On Aug. 7, nearly 15,000 people gathered at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl for City Pop Waves, a festival headlined by 73-year-old fusion-jazz legend Masayoshi Takanaka and featuring singer Junko Yagami and keyboardist Himiko Kikuchi. The crowd was strikingly youthful, waving along to Takanaka’s instrumental tracks played on his surfboard-shaped guitar. It was a striking demonstration of how a once-nebulous label for Japanese music has mutated into a full-fledged genre — and one of the most popular styles associated with the country today.
City pop now is broadly understood as Japanese music influenced by funk, disco, R&B and other Western sounds, particularly from the late 1970s and early ’80s, with an emphasis on an urban, sophisticated aesthetic. Call it yacht rock’s Japanese cousin.
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