From Asia with love: The Nice Tunes of City Pop

Today I'm feeling retro vibes thanks to Khruangbin. I played their songs for 24 hours non-stop since Christmas day. Feels good to hear this 60's Thai Music with a lot of beers. Their tunes reminds me of western cowboy movies and of course, Kill Bill.

I remember asking a GrabCar (Uber equivalent in South East Asia) driver to play Khruangbin from my phone. It was an ordinary crazy traffic jam in Jakarta. We spent 3 hours on the road and he didn't want to change the Khruangbin playlist :)

Christmas is over, the nice Asian retro tunes keep ringing in my ears. But I have enough for Khruangbin. Let's go to more softer tunes, something more jazzy, more pop, something fusion, keep the Asian taste. These are the keywords that will lead us to the realm of City Pop.

I can't describe it well, let's take definition from Wikipedia

City pop is a loosely defined subset of pop music that originated in Japan in the late 1970s. It was originally termed as an offshoot of Japan's Western-influenced "new music", but came to include a wide range of styles associated with the country's nascent economic boom, such as AOR, soft rock, R&B, funk, and boogie. Wikipedia

I grew up in Jogjakarta, and City Pop was a dominant genre in our mainstream music scene. There were some big local acts exploring the genre. I remember many of my generation would label this kind of music as sucks, uncool or lame. But that's the music magic, the more you grow, the more you appreciate the arts. The weird nostalgia feeling.

Here is a song from City Pop realm, my most favorite one:

There is something really nice in city pop music, I can't explain. Feels like eating a sweet candy or soft ice cream. I left Jogjakarta and reside in Jakarta, and with Jakarta is getting more and more urban, City Pop is slowly growing in my heart.

The jazzy major 7th and diminished chords of City Pop sounds so relevant with Jakarta's night lights. Just like Yutaka Kimura described it as “urban pop music for those with urban lifestyles”.

Here's another favorites of mine, with those heavy funk bass line and nice synth hook.

This one is less synth but more funk rhythm:

I said earlier that the wave of City Pop left big influence in Indonesian mainstream pop music. But I feel that the Indonesian city pop is more to Jazzy tunes, less funk, less dance beat. I think it just because majority of the session musicians and the singers at that time were coming from Jazz scenes.

Here are some of them:

This song is considered as evergreen for Indonesian pop music. Many have tried to cover this song, but nothing better than Vina Panduwinata's version :)

Fariz RM, one of the most genius person in Indonesian pop music Industry, expect some fun chords progression and rich arrangement from this one :)

This is my first post in Music Community.
Next time I'll share about Harumi, the lost psychedelic troubador from Japan.

Photo by David Mark from Pixabay