![[The JukeBox] #61 – Fortress of Lies & End of the Unknown- Keiichi Okabe](https://padraig.blog/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/2020/09/nier-puppets.png)
Another Nier: Automata related tune featured in the new 24-man Alliance Raid in Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers titles: “The Puppets Bunker” which was released as part of Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal.
During the first ‘trash’ pull and the in-between areas of the raid, you hear Okabe’s calming tune of when you are in the Bunker in Nier: Automata.
![[The Jukebox] #60 – Masayoshi Soken – The Reach of Darkness](https://padraig.blog/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/2020/07/cloudofdarkness.jpg)
Staying with Final Fantasy XIV and back in 2015, which was about a year and a half after the game re-launched, Square Enix launched the final major patch for the A Realm Reborn expansion titled Before The Fall.
![[The Jukebox] #59 – Weight of the World (Prelude Version) – Keiichi Okabe](https://padraig.blog/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/2020/05/ffxiv51.png)
I am a huge fan of Final Fantasy XIV and it’s music. It’s main composer Masayoshi Soken has created some fantastic music in the last 6 years of the game’s existence and he knocks it out of the park each and every expansion.
At the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival in Paris (which I attended), it was announced that the dev team had collaborated with another Square-Enix developer, PlatinumGames, to bring a new 24-man raid with a crossover between Final Fantasy XIV and Nier: Automata titled YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse.
![[The Jukebox] #58 – Rick Takeuchi – Never Gonna Give You Plastic Love](https://padraig.blog/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/2020/05/rick_takeuchi.jpg)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post was initially published on May 22nd 2022 and was last updated on the 6th November 2022.
![[The Jukebox] #57 – Macross 82-99 – Fun Tonight](https://padraig.blog/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/2019/11/futurefunk2.png)
A genre that I have been listening to a lot in the last couple of years has been “Future Funk”… ahem, I mean “Ｆｕｔｕｒｅ Ｆｕｎｋ 因為ヾ”
A genre born from the illustrious vaporwave sub-genre which was brought to popularity in the early parts of 2010’s with its sampling of music from the ’70s and ’80s English & Japanese pop and disco songs and the incorporation of synth-wave and other sub-genres of vaporwave and citypop.
![[The JukeBox] #56 – Joji – Slow Dancing in the Dark](https://padraig.blog/wp-content/uploads/wordpress/2019/09/joji.jpg)
George Miller made his name on the internet way before the release and popularity of Slow Dancing in the Dark. For several years, George was under the persona of Filthy Frank.