before i just start screaming at people about 80s jpop (which i am always doing inside my head), i think i should write a small primer about an Important Concept
namely: What Does It Sound Like?
as city pop has gotten more popular, whenever i mention liking 80s jpop, people are often like "oh! you mean stuff like plastic love! that's so cool!"
and i have to be like "ehehe... no... it's not like that......"
as awesome as city pop is, there was only so much of it in the charts at a time. it was definitely around and pop idols dabbled in it sometimes, but it was not really Pop Music i believe.
there was also a lot of stuff like this, which is the kind of music i inevitably scare all interested parties away with.
however, there is also stuff like this, which sounds basically indistinguishable from western 80s pop of the time.
so what's going on here?
well, at some point eurobeat happened to japan. (if you want me to talk more about eurobeat, don't worry. i will do so in a later post. you have no choice)
in the early 80s, jpop was dominated by the distinctive kayokyoku sound, which had already been well-established in previous decades. the wikipedia page says it's "a blend of western and japanese musical scales" and i do not know enough about music theory to argue. it's mostly sunny uptempo retro-sounding pop tunes with the occasional ballad. think bells, horn sections, and sweeping violins. sometimes something will rock a little bit more, but on the whole there is a major lack of edge. there's also little bloopy synthesizers sometimes because it is the 1980s and we live in the future now.
1985-1986 is the transition period when things really start to get 80s, largely because western eurobeat music hit japan's pop charts hard. synthesizer-heavy, Stock-Aitken-Waterman-influenced eurobeat dance songs begin to appear from idols for the first time. i find this transition period really interesting. any pop artists who survived the transition had to change their music to remain popular. for instance, here's what the idol who did the bloopy synthesizer song i linked was up to just a few years later in 1987. eventually, the synthesizers triumphed over all, and this is when music begins sounding nearly indistinguishable from the 80s music i'm sure you already know about.
i want to make it clear that i love All of this music. like i am not playing favorites. every single song i have linked is something i listen to regularly. speaking of which, i've linked a fuck of a lot of music here if you want something to listen to.
so yes! that's my intro to what i am sure will be many, many more 80s jpop related posts. thank you for reading :)
Had this post open in a tab forever and finally got around to reading it lol (also the followup post about eurobeat)
This has answered a longstanding question that's been bugging me:
Why The Hell Does Super Dimension Fortress Macross Sound Like That
Like Macross is broadly known as "the anime franchise about fighter jets which are powered by jpop" but a while back I watched the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982) expecting, like, stereotypically 80s Pop Music, and instead the whole thing sounds like this:
Absolutely baffling to encounter that when all of my other references for 80s Japanese music are like, Maximum Synthesizers lol. Like I'm not criticizing it but it truly, genuinely sounds like something my grandfather would have listened to and he died at like 92. I was just like... 1982 wasn't THAT long ago man, Yellow Magic Orchestra had released five albums when this came out; clearly I'm missing something here lol
So yeah, apparently the answer is "there was a ton of stuff that sounded like this and then it all rapidly transitioned into the Synthesizer Zone like... very shortly thereafter"
Neat!
...
FOOTNOTE ZONE:
while I'm talking about macross, you know what absolutely kicks ass? Macross Frontier came out 25 years after SDF Macross, and the in-fiction setting is 47 years later. Yoko Kanno reworked this song and somehow made it into actually a pretty great circa-2008 jpop track, and also simultaneously made it work in-universe as a modern remix of a ~50 year old classic??
Like she kept exactly the same tune/lyrics and just shifted some chords around in cool ways and just fuckin timewarped it forward by like three generations. Somehow?? Like it's still deliberately got a similar cheesiness but it doesn't sound Old. I don't know enough about music theory to understand how the hell this works but it's insanely cool
anyway you should watch macross frontier it rules
thanks for the addition, it’s really cool! i don’t know anything about macross but that video is indeed some Super Cutesy 80s Jpop. the music and setting and everything is super 1982- which is pretty funny because i’m assuming this takes place in the future, what with the spaceships and all. :P the writers were really like “Idol Music Will Surely Never Change!”
re: YMO- yeah! they were around, they were popular, but they really didn’t have as big of an impact on the pop music scene as you’d expect. i know that both haruomi hosono and ryuichi sakamoto did some writing for idols, and uh, you’re gonna be surprised but they didn’t really push forward the genre, just stuck to the formula as it was
hosono wrote this song for seiko matsuda- and he played himself with it, because it then kept “kimi ni mune kyun” out of number one in the charts!
(sorry for reposting this comment, i just decided that i wanted this info to be more public)
