The Formation Process and Trend of City Pop in the 21st Century: Focusing on the Opinions of Domestic City Pop Mediators

This study provides an in-depth examination of the concept of Japanese City Pop, its historical formation process, and the urban pop trend in the 21st century. Individual interviews were conducted with domestic City Pop mediators, who served as City Pop guides. Qualitative research was conducted on the contents of individual interviews, focusing on City Pop guides, papers, newspapers, magazines, record guides, and online websites. First, City Pop basically pursued Western- and American-oriented musicality, but songs focused on the relationship with the space they felt and faced through Japanese singing. Here, space is a Japanese city, and more precisely, the lifestyle of Tokyo, a city on the border between daily life and leisure, with skyscrapers and resorts, is the subject of the song. Based on the abundance and stability brought by the economic boom in the 80s, City Pop demonstrates attempts to break the boundaries between daily life and leisure by responding to consumerism. At the same time, City Pop praises the sophisticated yet snob-like lifestyle, gaining sympathy from city life and young listeners who longed for urban life at the time. Even from the current viewpoint, this characteristic can be evaluated as the direction and identity of City Pop. Next, through a review of the 21st century trend of City Pop, young listeners can guess that City Pop is matching keywords such as abundance, relaxation, romance, and sophistication enjoyed by Japan in the 1980s. The keywords of City Pop they matched are of a nature that is hard to realize with the sensitivity of the current 2020s, and the scenery of the Japanese city that City Pop evokes is also unfamiliar. Hence, in the City Pop released 30-40 years ago, they discovered the consumerist North Talge language brought by the bubble economy, and it can be interpreted as enjoying it from the current perspective. In addition, while the sophisticated melody and arrangement of AOR advocated by City Pop display similarities to Western pop songs, it is interpreted that young listeners now recognize the characteristics of Japanese singing as a cool sound that feels new rather than uncomfortable. Therefore, from the perspective of current young listeners, City Pop is given the status of an old future and a new popular music. By examining Japan’s economic and cultural background that brought the City Pop trend, this study explored the concept and historical formation process of City Pop as a type of J-Pop and the identity and image of City Pop. In addition, the review of the trend of City Pop in the 21st century revealed it seeks the possibility of a new popular music and is created from the current perspective beyond the meaning of the revival of music from the past.