User Stevem (2018), who covered the story of Plastic Love, attempted to redirect this negative energy into something more constructive, pleading with Plastic Love fans on Twitter to instead appeal to Levenson by describing what the song meant to them. But the removal of this specific, highly viewed video inspired hate mail from a community of listeners that had developed around the video, although Levenson was unaware that the video would be removed by YouTube. Many other clones of this video could easily be found on YouTube and in that regard, the removal was ineffective. Levenson was unsuccessful, and instead filed a copyright strike with YouTube, who removed Plastic Lover’s video (Whang 2019a). After he became aware of the popularity of the video, and by extension his photo, he attempted to contact Plastic Lover, to request proper attribution for his image. Alan claims he was never compensated by the label for that photo. Plastic Lover’s upload of the video included a photo of Mariya Takeuchi that had been taken by L.A.-based photographer Alan Levenson while the album was in production. Many are likely unaware of the bittersweet lyrical content of Plastic Love, but their emotional attachments to the video became quite evident following its removal by YouTube due to a copyright strike. From Plastic Lover’s upload of the song, millions of new English-speaking fans became interested and invested in the genre of City Pop, to some degree by accident. …reflected a new life of leisure and wealth, it also grappled with that wholly unique form of urban melancholy - the loneliness that grips you in the crowd, the fear of emptiness that sets in when everything you want seems to be sitting right there (Blistein 2019).Ĭity Pop, and the sounds found therein, today serve as the raw materials for the contemporary sample-based genre vaporwave, itself a kind of nostalgic but surreal interpretation of 80s and 90s popular culture. City Pop served as a kind of contradiction in that it A useful metaphor here might be Yacht Rock, but moored in Tokyo Bay. Fed by both the anxieties and ecstasies of a rising technological powerhouse, City Pop was a highly polished amalgamation of pop, soft rock, funk, disco, and AOR (among others), but distinctly Japanese. Within two years the video had amassed 25 million views, and “became somewhat of a nexus point for the microgenre of music known as City Pop” (Whang 2019a).Ĭity Pop emerged from the late-70s and early-80s technological and economic expansion of Japan, and especially its successes in the areas of music technology (Blistein 2019). Although statistics for videos are no longer viewable, a look at the number of daily subscribers shows that Plastic Lover’s YouTube channel had a dramatic spike between March 17 th, 2018 and April 5 th, 2018, suggesting that this may have been the period when the algorithmic magic was at work (Social Blade 2019). According to content creators Stevem (2018) and Justin Whang (2019a), who both covered the topic in video essays, it is not entirely clear why the algorithm selected an upload of the song by the similarly named user Plastic Lover. Takeuchi was relatively unknown to Western audiences until a specific upload of her 1984 song Plastic Love started to appear in the suggested videos for millions of users. Mariya Takeuchi has had a highly successful career as a Japanese pop star, spanning decades and with multiple #1 albums in her home country. The unlikely resurgence of City Pop in a new time and place also speaks to the power of music to transport artist and fan communities to a distant urban imaginary. This story provides academics of popular music, and sociologists of culture with an example of how quickly the meaning-making process is evolving in the era of globalized digital media. In this short piece I discuss the unlikely story of Plastic Love, the obscure single that seemingly came from nowhere and introduced millions to the late-70s Japanese genre City Pop by way of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The users of YouTube and reddit (among others) are facilitating this globalization of pop culture. Fan and artist communities form out of specialist microgenres in a matter of weeks or months. Now more than ever, consumers are able to span space and time to seek out niche genres and artists. Widespread digitization has fundamentally changed the consumption, production, and distribution of music in the 21 st century. The Curious Case of Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love
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