There was a record shop on the third floor of a narrow building in Shibuya that sold nothing but city pop. No sign outside — just a hand-painted palm tree on the elevator door and the faint bleed of an electric piano through drywall. The owner, a woman named Sayo who had once arranged strings for a session in Aoyama, organized her shelves not by artist but by time of day: "Morning Bay," "Highway Noon," "Midnight Poolside," "Departure." I spent two weeks there in the summer of 1983, and I have never quite found my way back to that elevator.
The Sound of Elevated Highways
The thing most people get wrong about city pop is calling it nostalgic. It was never backward-looking. These musicians grew up in concrete housing blocks in Nerima and Setagaya, and they were writing music for penthouse terraces they had never set foot on. The silver polysynth and the bright drum machine were not merely instruments — they were architectural materials, ways to compress night air into rooms you could carry on a cassette.