Plastic Love

When Mariya Takeuchi made Variety in 1984, it was a comeback, and for the first time she wrote every song herself. She was pregnant during the sessions and has said she wrote simply because it was fun. For Plastic Love she wanted something danceable with a city pop sound, sixteen beats and a lyric about life in the city. Tatsuro Yamashita arranged and produced it at Onkio Haus in Tokyo's Ginza district. The bright funk bass and brass sit on top of a sad story: a woman who has lost the man she truly loved and now treats love as a game. Released as a single in March 1985, it was a modest result. It peaked at number 86 on the Oricon chart and sold fewer than 10,000 copies, though it did respectably in karaoke. For three decades that was more or less the end of it. Then, in 2017, a YouTube account called Plastic Lover uploaded a fan-made eight-minute version that looped parts of the song. The recommendation algorithm picked it up, and by 2021 it had more than 55 million views before copyright claims took it down. The thumbnail, a photo of Takeuchi by Alan Levenson, actually came from an earlier single, but it became so tied to the song that the 2021 vinyl reissue used it. That reissue reached number five in Japan. Plastic Love is now widely called the best-known city pop song, and its strange second life opened a whole genre to listeners who were not born when it first came out.