sabukaru (subculture) pt. 1!

the trailblazers of early citypop whose satirical attitudes toward their changing social realities gave rise to a new genre

In this series we will be featuring music that fuses across genres, specifically today in the japanese jazz-pop realm. the breaking free from blue note mimicry and toward improvisational, modal, bebop and eventually rock, electronic, and psychedelic music performed a new, satirizing kind of exotica. It was also a mirroring of cultural changes amid ongoing student demonstrations and seemingly boundless economic growth in japan. It was out of this milieu that artists began doing away with boundaries of genre, language, and sound, laying the groundwork for soundtracks that would eventually resurface in digital spaces and accrue a global following under a new name: city pop.

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