Idols and New Music — Popular Song's Last Golden Age

In the previous episode we saw the Group Sounds plugging in their electric guitars, the folk that questioned society with a single guitar, and the budding of a new attitude of being both writer and performer. Song became the language of youthful rebellion and self-expression, and the very assumption that ‘a song is something made for you by someone else’ was shaken. From the 1970s into the 80s, that tremor became two great currents that richly colored the world of popular song. One was the song of the glamorous idols who shone in the glow of television. The other was the rise of New Music and City Pop, which competed with their own words and melodies. These two — often spoken of as if in opposition — were in fact the front and back of the same era, and together they built the richest season of postwar popular song.

The Idols That Television Made Shine

In the 1970s, idols produced by television leapt forward as one of the leading roles of song. Yamaguchi Momoe, who debuted in 1973, is a representative figure. She is regarded as one of the singers who sold the most records in the 1970s, and her singles up to her retirement are said to have exceeded ten million copies in total. The way she expressed, in her teens alone, a world of song full of shadow and depth was carved into the memory of many people.

In terms of glamour, Pink Lady, who debuted in 1976, symbolizes the era. Their songs with choreography drew in children and adults alike, and are said to have gathered a popularity that could be called a social phenomenon. Then in 1980, just as Yamaguchi Momoe retired at the height of her popularity, Matsuda Seiko appeared as if to take her place. With her bright character and sure singing, she became central to the 80s idols and piled up hit after hit.

What delivered the songs of these idols across the nation were the television music shows. ‘The Best Ten,’ which began in 1978, introduced hit songs in ranking form based on record sales and cable broadcasts and the like, and seized the talk of living rooms. Music shows, idols, and record companies joined hands, and songs competed for rank week by week — the honeymoon of television and song was one landscape of this era.

New Music — The Current of Singing in One’s Own Words

Beside the glamorous idols, a shift in the ground was occurring from an entirely different direction. It was the current of self-written, self-performed music that had grown out of folk and rock. Entering the 1970s, such songs, elaborate in their performance and arrangement, came to be called ‘New Music.’ One could say it was the impulse to ‘sing in our own words,’ seen in the previous episode, bearing fruit in a more refined form.

One of its symbols was Arai Yumi (later Matsutoya Yumi), who debuted with an album in 1973. Her music depicted urban, personal scenes different from both the plainness of folk and the conventions of traditional popular song. In 1976 it is also said that New Music album sales surpassed those of popular song, suggesting that self-written, self-performed music had become a presence too large to ignore even commercially.

The bearers of New Music often handled everything from lyrics and composition to singing by themselves, and it was not unusual for them not to appear frequently on television music shows. This was a stance in contrast to the idol popular song that took television as its stage. Yet rather than the two being hostile, it would be fair to see them as having broadened the range of listeners’ tastes and enriched the expression of popular song as a whole. The glamorous songs of television, and the introspective songs of albums. That both of these could stand side by side was itself the richness of this era.

City Pop — The Sound Born of the City Night

Among New Music, the music that was especially refined and polished to an urban gloss came later to be called, and distinguished as, ‘City Pop.’ Creators such as Otaki Eiichi, Yamashita Tatsuro, Takeuchi Mariya, and Onuki Taeko digested Western soul, funk, and rock while depicting urban scenes and romance in Japanese. One must be careful to note that it is a genre without a clear beginning or definition — its outline was given to it only in retrospect in later years.

What is interesting is that this music, far later in time, revived in an unexpected form. ‘Plastic Love,’ which Takeuchi Mariya released in 1984, is said to have been seen at the time as an unusual work rather than a signature one, but from the 2010s onward it became widely known to overseas listeners through online videos, and its play counts were reported to have grown greatly. A sound depicting the night of a Japanese city, loved across borders decades later — one could say the seeds sown in the 70s–80s were a foreshadowing of the later advance into the world.

What Lay Beyond the Golden Age

The popular-song world of the 1970s into the 80s was a season in which the accumulation of postwar popular song reached one of its peaks. The songs of idols whom television made shine, the New Music that competed with its own words, the City Pop that depicted the city night. These currents, different in character, stood side by side in the same era, and listeners could choose the songs they liked from that rich array of options. Diversity itself was the greatest asset of this era.

It was also a maturity reached by the journey of song that began from the postwar ashes, keeping step with economic growth. The lives that had grown affluent, the television that had spread into homes, and the record industry that had grown — these supported song, and song in turn added color to people’s lives.

But maturity is at the same time a sign of the next change. Toward the end of the 80s, records were replaced by a new vessel called the CD, and bands sounding their own music began to gather on the streets of Harajuku. Before long, these songs, so varied, would come to be spoken of all together under a new name: ‘J-POP.’ The word ‘popular song’ quietly recedes into the background, and a new name and new media repaint the era — toward that moment of transition, the story moves on.