Greetings and salutations Hivers. Today let's go into another Three Tune Tuesday post.
As always, thanks to 
The 1980s in Japan were a pretty wild time. This was the bubble era when everyone was making too much money and throwing it around like it was nothing. I know an older guy (in his 70s) who was here during that time and just from teaching English he was making enough to rent a place in Tokyo and take his family first class on vacations all over the world.
Anyway, during this time a style of J-pop called City Pop gained popularity. It was a new style of music, heavily influenced my American music. It has the feel of new technology such as the Walkman, cassette decks, electronic instruments. There are some parallels to New Wave in the West, but it was a bit of a different beast. In the years since music critics have had a hard time nailing down exactly what it was, but all agree that there was a certain vibe to the music that made you know it when you heard it.
Anyway, City Pop rose and fell, as some musical genres do. It had almost entirely disappeared, but then the internet rediscovered a certain City Pop song by Mariya Takeuchi called Plastic Love.
Watch the original music video here. Don't worry that it's in Japanese (in fact, turn off CC on the video below). We'll get to some English covers later. Just enjoy the sound of it right now.:
Anyway, since the internet rediscovered it, City Pop has kind of taken off again. Just search the term on YouTube and you will find tons and tons of playlists of Japanese 1980s songs.
But that song that started this resurgence, Plastic Love, is still the internet's favorite. There are now countless covers of it on YouTube, both in the original Japanese and in translation. I thought we'd look at some of those covers for this post.
English cover by Sonja Seva
This is a pretty good cover here. The video is weird, but the singing is pretty good.
Cover by Sam Griffin
Normally this guy does video game music covers, but here he switches to Plastic Love, and plays it pretty well. A nice mellow guitar cover.
English Cover by Caitlin Myers
A bit closer to the original than the first cover above. Better than that one? You decide.
One more... let's go wild. How about a Future Funk Remix of it?
So what's your favorite?
[Note: That cover image was originally used for a different single. But the internet decided it belonged with this song. Takeuchi's label rolled with it and used the cover for the 2021 reissue]
| David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon. |
