{"id":4649,"date":"2019-03-25T02:37:50","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T09:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4649"},"modified":"2019-03-25T02:37:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T09:37:50","slug":"korea-blog-listen-to-the-seoul-of-the-1980s-real-or-imagined-with-streaming-mixes-of-korean-city-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4649","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Listen to the Seoul of the 1980s, Real or Imagined, with Streaming Mixes of Korean \u201cCity Pop\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/center><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Japanese names like Katomatsu Toshiki, Ohnuki Taeko, Yamashita Tatsuro, or Takeuchi Mariya may or may not mean anything to you. Rest assured, however, that there are Korean record collectors to whom they mean a great deal indeed. I see more than a few of them in person whenever\u00a0Gimbab Records<\/a>, a shop not far from where I live in western Seoul, puts on one of their sales of Japanese \u201ccity pop\u201d records. These hotly anticipated events have usually involved an especially well-stocked collector parking a van on the store\u2019s narrow street \u2014 almost an alley, really \u2014 and dealing the sacred pieces of vinyl straight out of the back. The sacredness comes through in the prices they pay, which surely exceed even what they cost new back at the height of Japan\u2019s economic bubble in the 1980s. I\u2019ve never brought along the kind of cash I would need to buy even half of what I might want, and deliberately so.<\/p>

Like most city pop fans around the world, I just listen to the stuff on YouTube \u2014 and in fact discovered it on YouTube in the first place. If you\u2019ve never heard city pop for yourself, you\u2019ll better understand it not through a description of its sound but through a Youtube trip of your own. A YouTuber who calls himself Stevem has put together a video essay,\u00a0\u201cWhat Is Plastic Love?,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that explains just how a Japanese pop single from 1984, obscure even in its own country, racked up millions of views seemingly overnight after someone made it available in streaming-video form. That song, Takeuchi Mariya\u2019s \u201cPlastic Love,\u201d has for the better part of a decade acted as the most effective gateway drug for the potential city pop enthusiast. All that time, the digitization and uploading of this \u201cstrain of lite, easy-listening J-pop that drew on a variety of American and Asian influences including funk, soul, disco, lounge, and even yacht rock,\u201d as Rob Arcand and Sam Goldner put it\u00a0in their\u00a0Vice<\/em>\u00a0guide<\/a>, has continued apace.<\/p>

City pop\u2019s 21st-century fan base knows no nationality, and its members have mixed, matched, and even remixed its-ever growing selection of acknowledged tracks into a great many themed streaming mixes, often visually accompanied by clips of vintage Japanese television and animation. For my money, the\u00a0 Chicago-based\u00a0Van Paugam<\/a>\u00a0(whose work includes\u00a0a brief history of city pop<\/a>) has long made the best city pop mixes on YouTube, but earlier this year the Japanese recording industry \u2014 an aggressive entity, even by recording-industry standards \u2014 had his channel taken down, forcing him to start over again. You can still hear\u00a0all of his mixes on Mixcloud<\/a>, though, and not every city pop-minded YouTuber has suffered the same fate. Some have avoided it by diversifying their musical selections, even to the point of looking, or rather listening, outside Japan entirely: take, for instance, the recent appearance of city pop mixes from Korea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Japanese names like Katomatsu Toshiki, Ohnuki Taeko, Yamashita Tatsuro, or Takeuchi Mariya may or may not mean anything to you. Rest assured, however, that there are Korean record collectors to whom they mean a great deal indeed. I see more than a few of them in person whenever\u00a0Gimbab Records, a shop not far from where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4649"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4652,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4649\/revisions\/4652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}