Anime City Pop Cue
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The glossy 1980s city-pop sound as heard in anime — smooth, urbane pop-funk with slap and fretless bass, clean chorused guitars, lush electric-piano and synth pads, punchy horn stabs and breezy, sophisticated vocals evoking neon nightscapes and adult romance. Deployed as opening and ending themes and diegetic cues for anime set amid Bubble-era Tokyo glamour, the style favours mid-tempo grooves, jazzy chords and a cool, cosmopolitan mood. Production is warm and immaculate in the AOR tradition, with polished session playing. It captures the aspirational, night-drive elegance of Japan's economic boom.
History
City pop's glossy urban sound crossed into anime during its early-1980s commercial peak, when Anri's "Cat's Eye" (1983) topped the charts as the theme to the caper series of the same name, and Macross's Mari Iijima brought city-pop cool to the 1984 film Do You Remember Love?. City Hunter became the genre's spiritual home, closing episodes with TM Network's "Get Wild" (1987) and PSY·S's "Angel Night" (1989) over neon-Tokyo montages. Though city pop faded with the Bubble economy, its anime association endured and roared back through the 2010s vaporwave and city-pop revival, culminating in Yoko Kanno's jazz-and-city-pop-tinged Carole & Tuesday (2019).
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Jonathan Clements, Anime: A History (BFI, 2013)
- City Hunter and Macross OST liner notes
- scholarship on Japanese city pop and its revival