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I discovered city-pop through vaporwave genre. Initially, I thought these stylish Japanese album covers were contemporary and inspired by vaporwave - turns out it was the other way around! The original 80s city-pop aesthetic actually influenced vaporwave's visual style decades later.

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I’ve streamed city pop playlists while working and never realized city pop was a 70’s and 80’s thing. That’s kind of a funny thing about modern music streaming services— the music is just there and there’s no context. It never occurred to me that I was listening to 30 or 40 year old music…

It’s funny that you mention that the era of the music. Gen X–Millennials in Japan are likely to associate it with fun but extremely unhip* cafes and restaurants that started disappearing circa 2010 as the women running them hit retirement age.

*The cafes themselves were fine, but their chain smoking, 50-60+ clientele were not the kind of people your average young adult would want to hang out with. There’s only so many times you can get praised for your youth, asked about school or college or your job or when you’re getting married without going crazy. lol

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