A Love Letter to City Pop


The “A Love Letter to City Pop” is an educational project that aims to introduce the City Pop music genre to an audience who has little or no knowledge of the genre.  Through an A5 book and an accompanying CD, the project visits the history, peak and resurgence of City Pop. It showcases it’s origin and its cultural impact in Japan (The country of origin of the genre) and around the world. The publication also provides a contextualization of Japan's economic bubble period and the end of the bubble and its end in the 1990s, 
the so-called “lost decade”.  

On the flip side, it features a CD that allows for an immersive listening experience that reinforces the nostalgia and optimism of the genre, but also invites reflection on the relevance of City Pop in today's music scene. Also, the fact that the compilation is made on CD is a provocative way to listen to this music, has the format’s rising popularity in the 90s is considered to mark the end of the genre’s popularity, and, the resurgence of it happened after the CD was mostly obsolete. 
Therefore, it invites the listener to reflect on the ways the technology we use impacts the music we listen to.