Author: Padraig Fahy

In my previous post, I wrote about listening to a new genre of music, Future Funk for the last couple of years. There has been a sub-genre of Future Funk though which has had a resurgence in the last 10 years, known as City pop.

City pop is a loosely defined subset of pop music that originated in Japan in the late 1970s.
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Since the 2010s, city pop has gained an international online following as well as becoming a touchstone for the sample-based microgenres known as vaporwave and future funk.Wikipedia

One of the more popular songs that define the genre is Mariya Takeuchi’s – Plastic Love.

Mariya is a Japanese singer and songwriter who has been performing since 1978. Her latest studio album, Trad, was released in 2014 reaching Number 1 on the Japanese Music Charts.

The 65-year-old recently re-released one of her singles, Inochi No Uta (Song of Life) with a DVD of her live performance of the song.

Plastic Love was originally released back in 1984 and was on her 6th album, VARIETY.

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Mariya Takeuchi – Plastic Love

The song became popular in the West in 2017 when a user on YouTube uploaded the song (See above) and became a frequent recommendation for viewers on the platform.

Today, the song has amassed a whopping 31 Million views and is flying the flag as being the ‘mascot’ for Future Funk.

I cannot count how many times I have listened to this song. I only wished that Last.FM had some sort of integration with YouTube to find out that statistic.

More recently, I have come across some remixes of the song on SoundCloud and then discovered a load more on YouTube which brings me to the point of this post.

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Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up

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3 years after the release of Plastic Love, Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up was released.

A song that has become a staple ‘meme’ within the Internet landscape since the late 2000s, which has also held up very well 33 years after its release with an eye-popping 693 Million views on YouTube.

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Rick Takeuchi – Never Gonna Give You Plastic Love

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YouTube user, Gemosu, released a video back in August of 2018, mashing the two songs together to give this 80’s lovers treat.

An opposite version of the song was created by Gemosu in May of 2019 titled: Mariya Astley – Plastic You Up

2 absolutely stunning mashups of 2 brilliant songs from yesteryear.

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This was the beginning of a new series of ‘The JukeBox’. No ‘editions’ or ‘series’ numbers this time, just posting about music. It’s time for a change in the format and I feel that writing about the songs, rather than just posting lyrics is more enjoyable. Expect more in the future.

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This post was initially published on May 22nd 2022 and was last updated on the 6th November 2022.