the song itself, or is it mostly a story about how differently music circulates today?

Reflection 2

The viral video's own thumbnail photo wasn't even from the right single. Does that genuinely accidental detail change how you think about what actually drives something to go viral — the content itself, or something incidental attached to it?

Reflection 3

City pop's own real success in the 1980s depended on lavish, bubble-economy production budgets, while its 2017 resurgence depended on a free algorithm and an amateur remix. What do you think that contrast says about how a genre's own commercial conditions can change completely while the actual music stays exactly the same?

Quick Reference — Chapter 6

  • City pop emerged in Tokyo's late-1970s/80s economic boom, blending Western funk, jazz, disco, rock, and R&B; Tatsuro Yamashita is its defining "King" figure
  • Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" (1984), produced by her husband Yamashita, was a real commercial flop, reaching only #86 on Japan's charts
  • A 5 July 2017 fan remix, using a mismatched thumbnail photo from a different single, drew 24 million real YouTube views before a copyright takedown
  • The song later reached Japan's real top-10 sales chart decades after release, driven by algorithm recommendation, internet memes, and forum discussion
Next chapter: J-Pop Goes Global — Idol Groups & the Modern Industry — the real business model behind today's idol groups, and how J-pop reaches an international audience.