1. Introduction
[1.1] Japanese popular music has achieved international popularity several times since the postwar period, from Sakamoto Kyu's 1961 song "Ue wo Muite Arukou," released internationally as "Sukiyaki," to the works of artists such as Ryūichi Sakamoto, Utada Hikaru, and DJ Krush, among others. Genres like Shibuya-kei and Japanoise have had sizable international fandoms. While the fandoms around this music formed contemporaneously with the artists and genres during their prime, city pop music stands out as an example of an international revival fandom, which emerged primarily on the anglophone internet in the late 2010s.
[1.2] City pop emerged in the late 1970s as an outgrowth of fusion jazz, Japanese "new music" of the 1970s, and album-oriented radio (AOR). Although the genre was moderately popular during its heyday, and many artists in the genre have had long careers in professional music, audience tastes changed once Japan's bubble economy burst in 1989. For many modern Japanese listeners, city pop is synonymous with "cheesy, mainstream, disposable music" (Arcand and Goldner 2019). Aside from a short-lived domestic revival in the early 2000s, there was little interest in the genre until recently.
[1.3] City pop revival fandom emerged in the mid-2010s anglophone internet. Fan groups were created on platforms like Reddit and Facebook. According to recent demographic research on anglophone city pop fan communities (Sommet and Katō 2021), half of the revival fandom was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, with almost 90 percent being under the age of thirty-five—far younger than those who lived during the music's heyday of the late 1970s and 1980s. In addition, 60 percent of the fandom live in North America or Europe (with approximately 35 percent from the United States). How did users encounter city pop and become fans? How does this revival fandom engage with the historical contexts crucial in the creation and marketing of the genre? And how do revival fan practices enact a reflection of the past as depicted in the music and visual aesthetics of city pop?
[1.4] The online practices of the city pop revival fandom show engagement with the past that suggests a different critical lens in addition to nostalgia is warranted. Research on nostalgia in philosophy (Hutcheon and Valdés 2000; Boym 2001), media industries (Buerkle 2014; Lizardi 2015), and fan practices (Geraghty 2014; Taurino 2019) has looked at the role of memory (direct, generational, or collective) and media—either legacy media, which exists through online platforms like YouTube or Netflix, or new media, which evokes the past (Biesen 2019). The city pop revival fandom was, at least until recently (Sommet and Katō 2021; Ballam-Cross 2021), underresearched. Through case studies of discussions on the r/citypop subreddit and a thematic analysis of audiovisual materials, created and curated by members of the subreddit and YouTube between 2019 and 2021, I highlight how fans operationalize a different model of past looking, sehnsucht.
[1.5] Sehnsucht (Scheibe et al. 2011), alongside different deployments of Orientalism (Ueno 1999; McLeod 2013; Min 2020), constructs an ambivalently idealized past not directly experienced directly or by proxy by fans but one that is still felt and captured as they experience the city pop music in the present as a Japanese genre of music, albeit one with linkages to contemporaneous pop music. Here I aim to contribute to the literature on fan communities and engagement with historical media by suggesting a different critical apparatus to conduct research on fan engagement with the past through older media. This apparatus may prove relevant with the increasing number and diversity of works available for fans to discover.
[1.6] There are similarities between sehnsucht and nostalgia, particularly postmodern forms that acknowledge a flattening of space and time, creating feelings described by Svetlana Boym (2001) as being "both homesick and sick of home" (50). In a similar vein, Roy Christopher (2014), referencing Torlasco's (2013) concept of tertiary memory, notes, "We want to go back to a time that never existed, to relive times we never actually experienced" (209). However, sehnsucht provides a generative lens that permits us to look more directly at how the behaviors of city pop revival fandom not connected by personal or generational nostalgia can manifest and engage with the past.
2. City pop as a genre
[2.1] City pop emerged in the late 1970s with musicians interested in contemporary music genres of fusion jazz, rhythm and blues, disco, and AOR. Many of the foundational artists had been influenced by the California sound of 1960s rock. The genre later also became influenced by both commercial J-pop and dance music genres like freestyle. Electric guitar, synthesizers such as the Casio CZ-101, and drum machines like the Roland TR-808 make up much of the tonal quality of the music, particularly in later examples. The later period of the genre was also influenced by the 1980s J-pop idol movement, with many female singer-songwriters and vocalists like Mariya Takeuchi emerging. Her song "Plastic Love," although only a modest hit on release, was credited by many in the revival fandom as the song that launched the current revival fandom thanks to its appearance on YouTube and music subreddits in 2017.
[2.2] While city pop as a genre grew from the exploration and iteration of established music genres, much of the music came to be unified by the visuals associated with the music. Music studies scholars have argued that album covers (Jones and Sorger 1999; Vad 2021), liner notes, and concert posters function as paratexts promoting artists as well as creating an associated image and aesthetic for a musical artist—or, indeed, a genre of music. Many city pop albums deliberately evoke imagery that obscures the country of origin, evoking a newly affluent, globalized urban middle class, mixing imagery from California beaches and highways with Tokyo and Yokohama cityscapes. Pop artists like Hiroshi Nagai and Eijin Suzuki represented the genre's visual landscape.
[2.3] Historically, city pop was marketed to an emerging audience of middle-class young adults in the 1980s. This new audience had access to disposable income and luxuries like Walkmans and cars with tape decks that meshed well with the aesthetics of city pop. Consequently, it is no accident that a contributing factor in the genre's decline was the end of the bubble economy in 1989. Jon Blistein (2019) argues that the tensions found in city pop come from the juxtaposition of affluence and increasing alienation in the new neoliberal regime, noting, "That boom is where much of that new money and leisure in Japan came from, and subsequently the melancholy and the loneliness."
3. City pop revival fandom
[3.1] City pop revival fandom can be traced to patterns of online music consumption in the mid-2010s. Around this period, genres such as synthwave and vaporwave emerged (McLeod 2018; Ballam-Cross 2021). These genres were primarily based on evoking or transforming the music of the late 1970s through the late 1980s such as pop, R&B, and Muzak. In listening to these genres on platforms like YouTube, listeners were recommended city pop. One song in particular—an extended mix of Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love"—became a viral hit, accumulating 55 million views on YouTube between 2017 and 2021. The song was posted on Reddit's /r/listentothis in June 2017, prompting users to spread the song online and investigate similar music. Miki Matsubara's "Mayonaka No Door (Stay with Me)" hit No. 1 on Spotify's Viral chart in 2020, and on TikTok, more than 430,000 videos used the song between 2020 and 2023 (Calkins 2019; Sommet 2020; Zhang 2021).
[3.2] City pop fandom skews young and broadly international, even with data limited to anglophone fan groups. Although a small subset of the fandom collects physical media, particularly original and reissued vinyl records and CDs, most city pop fans listen to music through platforms like Spotify and YouTube and discuss the genre through platforms like Facebook and Reddit. As Moritz Sommet (2020) describes, the revival fandom shows "less interest in the genealogy of the genre than is commonly exhibited in the Japanese music press" (17). Previous demographic research observed the fandom as having elements of techno-Orientalism as well as what is termed fake nostalgia, both elements I turn to below.
4. Sehnsucht as a lens for engaging with the past
[4.1] Nostalgia is linked to perceptions of the past and present self. Previous scholarship suggests that a function of nostalgia is to link disjunctures between these selves (Davis 1979; Sedikides et al. 2015). Nostalgia's appeal has been described as being rooted in the "irrecoverable nature of the past," specifically an idealized past (Hutcheon and Valdés 2000, 19). Boym (2001) describes nostalgia in part as an historical emotion built on a "mourning for the impossibility of a mythical return" (8) and a relationship between individual and collective memory.
[4.2] Recent literature on nostalgia in media studies offers various qualified nostalgias to expand the idea of what the experience of nostalgia entails and how it is operationalized in context. Buerkle (2014), in response to previous discussions on nostalgia films, offers both generational nostalgia and nostalgia by proxy as qualifiers to describe the nostalgic elements not directly remembered by audiences in films such as Star Wars (1977). In looking at heritage films in the United Kingdom, Andrew Higson (2014) describes a postmodernist "atemporal nostalgia," where the past and present have been flattened and a "hopeless longing for a lost past is replaced by celebration of the styles of the past which are still accessible today and eminently collectible and consumable" (124). More pointedly, Ryan Lizardi (2015) uses "mediated nostalgia" to describe how media companies repackage past works to capitalize on the emotional past without asking viewers to consider the historical realities. Tembo (2019) uses "streamed nostalgia" to describe the role of digital video platforms to act as both repository of old media and creator of nostalgic media. Dauncey and Tinker (2014) outline the role of nostalgia in music. Paul Ballam-Cross (2021), when looking at music genres such as vaporwave, synthwave, mallsoft, and city pop, utilizes "reconstructed nostalgia" to depict audiences' engagement with this music and the pasts these genres invoke—or, in the case of city pop, come from. Rather than introducing yet another qualified nostalgia, sehnsucht may be more productive in examining the role of city pop revival fandom's engagement with the past.
[4.3] Sehnsucht describes a yearning or longing developed from facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. Scholarship defines sehnsucht across six dimensions, which I discuss in more detail below. We can draw some distinctions between sehnsucht and nostalgia. While Scheibe et al. (2011) acknowledge that sehnsucht can have some regret, it focuses on "how good life could be in an ideal world" rather than what went wrong; another distinction between sehnsucht and nostalgia is that sehnsucht "carries a solid dose of positivity and moreover possesses high everyday saliency" (778). This distinction between nostalgia and sehnsucht is precisely about unrealized idealizations rather than missing an experience, even a past experienced by proxy. Nostalgia also involves atypical or momentous past events (Batcho 2013) or addressing the present in terms of the past (Boym 2001). In contrast, sehnsucht's focus is tritime. It is simultaneously expressed in past, present, and future.
[4.4] Key to the idea of nostalgia is a memory of something that once existed, whether direct or experienced by proxy through generational or constructed memory. Sehnsucht, in contrast, involves a longing for an idealized past or a past that never existed rather than the memory of a past. Within the context of city pop revival fandom, demographic data suggest that sehnsucht is a more appropriate descriptor of psychological and emotional relationships than nostalgia. While Moritz Sommet and Ken Katō's (2021) findings show that a small number of city pop revival fans have direct links to city pop in their past, most do not have a direct memory and engage with the music as a product of an idealized, marketed past.
[4.5] Revival fans have noticed the imaginary world suggested by the genre and, through the visual and physical media shared on social media, practice this longing for idealization. As Sommet and Katō (2021) note, "Fans are aware that this nostalgia for the Japan of the past is not grounded in their own lived experience…To many, these nostalgic associations of city pop seem to serve as a means of escaping socio-economic problems of the present" (11). Certainly the turn to city pop fandom contrasts present-day economic realities of late-capitalist austerity, but this is less escapism and more an imagined utopia, one comparing the idealized past, the present, and futures. While most current fans of city pop did not experience bubble-era economic prosperity, parallels to that narrative, particularly compared to contemporary economic crises, have potentially played a role in seeing the bubble economy aesthetics of city pop as something that can be idealized.
5. Orientalism in city pop revival fandom
[5.1] While the idealization of city pop aesthetics for revival fans partly lies in its capitalist utopic vision, another element is that it is an explicitly Japanese genre. While the city pop revival fandom shows some ambivalence and self-reflection, as I discuss below, many fans engage with city pop as primarily Japanese pop culture. This engagement relies not just on an increasingly available multicultural media archive on platforms such as YouTube and Spotify but also on Orientalist notions of Japanese music and culture of the period more generally, as well as what Toshiya Ueno (1999) describes as techno-Orientalism. Techno-Orientalism describes the Western fascination and engagement with anime and other contemporary Japanese popular culture and its uses in other pop cultural practices that imagine an Asianized near future that nevertheless affirms a Western centrality to culture. As Ueno describes, "The landscape and atmosphere of Japan, as a typical model of over-adjusting to the high-tech built environment, are constantly referred to as signs of the near future…but at the same time, Japan is looked down upon rather than envied by the West" (98). Recent music studies research delved into techno-Orientalism's role in genres like hip-hop and vaporwave (McLeod 2013, 2018) and how Orientalism plays a role in K-pop fans in the West more generally (Min 2020).
[5.2] On the one hand, the revival fandom expresses its techno-Orientalism by mixing city pop and its aesthetics with other Japanese pop culture works unconnected in context. YouTube channels and playlists mixing clips of 1980s anime with city pop show a strong association by fans between the two forms despite the different original target audiences (affluent urban professionals versus an emergent otaku subculture). While Ueno's (1999) depiction of techno-Orientalism in Western fandom of anime and fictional genres (e.g., cyberpunk) imagines the Asian-inflected ideal as futuristic, in the case of the city pop revival fandom, it is a retrofuturistic aesthetic. In addition, fans on the subreddit post threads focused on the collection, curation, and archiving of physical music and travel to Japan, specifically to music stores in Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities that sell city pop. There is an irony to city pop revival fandom's techno-Orientalism because the music itself was marketed in a way that attempted to scrub the "cultural odor" (Iwabuchi 2002, 27) from its Japanese origins.
[5.3] As both Iwabuchi (2002) and Bourdaghs (2012) point out in their discussions of the Walkman and Japanese popular music, respectively, there is a larger question of how city pop blurs its Japaneseness. City pop as a genre has always marketed itself in a manner that often obscures its country of origin behind imagery inspired by California rock music, with beaches, highways, boat-sized convertibles, and city skylines. Similarly, prominent city pop artists' use of English (whether as an extension of the visual aesthetics' delocalized themes or because of the influence of American hegemony more generally) creates a genre that can more easily connect to contemporary anglophone fans, even if there is also appeal among them because of the genre's country of origin. These denationalized aesthetics and AOR-related styles may be responsible for fans looking for connections to related music in other national contexts. In an admittedly small number (about 0.89 percent) of threads in r/citypop, fans have looked for music similar to city pop in other national contexts, primarily Korean, Indonesian, Filipino, and Latin American (in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese) pop music from the 1980s through the present. This activity suggests that at least some fans engage with the fandom in ways that are not solely reifying the Japaneseness of the music.
6. City pop revival fandom on Reddit and YouTube
[6.1] Previous research has addressed the importance of identifying what aspects of platforms are essential, what ways communities use them, and what their effects are (Fox and Moreland 2015; Evans et al. 2017). Online media fandom research has argued that the structure and affordances of platforms play a role in shaping fandoms (Bergstrom and Poor 2021; Lynch 2022). In addition, platforms such as YouTube may serve as media archives, allowing access to past materials. As Lincoln Geraghty (2014) notes, "Fans utilise media archives, YouTube, eBay and other social media to discuss old and once-forgotten media texts all the time…are always reassessing and re-evaluating media texts from the past; they bring them into the present and reconstitute them as part of contemporary fan culture" (15).
[6.2] For my study looking at the relationship between sehnsucht and fan activities, I conducted a thematic analysis of the r/citypop subreddit from July 31, 2019 through May 13, 2021. Reddit was chosen as a platform because of its affordances. Reddit groups are organized by topic, and each post is a threaded conversation, with users able to post and comment pseudonymously. Although Reddit is primarily text based, link sharing to external media like images, music, and video is also common. During the analysis period, the number of subreddit subscribers increased from 13,153 to 31,188. The subreddit during this period saw five to twenty posts and twenty to fifty comments per day; a total of 6,300 posts were collected during the research period. Pseudonyms were deleted from the data. The analysis looked specifically at posts posted or linked to media; most posts (73 percent) in the subreddit were made up of audiovisual media. The remaining 27 percent were text posts or links to blog posts and news articles. In addition to the thematic analysis, case studies of text posts drawn from the same sample were used to look at the discourse around city pop fandom, specifically in the realms of how city pop fans engaged with the genre, grew emotionally connected to the music, and talked about their fandom.
[6.3] YouTube was chosen as a secondary platform for its role as a platform for online communities and participation, as well as connecting and delineating fans of media or activities linked to national identities (Gil-Lopez, Ahmed, and Taylor 2017; Burgess and Green 2018; O'Hagan 2021). In addition to YouTube's role as an archive, its algorithms, directed toward discovery, played a part in creating the revival fandom by connecting users to city pop music (St. Michael 2018; Calkins 2019). For city pop revival fandom in particular, the visibility and ease with which music could be uploaded and shared with fans (skirting copyright rules or foregoing monetization for themselves in favor of the rights holders) compared to music platforms like Spotify, which did not have city pop music available until 2020, played a prominent role in its rise, despite the requirement that YouTube users upload video only. Most videos posted on r/citypop (about 90 percent) are linked to music on YouTube, usually recordings ripped from vinyl or CD. However, song compilation videos, live performances, other artists' covers, and remixes or non-Japanese versions of the songs were also observed. Links to playlists and live streams of city pop music were also common in the data.
[6.4] Images shared by r/citypop fans could be placed into one of three categories. The first, at 45 percent, was images of physical media, specifically personal collections of vinyl, cassettes, and CDs. These posts often take the form of users' collections of various physical media arranged to show users (figure 1). Second, at 27 percent, were images of artists, live performances, and music availability. These included period and revival fandom concert posters; images of notable artists from the period, particularly artists who have died or who have retired from music, such as Miki Matsubara or Meiko Nakahara; or contemporary images, particularly of artists still making music, such as Tatsuro Yamashita or Junko Yagami. Third and last, some images were screenshots illustrating the availability of city pop music on platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music. Less than a quarter, or 24 percent, of images shared were transformative works. Common images shared in these categories were fan art of album covers or musicians, recreations or alternative album covers, or art that was inspired by city pop music.
Figure 1. A series of three image posts, each showing city pop vinyl and CD collections belonging to different members of r/citypop from the period of analysis.
[6.5] Text posts of r/citypop comprised about 27 percent of the sample and fell into several categories. The first was requests for information about lyrics, song titles, or tablature. Second were posts related to the availability and links to purchase physical copies of music (such as news of vinyl reissues or links to eBay vendors). Third were posts providing information about when city pop artists or albums were available to listen to on music platforms. Finally, there were links to text articles and text posts that aimed to start discussions about the genre and what it encompasses. Many of these questions focused on the importance of language and nationality; what artists, albums, and songs counted as city pop; and what boundaries exist between city pop, fusion, and J-pop.
[6.6] Case studies were chosen from posts on the subreddit focused on questions of nostalgia and history, as well as comments on news articles and essays about city pop music and revival fandom itself. These examples tended to cultivate discussion about how fans saw themselves concerning city pop music and their current fandom of the genre and relevant artists. These examples of reflection also led to debates within the fandom regarding what music fit into the city pop genre and what constituted an appropriate attitude toward city pop music fandom. These discussions, in tandem with the audiovisual artifacts shared, built an engagement with city pop that parallels the dimensions of sehnsucht in the revival fandom's genre engagement.
7. Sehnsucht in online city pop revival fandom
[7.1] City pop revival fandom on the r/citypop subreddit engages with an idealized past, its music, and its imagery across the dimensions of sehnsucht by fans' creating and sharing of media as well as discussing the genre in the past and present. Indeed, the present revival fandom plays an important role in the legacy of city pop music. Fan engagement focuses on unrealized personal utopias, engagement with material culture, text posts, creation of transformative works, queries about genre identification and limits, and exchange of various symbolic gestures on sites like YouTube.
[7.2] The aspect of sehnsucht related to unrealized personal utopias is noted as a "desired alternative expressions of life…Because of their utopian nature, these ideals can be approximated but they can never be fully attained, neither on the individual nor on the collective level" (Scheibe, Freund, and Baltes 2007, 781). While the idealized cityscapes, ocean drives, and economic prosperity evident in the genre's visual depictions may not realistically be attainable, the fantasy suggested by city pop allows fans to express desires not only via escapism but also in ways that can be attainable, even if only in small bits here and there. Fans experience a contrast between their imperfect present and an idealized alternative suggested by the idealized past of city pop's aesthetic, which is "unrestricted by the limits of reality" (781).
[7.3] Two strands of fan activity align with this idealization and desire for a personal utopia. One is the focus on material culture, both in terms of fans who collect physical media as well as the concomitant emphasis on rips of vinyl albums, album cover artwork, and images associated with the genre's marketing, such as city skylines, cars, and the ocean. Much of the visual culture's focus on the r/citypop subreddit and YouTube was on material culture. Vintage vinyl was an essential visual marker of fandom by a small but sizable portion of site activity. Alongside image posts, such as those shown in figure 1, sat text posts such as "City pop guide album masterlist (work in progress)" (March 18, 2020), "City pop vinyl London" (October 4, 2019), and "Weird Mariya Takeuchi cassette I bought" (May 29, 2020). These comprise the second strand of fan activity; it further shows discussion over material culture and music engagement (either by collecting physical media or listening on digital platforms), aligning with Roy Shuker's (2017) argument that music collection constructs identity and community.
[7.4] In addition to physical media and text, fan-created transformative works often aim to recreate this imagery or are inspired by the genre's sounds and associated images. Both hint at the existence of an emotional resonance found in the music and its related aesthetics. These practices allow fans to imagine the impossible, idealized world of city pop even as they recognize the disjunction between that nonexistent, idealized past world and the present situation.
[7.5] Incompleteness in sehnsucht is the recognition that the longed-for idealized state is not attainable at present—or potentially ever. Sommet and Katō (2021) identify a similar incompleteness comparing city pop fandom to genres like vaporwave and future funk. Compared to these other genres, city pop "is a more tangible and fixed period of the past and an established image of an idealized Japan. It doesn't need remixing, filtering, or ironic juxtaposition to historicize or fictionalize the past" (14). City pop has a canon of artists, albums, and singles, and its bounded timeline offers an idealized past. While that past is unattainable, the discrepancy between it and the present can be reconciled by listening to and collecting music. Physical media, although basically obsolete in terms of everyday listening, creates a connection to the past that can bridge that incompleteness. In addition, while the boundaries of the genre are necessarily fuzzy and unstable (based on fan discourse), fan activities help build consensus as to what comprises city pop. Fans build a corpus of artists, albums, and songs and create a shared aesthetic understanding through online platforms to share and transform works that evoke the idealized past.
[7.6] I found during my analysis that text threads in the subreddit often questioned the genre's boundaries—asking, for instance, if certain artists were city pop or a related genre, or if musically similar music from other countries, like Indonesia, Brazil, and South Korea, counted as city pop. Aside from English covers, a small but notable number of posts in the sample were South Korean and Indonesian covers of city pop songs or pop music in a style similar to city pop, which suggests a desire to push the boundaries of and create connections between the genre definitions of city pop and related pop music.
[7.7] Further, I found that city pop is bound up in a symbolically rich world. Much of the symbolism is pulled from the influence of California sound and its related marketing imagery, even though city pop sounds are rooted in jazz, pop, disco, and rock. Its imagery is that of oceans and beaches, summertime, wide-open highways, nighttime urban skylines, and nightclubs, conjuring an overall sense of young adult freedom tied to a prelapsarian period of economic prosperity that, in retrospect, was as fictional as the album covers featuring 1950s-era cars and surfboards. Fans use this symbology in their interactions with city pop music. One form is through the choices of imagery used in creating YouTube playlists and compilation videos (figure 2). The visual forms fans use on YouTube fall into one of three categories. The first is the use of album covers, deploying as they do symbols constructing the idealized world of city pop. The second comprises videos that do not use album covers but rather still art or video clips that evoke the imagery attached to the genre: nighttime urban landscapes, beachside in summer, classic cars. Often the works of Hisao Kawada, Eijin Suzuki, Hiroshi Nagai, and similar artists are used to play up the heightened imagery key to the genre.
Figure 2. City pop playlist and compilation video thumbnails from YouTube recorded during the study period.
[7.8] YouTube playlists may use media from related Japanese popular culture, usually anime, which uses similar imagery. Anime has become an easy touchpoint for city pop fans because anime is a more accessible Japanese visual medium to draw from than live-action television programs, as anime fans have worked to make shows available through legal and gray-market means for decades. Because of that availability, fans can draw on anime from roughly the same period of city pop's heyday, thus creating something that feels aesthetically coherent, even if the clips are drawn from series that aired after city pop's heyday, such as 1998's Cowboy Bebop, or drawn from genres like science fiction that are far afield from city pop's grounded, urban, and romantic focus.
[7.9] An important aspect of reflection comes through collecting items of material culture with a focus on artists and creators. I observed this aspect in fans who shared images of city pop musicians and performers. Key artists in the genre were the subject of discussions; links to articles, interviews, period and current-day images, videos, and music of specific artists proliferated. In addition, content about the genre itself, such as articles about the revival fandom, were linked and discussed. Questions about which artists were still performing and what happened to the careers of nonperforming artists mattered to fans. In addition, links to news events regarding revival performances, artist reissues of records or CDs, and upcoming concerts increased.
8. Construction of city pop as a genre
[8.1] In text-based conversations, artists who are still working in the industry were discussed, especially when releasing new works or when news articles about them appeared. For example, a thread entitled "What is the consensus on Mariya Takeuchi to deep city-pop fans?" sparked a discussion of the importance of Mariya Takeuchi to the genre, as many revival fans entered the fandom via her famous single "Plastic Love" (Reddit 2021). One respondent said,
[8.2] "Plastic Love" is a great entry point into the genre, but I have not really gotten into her albums versus other city pop and vintage Japanese pop artists. Still she gets plenty of love on this sub and I don't think any of it is undeserved.
[8.3] Another tied her work to the genre:
[8.4] I would say that she bridged "New Music" and standard, but very melodic J-pop. She is not as funky as Tatsuro, but more melodic instead.
[8.5] In addition, discussion about the genre in its context is part of the text discussions on Reddit. Another thread entitled "How popular was citypop in 80s Japan?" discussed the genre in context (Reddit 2020). Respondents made points such as this:
[8.6] I have some friends who were in Japan and were the right age—everyone knows Tatsuro but generally find him a little cheesy (like Paul McCartney), everyone respects the YMO guys.
[8.7] Another respondent said, in a way that mirrors a self-reflexiveness on the revival fandom and the audience at the time:
[8.8] My wife also has a few Japanese friends in their 40s and a while back I asked them about city pop artists. They all heard of Tatsuro, Mariya Takeuchi, ANRI, etc. and know an iconic song or two of theirs, but once you start asking them about lesser artists like Meiko Nakahara, Toshiki Kadomatsu, or Minako Yoshida, you'll mostly get "who the fuck are they" stares.
[8.9] Lots of US artists like Bobby Caldwell have a super loyal cult following in Japan, yet I'd bet most Americans don't know who he is, or at best know his one big track "What you won't do for Love." Similar situation for citypop. (Reddit 2020)
[8.10] Comments like this demonstrate self-reflection regarding fans' engagement with music as well as the origin and context of the genre, along with an acknowledgment that even though the genre has "pop" in its name, it has historically been a relatively niche music genre, and that the revival fandom is odd, particularly to those with a more general sense of the period's pop music.
9. The nostalgia of techno-Orientalism
[9.1] In addition, fans recognize the techno-Orientalism present in some of the idealizations of the genre and its imagery. As a result, fans express discomfort with overly idealistic takes on the genre. Chicago-area DJ Van Paugam (2021), known in the community for live streams and playlists of city pop music, particularly in the early years of revival fandom, wrote a long blog post about his engagement with city pop music in which he describes his thoughts about the use of nostalgia and city pop fandom:
[9.2] Nostalgia in the west has become just a way to sell something, and newer generations who have no real attachments to older music are looking for something to fill the nostalgic void…City Pop becomes the proxy to their musical heritage by allowing them to create new memories free from the tainted grip of corporate interests.
[9.3] Criticisms of Van Paugam within the subreddit emerged, refuting the article and Van Paugam's stance. One commenter's critique stated that Van Paugam's article is
[9.4] terrible purple prose about the Japanese equivalent of The Eagles or Air Supply. If anyone wrote a long facile treatise about the magic and splendour and mystical power of What A Fool Believes you would rightly be laughed at.
[9.5] Another went further, calling into question Van Paugam's understanding of the genre and its commercialization:
[9.6] It's not just the themes of City Pop that it's showing ignorance towards, it's the whole cultural background of the music, its artists etc…He tries to claim that Western pop music is commercially driven while the Japanese equivalent wasn't, which is far from the truth when idol agencies and the like existed.
[9.7] Clearly, although a great deal of idealization occurs among city pop—indeed, it is encouraged by the music and its associated imagery—fans do not solely participate in escapism; nor do they engage with the music on just a surface-level veneer steeped in techno-Orientalism. Fans have a self-aware and reflexive understanding of the genre and its history as well as the pop music business more generally. This awareness allows fans to connect their present lived experiences and their engagement with music to the desire for an idealized life and world suggested by their engagement with city pop.
10. City pop's tritime focus
[10.1] The composition of a revival fandom is by its very nature focused on past and present. Fans are interested in cataloging the past and present work of city pop artists. Fans are curious about which artists still work in music as writers, producers, and/or performers. They are also curious to learn what happened to musicians who have retired or died since the genre's heyday. In the present, city pop has seen a growth in shows highlighting the genre. DJs perform live sets of city pop music at clubs or via live streams over platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. These activities create juxtapositions between artists and their songs along the genre's lifespan. In much of the focus on the past-looking aspects of city pop fandom by scholars, music journalists, and fans themselves at times, the "revival" aspect of the fandom is overlooked; the recognition that revival fans are connecting to the music and creating events in the present day demonstrates a connection to the present. Other transformative works, such as fan art, memes, and crossovers with other media, including anime and video games, hint at the fandom's vitality (figure 3).
Figure 3. Transformative works by users of the r/citypop subreddit collected during the study period.
[10.2] The third aspect of tritime—the future—is articulated by fans as covers and reinterpretations of city pop music in English, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, or other languages, as well as related genres such as future funk, which heavily samples city pop music. These are all outlets to create new works that play on related themes and idealizations of city pop as well as new material goods (records, cassettes, CD, posters, stickers) and events (concerts) that add to the symbolic richness present in the fandom and that aim to make the unrealizable utopian ideals expressed in the genre more concrete, even if only in small ways.
11. Conclusion
[11.1] In his liner notes for a city pop compilation album, Pacific Breeze, Mark McNeil (2019) describes city pop as "a soundtrack for emerging urbanites. An optimistic spirit buzzed through the music in neon-bathed, gauzy tableaus coated with groove-heavy strokes," with imagery that is "[David] Hockney–esque, sun-splashed fantasies populated by sailboats, ocean horizons, and luxury cars rippling with light." These descriptors of the aesthetics and feelings evoked by city pop have led researchers to connect the revival fandom to some qualified form of nostalgia.
[11.2] The orientations fans have with this genre of music are more suggestive of the concept of sehnsucht rather than nostalgia. Nevertheless, the main driver of this sehnsucht present in city pop fandom is the gap between the mythologized, idealized past of economic prosperity that emerged from the bubble economy. While the reality of life in that period was that only some people living during that time became economically prosperous, the image of prosperity used to market the music, combined with sounds influenced by international genres, combined to create an idealized world distinctly apart from that of revival fans, who are from a different time, a different place, and a different, heightened level of economic precarity.
[11.3] My study is a preliminary look at fan engagement with audiovisual culture and the past. A look at other platforms could provide more comprehensive curation and reveal other transformative works, particularly as city pop revival is incorporated and sampled in genres like future funk and hip-hop. In addition to techno-Orientalism, another aspect worth further research is the connection between city pop fandom and the ways revival fans tie the genre to unrelated Japanese popular culture forms, particularly anime and manga. Finally, future work should consider interrogating the roles that Orientalism and other imaginaries of non-Western cultures play in transnational fandoms.
[11.4] More generally, sehnsucht has the potential to be generative while looking at the role of examining or imagining the past through media. Beyond the semantic advantages of not using qualified nostalgias to describe the practices of fandoms like city pop revival, it has the potential to permit description of a relationship to media that is not distinctly related to the audience's personally lived past or through a shared generational nostalgia from one's parents or culture. Sehnsucht names a means of fan engagement with media as online platforms expand temporally and geographically, with phenomena like algorithmic feeds potentially connecting audiences to media in ways removed from the time and place of that audience's experience.
[11.5] Two factors may complicate the relationship between city pop fans and online platforms. One is the role of algorithmic selection in cultivating or creating tastes. Many music journalists and fans acknowledge the role of YouTube's algorithm in popularizing the revival fandom, and city pop has appeared on platforms such as Spotify and has been used in TikTok videos. The other is the recent tenuousness in the idea of online platforms as archives. Recent cases of subscription video platforms, such as Disney+ and Max (formerly HBO Max), removing content permanently from their streaming libraries—beyond the commonplace practice of removing content when its license expires or a platform migrates—have shown that there is a real possibility that online media platforms will grow only so large before the economic benefits of content availability are outweighed by hosting costs. These factors could limit opportunities for encountering media from different eras and cultures, making the city pop revival fandom a unique one-off phenomenon rather than an outgrowth of the recent media landscape.
[11.6] The bubble economy myth of 1980s Japan and its concomitant economic prosperity are out of the realm of possibility for most people—both in the (nostalgic) past but especially today. City pop revival fandom reconciles that incompleteness by sharing in the music of that period, imbibing images of warmth and urban playgrounds, and reflecting that back in collecting physical media, sharing artists and their music with others, and creating transformative works that are inspired by the pulsing beats of summer nights in the city by the ocean.