In April of 2020, a user on the Internet Archive started a project titled the Myspace Archive Project. Their mission statement, as posted by them, essentially boils down to wanting to track down, archive and upload every piece of music uploaded to Myspace by (generally) unsigned artists during its heyday. They steer clear of things still readily available for purchase to avoid any kind of copyright issues, and instead focus on the boom in pop punk, metal and general rock music coming from a myriad of garage bands in the suburbs. It’s a vast collection, which I’ve linked here if you’re so interested, and certainly a worthy cause.
The reason for this endeavor is because, according to a Cnet article, back in 2019, Myspace, during a server migration (they claim anyway), lost all data from all users, meaning that millions of songs uploaded between the site’s Aug. 1, 2003 launch and 2015 were now lost to time. To break it down into numbers, Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years, which amounts to losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists. Myspace, of course, claims no actual responsibility for this, and their statement to users and the general public as as PR based as one could get:
“As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com.”
While it sounds like nothing to be concerned about, especially because the majority of music uploaded was by independent artists who never went anywhere, it’s important to remember that a good number of bands actually became popular because of their usage of Myspace. Most notably, Artic Monkeys and Panic! At The Disco are both bands that got famous utilizing the social networking sites popularity as a music streamig hub, along with many others. If you’re interested in other bands that got famous through Myspace, I found this article on Loudwire of just a select few.
And while I think it goes without saying that Myspace Rock isn’t exactly a “genre”, one cannot deny it’s weird when music essentially vanishes. Music, a medium so prevalent in our day to day lives, is something we take for granted, never once considering the fact that, yes, sometimes it just disappears, never to be seen – or rather heard – again. Certainly mediums might come and go, taking us from vinyl to 8 track to cassette to CDs to digital, but music in and of itself vanishing? Obscenely strange. But what’s even stranger than an album or an artist here and there vanishing into the ether is when an entire genre seemingly disappears with little to no fanfare. But music being unknown isn’t unheard of, and we’ll come back to that at the end of this column. Right now, I want to discuss something else.
Enter City Pop.
According to Wikipedia, City Pop was a loosely defined form of Japanese pop music that emerged in the late 1970s and peaked in the 1980s. It was originally termed as an offshoot of Japan’s Western-influenced “new music“, but came to include a wide range of styles – including adult oriented rock, soft rock, R&B, funk, and boogie – that were associated with the country’s nascent economic boom and leisure class. It was also identified with new technologies such as the Walkman, cars with built-in cassette decks and FM stereos, and various electronic musical instruments.
There is no unified consensus among scholars regarding the definition of city pop. In Japan, the tag simply referred to music that projected an “urban” feel and whose target demographic was urbanites. Many of the artists did not embrace the Japanese influences of their predecessors, and instead, largely drew from American soft rock, boogie, and funk. Some examples may also feature tropical flourishes or elements taken from disco, jazz fusion, Okinawan, Latin and Caribbean music.
What with the focus on JPop and KPop these days, I figured it’d be fun to poke around in the history of the genre that predated the idol era, City Pop. So let’s discuss City Pop, in depth; it’s eventual demise, it’s weird legacy and the overall concept of dead genres, and I can think of perhaps no better place to start than with, oddly enough, the oppressive era of Ronald Reagan.
In Brett Easton Ellis’s magnum opus “American Psycho”, the lead character, Patrick Bateman, ends a rant about how to fix the modern day climate with the phrase “most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.” Of course, this entire book is a farce, but the core of the sentiment is a shocking one either way, considering the book is set in the 1980s, an era of excess and overindulgence and unbridled greed. That being said, it should come as no surprise that, during this most gross reign of capitalism, a genre called Yacht Rock came into its own.
For the uninitiated, Yacht rock (originally known as the West Coast sound or adult-oriented rock) is a broad music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Its name, coined in 2005 by the makers of the online video series Yacht Rock, was derived from its association with the popular Southern Californian leisure activity of sailing, a more rich person activity I could not imagine. It’s essentially – not to sound biased – the kind of inoffensive and forgettable music you would hear played at your white midwestern Uncle Tony’s wedding to his 3rd wife, who’s a questionable several years younger than him.
However, journalist Steven Orlofsky has argued that the genre’s resurgence is partly due to its function as an antidote to the negativity of the Trump era in the US just as in its original context, when yacht rock created “the perfect soundtrack for listeners trying to ignore Watergate and Vietnam“, it now again represents “a defiant, fingers-planted-firmly-within-ears disregard of any and all political unrest.”
I find this to be a rather dangerous way to interact with the world. Imagine being so wealthy that you can ignore the crumbling of our society by those only invested in their own self interest, and instead listen to Steely Dan on your schooner. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t get political, but I find the idea that Yacht Rock is escapism from important aspects that influence and affect the lives of our most vulnerable to be a rather despicable thing.
So why bring up Yacht Rock? Because it’s vaguely associated with City Pop, in the same way that you’re vaguely related to your cousins twice removed.
Yacht rock bears strong similarities to the Japanese genre of city pop in that they both peaked in the early 1980s, featured jazz and R&B influences arranged and produced by elites in their fields, and gained newfound popularity in the 2010s through the Internet. The link between city pop and yacht rock was made all the more explicit in 1984 when Tatsuro Yamashita, one of Japan’s most influential city pop artists and producers, traveled to California to record the album Big Wave, a mix of Beach Boys covers and original English-language compositions written in collaboration with Alan O’Day.
Take Momoko Kikuchi, for example.
Kikuchi was born in Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan, scouted in 1982, and started to make TV appearances in 1983. She officially made her debut as an idol in 1984, releasing her first single just before her 16th birthday, and instantly shot to fame. She then produced seven consecutive no. 1 songs on the Oricon Chart from 1985 to 1987.
Then, in the late 80s, Kikuchi tried to shed the “idol” label and formed RA-MU, a band featuring more original material and rock music, but when the band failed to be recognized, and she was unwilling to return to perform as an idol singing mainstream bubblegum pop, Kikuchi decided to shift her focus to that of acting, where she’s since been highly successful.
And her decision to leave the idol scene behind is completely understandable, given the fact that, historically, the idol culture is apparently so controlling and toxic that idols commit suicide on the regular. In fact, while doing research for this column, I came across far more examples than I wish I had. For instance, there was Yukiko Okada, a Japanese singer and actress who, after winning a nationwide television show at age 15 in 1983, debuted as an idol in 1984. In 1986, after being found with a slashed wrist in her gas-filled Tokyo apartment, crouching in a closet and crying, she was taken to the hospital and released to her manager on April 8th. Her managed then took her to the Sun Music office building, where she raced to the top of the seven story building, removed her shoes and leapt to her death.
And what’s odd is that, just ten days earlier, Japanese model and actress Yasuko Endo, set to debut as an idol singer, committed suicide at age 17 by the very same method. Although she had been scheduled to debut as an idol singer on May 21, 1986 with Riv.Star Records song “In the Distance”, on March 30, she jumped from the roof of a seven floor building in Asakusabashi, Taito-ku and killed herself, after leaving a single earring on the roof. And while these are eerily similar situations, it’d be easy to write them off as a one time happening, but it’s an ongoing epidemic. In 2018, Honoka Oomoto, an idol based in Japan’s Ehime prefecture, died by apparent suicide on March 21. So, if we consider the fact that Kikuchi left the music industry in 1987 – and refused to return to the idol scene beforehand – I think her decisions makes a lot of sense in hindsight.
And even though she’s since returned to making music, she’s doing it on her own terms now, which is much healthier. In April 2014, Kikuchi celebrated her 30th anniversary in the show business by releasing her seventh album, the first since 1991, which was simply a re-recording of all her hit songs during her idol period.
I guess if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But back to the point at hand, which is that City Pop has had an odd resurgence in the last decade or so. City pop lost mainstream appeal after the 1980s and was derided by younger generations of Japanese, but in the early 2010s, partly through the instigation of music-sharing blogs and Japanese reissues, City Pop gained an international online following as well as becoming an inspiration for the sample-based microgenres known as Vaporwave and Future Funk, which makes sense given that even Jon Blistein of Rolling Stone concurred that genre was “less a strict genre term than a broad vibe classification.” He’s not wrong. A lot of music these days seems far less interested in saying something than it does in making you feel anything at all, and frankly the entire “vibe” thing is hurting the industry, but nobody’s ready to have that conversation just yet.
But therein lies that term. Microgenre. That’s exactly what these all are. There’s the main genres we all know; pop, rock, folk, etc, and then there’s the microgenres, which are smaller niche genres that have spun off from the larger ones. And while Yacht Rock has become more mainstream in the past few years – recently even streaming service Paramount Plus released a 3 part documentary series titled “Sometimes When We Touch” on it – and City Pop has had its own reawakening, there’s just as many that haven’t had that sort of rebirth. Take Filk, for instance.
Despite sounding like an infectious strain of flesh eating bacteria, Filk is a microgenre of music by classification but it’s also so much more. It’s a musical culture, genre, and community tied to science fiction, fantasy, and horror fandom and a type of fan labor. The genre has existed since the early 1950s and been played primarily since the mid-1970s. In the early 1950s, the term filk music started as a misspelling of folk music in an essay by Lee Jacobs, titled “The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music”. Wrai Ballard, then editor of the Spectator Amateur Press Society refused to publish it for fear that the article’s bawdy content could get them into trouble, but found the typo itself amusing, and mentioned it repeatedly; thus, Jacobs’ typo became the self-identified term for the genre/subculture while it was still an informal, unrecognized activity at conventions.
Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, filking slowly became established as an acknowledged activity at science fiction conventions. Some convention organizers allotted hotel function space late at night for filkers, or filking occurred in hallways, bars or any other place that the filkers could find. Some convention organizers in the 1980s began inviting guests specifically for their filking. Some specialized conventions focused entirely on filk, beginning with FilkCon in Chicago in 1979, organized by Margaret Middleton and Curt Clemmer, later joined by many others. Like the birth of Chiptune (or Nerdcore) in the years that followed, Filk was a niche genre for a niche group. And yet, even with nerd culture becoming increasingly overpopularized and mainstream in the 2010s and onward, music like Filk or Chiptune haven’t seen a rise in popularity, because these types of music are far too specifically tied to their source origins to be appealing to the general audiences going to see Marvel Movies.
But that hasn’t stopped the microgenre from being a recognized and respected one. There’s even a Filk Hall of Fame, which was created by David Hayman in 1995 as a complement to the Pegasus Awards. If you’d like to read more on the subject of Filk, I suggest these two 2005 articles by Wired and NPR respectively. So while Filk likely won’t see a resurgence the way City Pop has, it’s safe to say it’s still worth it to listen to, especially if you’re into the history of music overall. Even the microgenres have their high points,
If anything, I’m mostly annoyed that “Imagine Dragons” squandered such a good name on such generic music, when it would’ve been an amazing Filk band name.
The more we talk about lost music, the more apparent it becomes that it’s pretty hard to lose an entire genre. While some genres might fade over time, ultimately there will always be an audience for them, even for microgenres. But what about losing just a single song? That, actually, happens far more often than you’d think.
Over on a subreddit called r/lostwave, they’ve made it a habit of unearthing seemingly unknown or forgotten songs. As an offshoot of the lost media wiki (perhaps in concept only, not official association), a user by the name SoDoISong posted a year ago about a song they found on a cassette tape recorded by their grandfather, presumably in the 80s, and arguably in Germany. Shortly after, the song was identified as DCO’s “So Do I”, a truly catchy little tune, but the users story was identified as an out and out hoax. Still, it brought attention to an otherwise virtually unknown song, and false flag operation or not, that’s ultimately a good thing. While some users thought the OP was the songmaker themselves seeking out free promotion, that theory at least has virtually been put to rest, as a comment under the song backs up its origins:
Hi, my name is Marco Schwarz. I am one of the members of the band DCO. We are/were located in Berlin/Germany. Lasson and I were classmates und we found out that we were both making music for ourselves. He was learning drums and i had piano lessons, so we started making music.We started with Tama Drums an 2 Yamaha keyboards. It was quite funny. Stones and Kiss but also Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. As some of you guys correctly assumed, it all changed when we were listening to a live version of Photographic by Depeche Mode (Hammersmith Odeon). So we started getting into electronic music. -> to be continued. Regards Marco
Seeing art lost time to time being found, regardless of how its discovery comes to be, is a good thing. It proves my point, which is that there’s always someone out there interested in something enough to keep it relevent. But what about when a song outright refuses to be found? Well, then we’re left with the case of “Everyone Knows That”. For reference, a good portion of the information on this song comes from the Lost Media Wiki page for the song, to which I’m very grateful.
On October 7th, 2021, a user named carl92 posted a query on watzatsong.com for a song that was unknown to them. People then commented and gave suggestions of what the song is, but to no avail. But then carl92 responded to the comments with the quote being, “Thanks. Sorry that’s all I have. I don’t remember its origin. I rediscover this sample between a bunch of very old files in a DVD backup. Probably I was simply learning how to capture audio and this was a left over. The thing is it sounds somewhat familiar to me (or maybe I’m mistaken with a similar song) and I though it wasn’t going to be a too obscure one. I tried in http://www.aha-music.com, and also tried searching the lyrics but my english is not good enough for that, I only understand something like: “everyone knows that, you can’t […] tell me the truth”. YouTuber Jay Kay would then upload carl92’s watzatsong’s snippet onto YouTube with a photo of a purple boombox before being terminated. This photo would eventually be associated with the song’s existence via reuploads and in conversations.
What’s most interesting, however, regarding this song is how much attention it’s garnered. While most songs being searched for on Lost Wave or the Lost Media Wiki are beholden to its niche audience, “Everyone Knows That” has very quickly broken past that barrier. Hell, not only does it have its own subreddit, but on November 12th, 2023, Miles Klee wrote an entire piece on the “song” for Rolling Stone, thus exposing it to even more unaware potential listeners. And for good measure, it seems that a moderator of the subreddit feels the same way I do about lost music, when they stated:
“Why are people obsessed with it? “On one hand, it’s an incredibly catchy and recognizable tune, while on the other hand loaded with mystery. Especially in 2023, with everything digitized and music freely available, it’s probably very interesting to a lot of young people that this song is seemingly untraceable.”
It’s mind boggling to a culture that’s grown up with everything available at their fingertips and the click of a button that something could be actually unavailable. For people like myself, who grew up in an age where if a film didn’t make the jump from VHS to DVD it was most likely lost to time, this concept is far more understandable.
Sometimes a song is mysterious and unknowable, and sometimes a band is just lost in the ether, simply waiting to be found. That was the case with Panchiko. Panchiko is a British indie rock band originating from Nottingham, England. Formed sometime between 1997 and 1998, first received public attention in 2016 when their 2000 demo EP D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L was discovered by a 4chan user in a charity shop in Sherwood, Nottingham and shared online through the music discussion section of the messageboard; the disc was notably distorted due to disc rot, lending further mystery to the EP. Its brief status as lost media led to a dedicated cult following and a community devoted to tracking down its band members. This was unbeknownst to the band until 2020, when lead vocalist and guitarist Owain Davies was found and contacted by a fan through Facebook. They have since released a new album, along with old demos and EPs and have been touring regularly.
The reason I bring these up, is because Lost Wave is, in and of itself, a genre of sorts. A fan made genre, but a genre nonetheless. Lost Wave is the sort of thing that can only really exist on a platform such as the internet, where people can congregate and discuss something on a global level, and work together to uncover it. So while it might not be at the same level as City Pop or Filk, it’s still as valid as those for those interested, And while it’s technically more of a term used to describe obscure music from an unknown source – where the information, including title, artist, album and dates are generally unknown or scarce – and certainly not a “genre” in the traditional sense one might find in an actual record store, it’s a category unto itself that most folks in the general music listening public are likely blissfully unaware of.
The fact that Panchiko was uncovered, that DCO was found (among many other examples) gives a lot of hope to the eventuality of “Everyone Knows That” being brought back from the haze of obscurity, but until that time comes, all we have is that snippet, but that snippet itself is a testament to how important music can be to people, where even 30 seconds or less is enough to instill a desire and love for something you’ve never even heard of until this very moment. Nothing is ever truly gone, so long as one person remembers it, even if it’s remembered fairly inacurrately or with lots of information outright missing.
The fact that people sometimes have the music sitting in a dusty closet or can find it in a charity shop somewhere proves the fact that no matter what the perception of it is, the media itself is never truly gone. It exists somewhere for someone to uncover, and who doesn’t like a scavenger hunt?
Whether it’s Lost Wave or City Pop or Filk, or the enormous glut of Myspace garage bands, there’s one thing that’s true betwixt them all, and that thing is how there’s always an audience out there somewhere, regardless of the musics availability.
In an article for The Verge by Jon Porter on April 4th, 2019, he estimated that, at the time of writing, the Myspace Archive Project had catalogued 490,000 MySpace songs uploaded to the service between 2008 and 2010, though that is significantly less than one percent of the estimated 50 million tracks uploaded between 2003 and 2015 that the once dominant social network accidentally deleted, but also sadly notes that the current MySpace song database has only been recovered because an organization made a backup when it was still available, making it unlikely the rest of the 50 million tracks will ever resurface.
And, for good measure, there is now a website one can visit to simply listen to the music without having to deal with Archive’s slow and clunky interface (no shade to Archive, I respect the hell out of them, and site optimization is likely not high on their list of priorities, but still, come on guys), so that’s kind of nice. Even better, the music player on the site is designed to look exactly like the music player on Myspace pages, giving it an extra kick of nostalgia. But with all this said, and while it’s a noble pursuit to drag oft forgotten things into the spotlight, one can’t deny that there’s also a beauty in having been there when something was available. Nowadays where people record concerts more than they do attend them, there’s a sort of wistful memorabilia to having heard a song before it vanished forever into the unknowable ether. And it’s generally those people who are the ones who try the hardest to bring it back.
There’s a famous saying that goes “nothing on the internet is ever really gone”, but this is obviously not true. There’s been plenty of things, the Myspace music debacle notwithstanding as our primary example, that have been uploaded and then vanished. On a personal level, I’ll end this was an anecdote. About ten years ago I ran a blog where I scoured Youtube to find amateurly produced music videos for original songs as a way to showcase young artists attempts at their artistic endeavors, albeit in a somewhat boarish manner. In hindsight, the idea of ‘cringe culture’ when in direct reference to just young people making art is a disgusting one, certainly, and I very much am regretful at my time engaging in it even on a minor level. During this time, I came across a music video for a song called “Rule This City” by Eli Kaldwell. This song, and video, are gone. The song hailed from an EP titled “Glitter Hug”, and while one can find an entry for the EP on Spotify, you cannot stream it, and while one can find another song on Indian Amazon Music, it’s not the song I’m talking about but instead the titular song from the EP.
In fact, aside from a handful of links to Cringe subreddits posting about said song and a defunct Soundcloud account, the only real proof of Kaldwells existence and time online producing content is an article from the University Times, on October 30th, 2013, in which it’s stated that a great array of the YouTube comments for “Rule This City” have been racist or homophobic. Among them are death threats and even calls for his suicide. Towards the end of the piece, he even states “I want to achieve my goals the old fashion way, like all the greats.” The fact that he’s gone, seemingly scrubbed from the internet, proves that things can go away because outside of the few glimpses I’ve provided here, the EP, and Kaldwell himself, are nowhere to be found or heard. And while I have no great desire to ever hear the song again, I think it stands as a perfect example of how we often take media for granted, assuming it’ll always be there (and the only upside to movies being pulled as tax write offs is that it’s making others aware the opposite is true).
The thing that’s truly fascinating about City Pop is how, according to a fantastic in depth Pitchfork article from February 24th, 2021 by Cat Zhang, recent man-on-the-street interviews reveal that the term “city pop” doesn’t even register with ordinary Japanese citizens, even if they recognize artists popularly associated with the genre and how instead essentially City Pop is Western music that’s been adapted by the Japanese. And while most of these microgenres will likely never get the new burst of life like City Pop has, that doesn’t make them less worthwhile. Music is important because of who put their time into it, as any art is, and what those who interact with it get out of it.
Music, unlike other forms of media, has the ability to be so personal to whoever hears it, because they can apply it to themselves, moments in their life, what have you, that it can become something you remember forever, even if you only heard it once on a radio late at night. So I love that City Pop is back and bigger than ever and I look forward to the day when “Everyone Knows That” is finally unearthed, if only to be proven, once again, that art, no matter the medium it takes, is memorable no matter the level of obscurity. And if when that day comes, when the song is found in its entirety, I’m sure some folks will hear it then for the first time and think “What was so important about this that it warranted such a ferver?” but that’s what it’s all about. Art is subjective. It’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Everyone knows that.
Addendum: For those interested in perhaps learning more about other microgenres, seeing as I only touched on a few, I’ve linked a list for you right here. Enjoy!
Hollywouldn't 