Three beats into the song, you are in a euphoric mood. Rather, we yearn to relive our anticipation by going back to the past. We are haunted by the past, as we are no longer trying to anticipate the future.
The sense of futurity has been lost in more than just musical styles or forward-moving cultural forms the whole mode of social imagination has been deteriorating. Even “Plastic Love” itself was produced during times when the crisis of cultural temporality could be first felt, hence the blending of different musical styles of city pop. The revitalization of city pop exemplifies a digital counterculture that recycles 1980s popular culture, which was never going to deliver a forward-moving culture nor a sense of futurity in the first place.
Without them, the world could not possibly function, it seemed - just like how we may think of American brands now. The comeback of “Plastic Love” magnifies a yearning for an eternal 1980s, and a Japanified future when Japanese trademarks would dominate the world. The 21st century is obstructed by the relics of the 20th, as Mark Fisher says. It is no longer current nor outdated cultural time is canceled outright. Tendencies towards retrospection and pastiche have now been naturalized, even in cyberEDM, through which we move in and out of a loop without actually participating in any temporal processes. The nostalgic mood is symptomatic of dyschronia, which signifies the condition of “time out of joint.” It is no longer possible to have a linear notion of cultural time, since popular cultural time has collapsed in on itself. įuture funk typically speeds up city pop songs, as though one has to accelerate to catch up with lost futures as they were imagined in the 1980s. The adoption of city pop allows one to live with anxieties about the impotence of contemporary culture while exposing precisely the lost potential of this so-called digital counterculture. The domain of cyberspace that hosts the fantastical other place hence functions as a space of techno-Orientalism. The virtual sonic experience of future funk and its obsession with Japanese culture make the listening experience appear to be immersed in a place of fantastical otherness. Vaporwave has often been described as a satire of consumerist culture and capitalism, specifically as a critique of mainstream electronic dance music. Three decades later, “Plastic Love” has become a popular sample source for future funk, a subgenre of vaporwave that emerged in 2012 and only exists in cyberspace. I’ve input hellos and goodbyes so neatly.Įverything comes to an end in due time. City pop has since drifted in and out of the musical lexicon with the “lost decade,” as a style of music that no longer reflects economic realities. to oppress Japanese production and force the appreciation of the Japanese yen, which eventually led to the burst of Japan’s asset bubble. By the 1990s, however, Japan was experiencing a recession, in part due to the imposition of economic protection policies set by the U.S. By blending synth boogie, disco, pop, jazz, soul, yacht rock, and funk, city pop created a lush, complex, and pristine style of music to reflect the burgeoning economic and technological prosperity of that time period. After overcoming two oil crises in 19, Japanese government policy advocated a shift to manufacture products that were more environmentally friendly and required less oil consumption, and thus managed to shift to a technology-oriented mode of production. In that period, energy consumption rose at a much faster rate in Japan than in any other part of the world, with extreme dependence on foreign sources of raw materials. This music appealed to those who benefited from the postwar Japanese economic miracle, and who lived against the backdrop of a significant American presence in Japan after World War II to slow the expansion of the communist bloc in the Asia-Pacific region. Variety, as the name suggests, is a collection of songs with different styles that are categorized as “city pop.” City pop loosely describes an offshoot of Japanese music from the 1970s and 1980s that was heavily influenced by the West, with artists turning away from the traditional influences of their predecessors to introduce a sound with more of an “urban” feel. The extended club mix of "Plastic Love" that was later released as a single, however, only reached #85 on Oricon. The song originally appeared on Mariya Takeuchi’s comeback album Variety, which was one of her most successful albums, reaching #1 on the 1984 Oricon LP Chart in Japan. Plastic Love is a love song without an endgame.