Looking back at my music purchases of 2022, there’s some current, but a whole lot from the 70s and early 80s.

One of which, weirdly, is “Plastic Love”, by Mariya Takeuchi.

I can’t remember, now, why I heard it and bought it. Now, though, I know that it was suddenly everywhere in the world starting a few years before I noticed it.

I know this because my wife went on a Japaneses Disco deep dive one night, because somebody has made a new video for a song of the same era called “Sparkle”, by Tatsuro Yamashita. And she loves “Stay With Me”, also by Mariya Takeuchi.

Everybody loves those now, apparently. And “Plastic Love” above all.

It’s even got a name, which it didn’t have at the time – City Pop.

I do remember my feeling when I heard “Plastic Love” (which would have been because of my wife, and she has the excuse of having grown up with Japanese culture around her).

It’s a fresh nostalgia. A new familiar sound. It’s … right, and also strange. Something I should have known all my life, and just different enough.

What I now know, reading about it, is that once somebody rediscovered this forty-to-fifty-year-old Japanese version of American music (around 2018, apparently, which is why it would have been around for me to hear), a whole lot of people felt exactly that about it. I saw someone quoted, saying they felt it took them back to their childhood in Tokyo … even though it couldn’t because they were eighteen years old, and American.

But it really does feel like discovering a parallel world golden-era radio station. All the songs sound like they should, as though they were huge hits everybody knows, but aren’t any of the ones that have worn grooves in the airwaves ever since.

And isn’t that what so much art tries to do? It needs to be familiar enough to feel comfortable, but bring something fresh with it so it isn’t just the same (though admittedly modern culture can feel like the freshness isn’t as important as it was). This does that accidentally, but uncannily.

I hadn’t played “Plastic Love” often deliberately since, but smiled to myself and nodded along when it pops up on shuffle. And spun round when it formed part of my wife’s descent down the City Pop rabbit-hole, the point at which I joined in.

One corner yielded fresh gold, which turns out to be another song that pops up in places like Reddit, with people saying “I’ve just heard this, is there anything else like it out there?” It’s another City Pop staple, it seems.

4AM, by Taeko Onuki.

I’m not sure I’d put it in the same genre, personally, but City Pop is where it finds itself by now. It’s sort of Art-Disco-Jazz. A flop in 1978, I read, but brilliant in 2024. The version I bought weirdly includes the person who mastered the album in its title, no idea why.

Yes, I bought the album, called “Mignonne”. It tickles my ears, all of it, like a reminder of something I never in fact knew, an old friend I’ve only just made.