When I sing, I don’t think of myself as singing ‘older music’. “City pop may be considered something timeless or retro, I don’t consider it ‘old music’ like others would. Despite its immediate impact, however, Yukika wasn’t entirely satisfied with ‘Neon’. As the beat kicked in on a soothing instrumentation, her voice emerged to create a musical time capsule – “The tangled memories of the time, would they be emptied? Would they disappear?” she sang, tickling one’s fantasy about whether she’s actually talking about a bygone era. With funky grooves, orchestrated symphonies and a classic 4:3 ratio music video complete with vintage filters, Yukika’s 2019 debut single ‘Neon’ felt like a loving tribute to the genre she had grown up with. Combined with climbing interest in the genre and numerous labels putting out compilations of old hits, it was easy for her to make the choice. It’s something that I had already been naturally listening to and actually liked already,” she explains. “City pop was relevant in my family and in Japanese music since way before. In middle school, she started venturing out and buying her own CDs, developing her own palette, and when she came over to Korea, it seemed natural for her to gravitate to the genre. It was always something that surrounded me.” So it was in my family to listen to music, to have music around me. “They listened to everything from regular pop music to all the Japanese music from way before, to more recent things. “My parents really liked music,” she reminisces. Inspired by western jazz, funk, disco and lounge music, city pop was the proverbial glitter filter on the musical representation of an era, invoking images of driving by an ocean or going dancing on a hot, humid night. In an ironic journey of art reflecting life, the sparkling, shimmering Goliath of city pop boomed during an era of economic prosperity in Japan, where upward mobility for people came with the proliferation of music that emulated the easy-going, luxurious, futuristic city-based lifestyles that people became used to. Songs like Mariya Takeuchi’s ‘Plastic Love’, Takako Mamiya’s ‘Midnight Joke’ and Miki Matsubara’s ‘Stay With Me’ have become the gateway for a younger generation to discover the genre, but long before the advent of the internet, city pop was one of the primary sounds of ’80s Japan. It seems like an apt descriptor for the genre, which went from mainstream Japanese music in the ’70s and ’80s to barely surviving in niche corners of the internet, before being resuscitated into popularity, much to do with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, it seems (and, before that, sample-heavy genres like vaporwave). That’s the part of city pop that I like the most.” “Rather than thinking of it as an old genre or old piece, when I listen to any city pop song, it sounds like a recent song. Seeped in dreamy pastels, sparkling lights and flares, twinkling synths, jazz and horns, the city pop sound and vibe of Yukika’s music imparts a similar warmth – more accurately “timeless”, as the singer describes: “I think of city pop as an almost timeless piece,” she says during our conversation, dressed in soft white and slipping between Korean and her native Japanese with ease. READ MORE: IU – ‘LILAC’ review: a near-perfect, wide-ranging pop gem from K-pop’s darling.Finding an old diary buried in a corner of a ratted box in the attic, happening upon a small establishment so old that even the neighbours wonder whether it has always been there, or the crackle on a vinyl before the music kicks in – the past inspires something visceral, yet comforting in us, as if a thread stretches across time to provide silent reassurance in the present. Few things inspire the kind of glee that finding a piece of the past in the present brings.
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