(The song ends with the following refrain, sung in English: “I’m just playing games/I know that’s plastic love/Dance to the plastic beat/Another morning comes.”)ĭespite being 35 years old, the song has taken on a life of its own in recent years, with adoring fans gushing about the song and the nostalgic urban fantasies that it inspires in YouTube comment sections. Originally released on Takeuchi’s 1984 album, Variety, “Plastic Love” feels like the platonic ideal of city pop thanks to its breezy horn and string arrangements, some tasteful guitar licks, and funky rhythms - and all of it wrapped up in production that’s been polished to within an inch of its life.Īnd then, of course, there’s Takeuchi’s lovely voice, which walks a fine line between coy, plaintive, and heartbroken, which makes sense given that “Plastic Love” is about a woman coping with heartache by indulging in shallow, empty behavior. There’s a lot of great music to be found in the genre - a YouTube search for “city pop” will return any number of mixes - but for my money, one of the definitive city pop songs is Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love.”
About this time last year, I discovered “ city pop,” an ultra-slick and highly polished form of pop music that emerged from Japan in the early ’80s, and served as a celebration of the upscale, urban living brought on by the country’s economic success.
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