Smooth Waves: On City Pop and Don Delillo
it doesn’t really matter at all
is the answer to the hardest question
waiting for the apple to fall
it’s not why it falls but the fact that it falls at all
Through some strange gift of the algorithm, I’ve been introduced to a strange, half-forgotten genre of Japanese music from the 1980s called “city pop.” From what I gather, it marks a departure from popular music that pulled from traditional Japanese sounds. It incorporates funk, smooth jazz, yacht rock, all things that in my younger years, I found alienating, corporate, and lifeless.
But now I can’t stop listening to city pop. And I’ve barely dipped my toe into all that the genre has to offer. What little clicking around I’ve done has revealed its aesthetic impact on things like vaporwave and that some of the album art by Eizin Suzuki, the major visual artist of this genre, inspired canonical levels in the original Sonic game. When I listen to it I feel like I’m listening to a secret history of videogame and advertising music. Or like I’m watching a pop can perspire close up and on film in a well-lit studio.
City pop is incredibly optimistic. It was meant for cruising around Tokyo at night, being young, cruising around, seeing what the city has to offer. As Japan’s electronics economy exploded in the 80s, and as economies worldwide shifted from their Keynesian postwar models to the Habsburgian Valhallas of just-in-time supply and the insulation of international economics from national political interference took root, in other words, as a historical moment now in its twilight debuted, city pop piped through tape decks all over Tokyo.
It arrived at a crucial inflection point during the Cold War defined by consumerism and by shifting expectations and political understandings. I believe one of President George H. W. Bush’s economic advisors said something like “It makes no difference whether states make potato chips or microchips as long as they’re making something that sells.”
That’s not the quote exactly. But that’s the spirit of it. And while I’ve been listening to this music, I’ve been thinking about how and why I would have found it alienating when I was younger.
When I was a teen I worked at a comic shop. One of my regular tasks was to sleeve and box old back issues. I got it down to a meditative art. The way you could slide a back issue into one of the plastic sleeves perfectly, press all the air out, and tape the sleeve shut with a few swift movements and then place it perfectly in the box.
I spent hours doing this on slow days. I would take some time to look at the old ads within them and wade into their obsolescence. Like watching a slide carousel click through old dreams that can’t come true anymore — the dreamers have died or moved on. The sheen of ads touched something in me I couldn’t express. They so transparently invited me into lives impossible and now unwanted that I would suddenly recognize my life as a slim swatch of time meted out for unknown length to me and me alone, though still woven into the patterned chaos of history.
What young man with the majority of his years unspoken for wants to imagine the hem bounding the far end of his life?
That’s what the smoothness of advertising, especially deeply unironic and aspirational older advertising, brought me.
But now that I’m a little bit older I can more indifferently enjoy this music. I don’t resent its commercial and it’s because I can locate in a time and a place. I have the proper distance. Now, when I listen to city pop, I’m overwhelmed by its power. It’s so smooth it hurts. This is something that the philosopher Byung Chul Han talks about: a violent positivity. It so denies any negativity, any tarrying, that it takes on a surgically sharp edge.
And it makes me feel like Murray Siskind character from Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, which came out in 1985. The novel follows Jack Gladney, founder, and head of the Hitler department at College on the Hill, a small liberal arts college somewhere on the East Coast.
And his colleague, Murray Siskind, is a recent adjunct who wants to do for Elvis, he tells Gladney, what Gladney did for Hitler. In other words, create an entire department and field of study around Elvis. That the book still functions as an academic satire should worry those with academic aspirations.
But there’s an interesting moment where Jack and his wife bump into Murray at the grocery store. Murray talks to them about his love for generic brands. They give off getting “waves and radiation” that he can somehow sense something in the Zeit Geist. It’s an atmosphere of meaning, an imperceptible miasma that colors the well-lit convenience store.
The music rows me to closer to time. Waves and radiation. What is it that it tells me? I’m Murray, with an armload of cheap goods expertly crafted and shrouded in ideological mystery.
Five years after White Noise came out the Japanese electronics bubble burst. With it went the optimism that inspired city pop. Just like that, a whole genre of music thrown out. For decades forgotten until now. It’s been revived thanks to the internet, the unknowable force of the algorithms that bring us our media. I can hear Fire-Toolz in this music, the lobby music for all the abandonware and digital memory lumped together in my mind’s lesser-visited alcoves. Vaporwave’s here too, the murmuring of the highway that laps every abandoned mall in the Midwest.
City wave’s rebirth comes in the form of its inverse: depression and nostalgia. Especially when it comes to vaporwave, or SoundCloud rappers like Bones who for the longest time insisted on grainy VHS recordings for music videos, the smooth jazz saxophones lifted from a K-Mart in-store music cassette. These are the aesthetics that have inherited city pop’s basic elements and flipped them on their head.
We live downriver from possibility.
We’re playing in the garbage.
Lately, I’ve been reading Delillo’s magnum opus, Underworld, which came out in 1997. I’ve been reading it as a spiritual sequel to White Noise. Whereas WN serves as a consummate Cold War novel suspicious of the new and pervasive consumerist vacuousness, the sense of simulation overriding the Real of every day life, UW strikes me as more resigned. The Cold War’s over and with it went a whole constellation of meaning never to be recovered (despite our attempts after 9/11).
And whereas WN concerned itself with media, consumption, and the overwhelm of modern life’s sea of information, UW’s concerned with garbage. Several of the characters helm a major waste management concern. At one moment in the novel, one of the characters, Brian Glassic, drives out to a major landfill after meeting with a baseball memorabilia peddler who tries to impress upon Glassic the meaningfulness of the Cold War’s end, the totality of it, and how it has robbed him of the constellations by which he’s navigated his life regardless of whether or not he recognizes that fact.
The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He’d seen a hundred landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?
Delillo saw through something into where we now live. He knew how we were feathering our nest. I’ve written optimistically about the garbage times we live in, the way decay can surprise you and give you something new. Even when I write and believe things like that it still feels like a cope.
And listening to city pop doesn’t even bring me nostalgia for sunnier, more optimistic times. Because that was the rule, and the rule is what brought us here. So what good was it? What’s to miss?
Last night as I fell asleep and fell into dreams I can’t now recall I had the sense of walking down a flight of stairs and each step fell to catch my foot to guide me lower and the railing rose to guide my hand along the same course.
I kept looking back, wanting to take something in, to remember. Or was I looking over my shoulder, worried over some unnameable thing that pursued me, had driven me to walk ever downward? I couldn’t tell the difference.
Or rather, I’d forgotten what the difference was.
