User:Fandyllic/City Pop

City pop (シティ・ポップ, Shiti poppu), also known as City Music, 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)
 * CINDY
 * Honda Minako
 * Kadomatsu Toshiki
 * Kishitani Kaori/Okui Kaori
 * Kokubu Yurie
 * Matsubara Miki
 * Miyazawa Rie
 * Nakayama Miho
 * Ohtaki Eiichi
 * Omega Tribe
 * Sugar Babe
 * Takeuchi Mariya
 * Tsubokura Yuiko
 * Yamashita Tatsuro
 * Yoshida Minako


 * Musicians/producers
 * Inoue Akira
 * Takiguchi Cunimondo/Takiguchi Kunimondo

Neo City Pop/City Music
Producer Takiguchi Cunimondo, curator behind City Music Tokyo Invitation (2020) and music project Ryusenkei's earlier City Music (2004), said those who were trying to create a new wave of similar music in the early 2000s didn't call it "city pop", but favored "city music". As he remembered the heyday era, he wanted to distinguish the sound from the mre folksy city pop progenitor band Happy End that was active mostly in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Since then, several artists have adopted the jazz-inspired, funk/R&amp;B influences that project an sophisticated urban style reminiscent of city pop in its heyday, but now mixes with contemporary J-pop more easily than it did in the past.

Neo City Pop artists

 * Toki Asako
 * Awesome City Club
 * BLU-SWING
 * Hitomitoi (一十三十一)
 * Junk Fujiyama
 * LUCKY TAPES
 * Ryusenkei