User:Fandyllic/City Pop

City pop (シティ・ポップ, Shiti poppu) is a loosely defined form of Japanese pop music that emerged in the late 1970s and peaked in popularity during the 1980s. It was originally termed as an offshoot of Japan's Western-influenced "new music" (ニューミュージック, Nyū Myūjikku) centered around Western rock, pop, and folk music, but came to include a wide range of styles – including funk, disco, R&B, AOR, soft rock, and boogie – that were associated with the country's nascent economic boom and leisure class. It was also identified with new technologies such as the Walkman, cars with built-in cassette decks and FM stereos, and various electronic musical instruments.

There is no unified consensus among scholars regarding the definition of "city pop". In Japan, the tag simply referred to music that projected an "urban" feel and whose target demographic was urbanites. Many of the artists did not embrace the Japanese influences of their predecessors, and instead, largely drew from American funk, soft rock and boogie. Some examples may also feature tropical flourishes or elements taken from disco, jazz fusion, Okinawan, Latin and Caribbean music. Singer-songwriter Yamashita Tatsuro, who was among the genre's pioneers and most successful artists, is sometimes called the "king" of city pop.

City pop lost mainstream appeal after the 1980s and was derided by younger Japanese generations for an extended period of time. In the early 2010s, partly through the instigation of music-sharing blogs and Japanese reissues, city pop gained an international online following as well as becoming a touchstone for the sample-based microgenres known as vaporwave and future funk.

Well-known artists

 * ANRI (Kawashima Eiko)
 * Honda Minako
 * Kadomatsu Toshiki
 * Matsubara Miki
 * Nakayama Miho
 * Ohtaki Eiichi
 * Omega Tribe
 * Sugar Babe
 * Takeuchi Mariya
 * Tsubokura Yuiko
 * Yamashita Tatsuro
 * Yoshida Minako


 * Musicians/producers
 * Inoue Akira
 * Takiguchi Cunimondo