On Sunday, January 13, a 57-year-old Japanese singer named Anri will play a rare midwestern show for a sold-out crowd at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center. In the mid-80s, while Japan was enjoying the final years of its long postwar boom, Anri became one of the crucial voices of “City Pop”—a fizzy, euphoric form of electronic disco, that was imbued with the optimistic spirit of a New Japan and also took cues from American superstars such as Michael Jackson and Donna Summer. It was the aspiration of a nation condensed into sound, and Anri had the perfect persona for it: she was gregarious, sexy, sophisticated, and alluring in her worldliness but always impeccably Japanese. She recorded dozens of hit songs throughout the decade, but in the 90s, as Japan’s miraculous economic growth began to slow, so did City Pop. The genre dried up as fast as disco did in this country, and it probably never would’ve reached American ears if it weren’t for Van Paugam, a Chicago-based DJ who’s made it his life’s work to resurrect City Pop for a new generation of Westerners.
“I had no idea people would be as receptive to the genre and style of mixes I put out. I had always dabbled in the more obscure genres, but never really reached a big audience for what I was doing until City Pop resurfaced,” says Paugam. “I’ve never been anything much more than a starving artist experimenting on the fringe sounds of the outer Internet, so I never expected much of a fan base. Now it seems there is an entire community forming around the genre and my channel, which is still both confusing and wonderful at the same time.”
Though it can sometimes feel like nostalgia and irony are always a package deal these days, City Pop seems to purge the cynicism from American listeners. The music will never fully belong here—and there may be something colonialist about repackaging another country’s airy, hopeful pop music 30 years later—but Paugam’s fandom is so nerdy and earnest that it’s difficult to see it as disrespectful. And it’s helped Anri find new frontiers 40 years after her debut.
