Phung Khanh Linh and artists abroad get creative with city pop palette

Late last year, Vietnamese pop singer Phung Khanh Linh was mourning the death of a beloved cat. Her pet’s passing came after the loss of other loved ones during a rough stretch of the pandemic. Overcome with grief, she longed for a cure to her sadness and found comfort in the nostalgic funk-pop sounds of Japanese city pop.

“I turned to those sounds around the start of this year, and listening to them made me feel really inspired during this time, especially albums from Mariya Takeuchi and Anri,” says the 28-year-old performer over video chat from Ho Chi Minh City.

Soon, Linh was binging on the glitzy melancholy of city pop, a genre that epitomizes the ease and exuberance of Japan’s bubble era. She eventually began creating her own sonic metropolis, guided by both the sounds and aesthetics associated with this corner of Japanese music.

Her second album, “Citopia,” came out Nov. 11, featuring 10 songs with clear connections to city pop. There’s a distinct funk and disco strut on the more upbeat tracks, while slower numbers nod to hazy works like Tomoko Aran’s “Midnight Pretenders.” Sax solos add extra zazz, while Linh herself swings between Friday night optimism and Monday morning sorrow through her vocals.

“Citopia” arrived during a year in which the world tuned in to city pop more than ever before. Outside of Asia, it spent years as a niche sound celebrated by music message board users and obscure electronic producers. Now, it has become an international social-media phenomenon, thanks to curatorial, algorithmic and vibe-driven forces. In 2022, this appreciation manifested itself in creative ways, both pushing rediscovered sounds closer to the mainstream and revealing new possibilities.

More than a revival

City pop and older Japanese music in general have been inching closer to the global mainstream via samples used by hip-hop artists such as Tyler, The Creator and Playboi Carti and replication by the likes of K-pop performer Yubin. Yet, it was Canadian superstar Abel Tesfay, better known as The Weeknd, who kicked off 2022 with one of city pop’s biggest moments in the spotlight with the release of “Out of Time,” a song that samples Aran’s “Midnight Pretenders.”

Other major artists nodded to the style in the following months, most notably Harry Styles, who named his hit album “Harry’s House” after city pop saint Haruomi Hosono, and BTS member RM, whose solo album “Indigo” features the city-pop-inspired track "Hectic."

Many city pop revivalists in previous years, including Japanese creators, have been content to create sonic equivalents of the neon nightscapes of Tokyo often seen on Instagram — pretty, but not offering much depth. That shifted in 2022, though, as more creators started poking at what they could do with city pop’s palette. Domestically, bedroom producers like Tsudio Studio and Gimgigam applied modern sounds to classic formats, while Tokyo electronic artist Hameln offered a more dystopian atmosphere on their “Algorithm City.”

That ambition has extended to non-Japanese artists like Linh and The Weeknd, who presents latest album “Dawn FM” as a radio station hosted by Jim Carrey playing in purgatory (the fake radio show format itself a staple of city pop). American artist Cameron Lew, meanwhile, has explored vintage Japanese sounds in recent years, but on this year’s “Nisemono” EP, he expanded it to a whole concept album about music project Ginger Root producing songs for a Japanese pop-idol in the 1980s, only for the performer to bounce, leaving him as the star in this imagined reality.

An updated aesthetic

Beyond just music, the visuals associated with “Citopia” have leaned not just into the idea of retro Japan but the city pop aesthetic that is often emulated online. Linh says her team purposely blurred ’80s hallmarks — anime, skyscrapers, anything neon — with Y2K imagery to create looks more ideal for the modern city pop fan. The video for lead single “Sweet Summer” features backdrops evoking the bubble era mish-mashed with Hello-Kitty-pink desktop computers and turn-of-the-millennium internet graphics. Other uploads are just looped anime GIFs, including one referencing Linh's cherished feline that kickstarted it all.

For all of the nods to nostalgia and internet culture, “Citopia” isn’t simply an exercise in re-creating a digital trend. There’s a deeper concept at work.

“It’s about a girl seeing the city from a helicopter, looking at the imagined Citopia zoomed out. She can see dazzling and shining lights,” Linh says. “But when we zoom in, we see the different lives of people in the city. Some are crying, some are smiling ... some are smiling and then crying.”

While Linh started “Citopia” as a way to imagine a world free of sorrow, she realized such a place — like the imagined Tokyo at the center of so much of the city pop revival — couldn’t exist. (“Perfect is a pure illusion. The pursuit of perfection is exhausting,” she writes in an album foreword.) Instead of fantasies, she embraced complicated realities.

“I knew that nobody in contemporary Vietnamese music had ever released an entire album themed around city pop,” Linh says. “It was also a strategic way of finding a unique way of expressing my music.”

Capturing the present

When people write or talk about a city pop revival powered by the internet, they are talking about a trend outside of Asia, because that funk and disco sheen never left the continent even after Japan’s asset bubble popped in 1992.

This is especially true in Thailand, where smooth songs by artists like Musketeers, Billkin and Tattoo Colour have proven popular. It has even led to collaborations between Thai and Japanese artists, such as the singer-songwriter Ink Waruntorn working with Japanese group Three1989. Artists in Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and more have played around with the sonic signifiers and imagery of city pop for decades, to the point where Disk Union Books published an “Asian City Music Disc Guide” earlier in 2022, documenting just how far-reaching and ever present these sounds have been.

Asian countries like Thailand and Vietnam are currently experiencing economic boom times — while not quite reaching the hedonism Japan saw in its heyday, they’ve embraced a similar optimistic outlook. Artists outside of Japan aren’t using city pop to remember something long gone, but rather retrofitting it to capture the now.

“Although we’re inspired by Japanese city pop trends, we made sure to inject the stories of Vietnamese people into the songs,” Linh says of “Citopia.” “I wanted to make sure we capture the full spectrum of emotions people here feel living in giant cities, while also working in touches that would appeal to listeners here.”

For all the dazzling melodies and anime loops surrounding “Citopia,” its finest moment comes when Linh faces the modern metropolis on “Sentimental Saigon,” an ode to the ups and downs of life in Vietnam’s largest city (when she said some songs are about smiling and crying, she means this one). It carries touches of the past, but is distinctly of now, all while showing how city pop can still be an active influence rather than an illusion of a better past.