My daughter was listening to "Say So" by Doja Cat on YouTube. And I asked her to replay it because something sounded eerily familiar—as if I heard it before.

Turns out, it sounds remarkably similar to the future funk song "Fiona Coyne" by Skylar Spence. If you're unaware, future funk is a genre that originated in the 2010s. It's basically a mix of disco and vaporwave. It has its following, but never cracked the mainstream.

But hold on... "Fiona Coyne" is inspired by "Love Talkin' (Honey It's You)" by Tatsuro Yamashita, one of the heavyweights of city pop.

City pop is what's known as a retronym. That is, a label we give to music when a retrospective canon gets formed, requiring recontextualization. Yacht rock is another example of a retronym.

In Japan, where city pop originates from, city pop is an obscure genre even though city pop songs themselves are popular. That's because it was simply mainstream pop in Japan.

Now don't get me wrong. "City pop" as a term existed in Japan during the 80s. But this wasn't a genre with a defined musical structure. It was more a marketing term to sell aspiration, much like how we in the West hear terms like "contemporary" and "sophisti-pop". Because of this, most Japanese people didn't recognize city pop as an identifiable thing.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Westerners started hearing Japanese music from the 80s. They needed context. So they re-purposed a Japanese marketing term to define a corpus, a body of work that identified Japanese music with broad similarities that seemed to have an associated scene.

The city pop canon was never big in the West. Even now, it's only known amongst music nerds. But its effect on modern mainstream music is huge. Here's examples:

• "Out of Time" by The Weeknd samples Tomoko Aran's "Midnight Pretenders"
• "GONE, GONE / THANK YOU" by Tyler, the Creator interpolates Tatsuro Yamashita's "Fragile"
• "We Ride" by Brave Girls was a Top 5 K-pop hit, but it was blatantly marketed as city pop upon its release

What's wild? City pop is not the only obscure genre to impact the mainstream but never hit the mainstream. Witch house, phonk, and vaporwave all had a big impact. But none of the artists who originated these genres have ever become house house names.

I think this is one of the defining characteristics of 21st-century music. A genre can remain underground while its sounds, production techniques, and aesthetics become completely mainstream.

We're in a time where the mainstream raids from subculture before subculture can ever challenge it.

Is this why we no longer see musical revolutions like jazz, rock, punk, hip hop, and grunge?

Has the mainstream become so good at absorbing underground music that new genres can influence it without ever displacing or fundamentally transforming it?

Van Halen could sell out stadiums in the US, yet in Europe they had to open for Bon Jovi. That would never happen in the States.

DMB could easily sell out the biggest arena in my country (Portugal), but I doubt they have much of a fanbase in the rest of Europe. My dad is a huge fan of 70s rock, and he tells me Van Halen and Journey were never particularly big over here. And FUNNILY ENOUGH, he'd never even heard of Tom Petty...

The first track i heard was around the time i quit weed for good. It's also the first artist that made me like brass instruments.
I love Toh Kays songwriting yet i tend to forget about them ever so often. I feel my main problem is that the lyrics are often way to fast to sing along but they are so bloody good and interesting compared to other 3rd wave ska bands like Less Than Jake or Mad Caddys. Kinda feel like they are so underraded. It's not really Ska nor is it Skapunk. They are kinda unique and have such a bloody good brass section.
And now roast me :)

I don't have problems with understanding texts, i read a lot. Also i am a writer, and write not only stories, but also certain amount of poetry for the songs since i was a kid. In theory, this background should make things easier for me... But nope.

There are certain amount of songs (only songs, never a prose) where i simply can't understand meaning behind sentces. Often i can get the general idea of the song - like, this one is about humanity being obsessed with violence, this one about loss, etc. But when i start to read it line by line - it does not make sense. Sentences can mean something, but do not connect, do not rely to each other. And sometimes even meaning of sentences is obscure to me. And in very rare cases i can't understand the entire song.

There are entire bands that have a lot of lyrics beyond my understanding. Especially japanese ones - at first i was blaming bad translation, but AI's not can translate pretty good, but it still does not make much sense in lots of cases. I can't feel the story being told by those words, and more like... shattered echoes of the story, where i constantly try to put puzzle together but fail.

I have various theories of why this happens, from being an effect from asd to me just being not smart enough to understand more complex narratives. So i need to hear experience of other people about this subject. Do you have problems with understanding lyrics, and how often?

The long version of “People Make the World Go Round” has a whole second half, and I think it’s the best part

https://youtu.be/2owZXPyeilc?si=pq2Q5CoSjFxLEqN-

Most people probably know “People Make the World Go Round” from the single, which is around 3:30.

That version is already great. Thom Bell’s arrangement, Linda Creed’s lyrics, Russell Thompkins Jr. singing in that ridiculous falsetto.

But the album version on The Stylistics’ first record is over six minutes long, and right around the point where the single fades out, it just keeps going.

And honestly, that’s the part I like the most.

The vocals slowly disappear and the whole thing opens up. Bass, drums, congas, all those strange Bell percussion sounds, then guitar and flute drifting in and out.

It doesn’t really feel like it’s trying to get anywhere anymore. It just sits in the groove.

That part hits me more physically than the first half. It’s hard to explain without sounding slightly ridiculous, but it feels like the song starts breathing differently.

The lyrics are actually pretty bleak. Strikes, garbage piling up, pollution, Wall Street losing money. The whole world is dysfunctional.

Then the words disappear and the music just keeps going.

To me it almost feels like the song is saying: yeah, the world is a mess, but it keeps turning anyway.

That’s obviously just my interpretation, but once I started hearing it like that I couldn’t really unhear it.

I also found something interesting about the rhythm.

I assumed the long instrumental part felt more relaxed because it probably settled into a simple 4/4 groove. Apparently not. The ending vamp has been analysed as alternating between 4/4 and 5/4.

Which is kind of funny, because it feels more relaxed even though the meter is actually less regular.

Maybe that extra beat is part of why it feels so loose, like the music is constantly hanging around a little longer than you expect.

The song also seems to have really appealed to jazz and soul-jazz musicians. Milt Jackson did an eight-minute version, Cleveland Eaton covered it, O’Donel Levy did a great guitar version, and it kept resurfacing later in hip hop and sample culture.

I don’t want to claim all those musicians were specifically obsessed with the long Stylistics outro, because there’s no way to know that. But it does feel like there was something in the composition that musicians wanted to stretch out and live inside.

Does the long outro change the meaning of the song for you, or does it just feel like an extended groove?

And for anyone here who understands the meter better than I do, why does that 4/4 and 5/4 vamp feel so relaxed when the rhythm is actually becoming less regular?

If you only know the short version, let the album version keep running past the point where the single would have faded out.

That’s where the song really starts for me.

Like actually. I've spent the last two years making what I think is my life's greatest work, only to realise the world in which I live values this craft less and less. I mean I'm guilty of it too, listening to records just isn't what it used to be, but I try. Yet here we all are making them as though nothing has changed. How depressing! I don't mean to be dramatic, I know the fire will always burn, but it flickers now in the winds of time.