It's warming up outside and I am keeping cool with a delightful blast from our abandoned future-past, with a collection of Japanese pop from the past century,
Pacific Breeze: Japanese City is now on Light in the Attic Records. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Japan was experiencing an unprecedented post-war economic boom driven by new developments in technology. Many of these technical wonders were exported to the US and elsewhere, cementing the country’s dominant position as a source of innovation and generating innumerable culture touchstones, the images, and sounds of which pervade culture to this day. Luxury items like walkmans, car cassette decks, and Roland TR 808s are iconic devices in our recent culture memory, inextricably linked to a period of excess and conspicuous consumption, as well as the frivolous fun of an era immortalized in the films of John Hughes and Robert Zemeckis. Japanese artists of the era were thirsty for a sound that matched the bright future that seemed to lay ahead, and so they forged that sound for themselves, combining smooth light funk and jazz-rock fusion with a mix of Japanese and English lyrics to paint sonic portraits of an imagined, and seemingly inevitable, techno-utopia. The fresh sound of this new style was deemed “city pop" because of its association with the rising urban, affluent class of the period. But the future imagined in these songs never came to pass. A market crash in the 1989s put the bull market to sleep and effectively ended the upward trajectory the country had experienced in the decades prior. Pacific Breeze: Japanese City is a curated collection of the lost sounds of the pre-crash world, the echos of which can still be heard in modern J-pop and the now ubiquitous vaporwave of Macintosh + and others. It is simultaneously some of the weirdest and undeniably earwarmy tunes to ever receive mainstream radio attention in an industrial nation. Think Steely Dan meets Boney M, or Devo meets Dinah Shore, or Diana Ross meets Orange Juice. It’s wild. It's weird. And goddammit if it isn't wonderful. I can already tell that this collection will be a constant companion of mine this summer, giving me hope for a future that is better than today, every day.
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