Every month, a new genre falls to the ever-encroaching siege of AI dreck. The infestation began with lo-fi beats, which mercenaries ransacked and rewired into a black hole of mindless loops. Then there was AI vaporwave, which felt almost farcical—the genre built around exposing the hollowness of capitalism got withered into a fetishized formula. As AI improved, producers ventured beyond instrumental music. Suddenly, one of the biggest channels on YouTube was Masters of Prophecy, which amassed over 31 million subscribers with synthwave shite and “singers” whose “every note whispers with starlight.” Then came The Velvet Sundown, a “band” with over 1.2 million Spotify monthly listeners, that scored actual press coverage as people puzzled over whether it was human or machine. The grifter behind the saga tried to play it off as some kind of Banksian ploy to “challenge the boundaries of authorship.” So that means you’re giving 95% of Spotify royalties to your robo-coauthors, riiiiight?
One of the latest and perhaps most chilling AI invasions involves city pop, the amorphous genre of glitzy late ’70s and ’80s Japanese pop music that became an online obsession in the West in recent years. Type “city pop” on YouTube and nearly everything will be AI-generated, fitted with seemingly doctored images of gleeful Japanese women, often standing in front of cars. Sunlight glints off the hood, long hair sways in imaginary wind; the titles tantalize you with hyperspecific descriptions, like you’re in a Shinjuku Bar or driving in Harajuku in 1980. Fan forums are flooded with people decrying the swell of synthetic city slop, as well as sleuths helping decode what’s real. In one thread, someone discovered that a song was AI by analyzing the license plate of the car in the cover art—it had a number in the bottom left corner, against Japanese standards. Another person picked up on the cover woman’s outfit—too revealing for the time period. Someone else recommended searching the artist on Discogs: no profile, likely not a real person.
City pop has always been a particularly weird viral phenomenon. As Cat Zhang previously wrote for Pitchfork, the genre originally pulled from American styles like funk and yacht rock and aimed for a kind of California dreaminess, soundtracking an ’80s Japan era of glamor and ascendancy. Many Japanese people never knew it as “city pop,” just J-pop or ordinary music detached from a genre label. Only recently has it been canonized, thanks largely to YouTube and TikTok algorithms that pushed Western scrollers onto songs like Mariya Takeuchi’s luxe and hypnotic “Plastic Love.” The genre has soared, providing genuine nostalgia for Japanese people who grew up hearing the music and pseudo-nostalgia for Westerners who project some kind of mythological fantasy onto Japan, imagining they’re cruising around Tokyo as they listen.
Musician-creator Amanda Nolan split her childhood between Nashville and Tokyo but didn’t really discover the genre until a few years ago, when Miki Matsubara’s 1979 “Stay With Me” was resurrected and hooked the globe. She’s become obsessed, posting dozens of city pop covers and using it partly as a way to connect with her Japanese family members, who recognize the music from their youth. She finds everything about AI city pop egregious, from the way the channel operators run their pages solely for profit to the actual music, which offers a fakesimile of the genre.
“There’s so much layering that goes into Japanese city pop production—the jazz elements, the tons of instruments they’re using. There are so many teeny, tiny details in every instrument that you have to get really perfect,” she tells me. “I think a lot of that is missing in the AI stuff… they’ve got maybe four or five parts, but if you think about a [real] city pop song, they’re missing like 10 layers.”
In some ways, it makes sense that city pop would fall prey to AI. The music can sound surpassingly anodyne, built for commercials and idle, low-wattage daydreaming. But the best city pop has a certain richness that feels like diving into a pile of sequin-bedazzled jackets and dark trench coats and perfectly tailored trousers. Anri’s “WINDY SUMMER” conjures up an orchestra playing hooky, carousing in the park. Horns squiggle over blissed-out basslines; piano notes vault in the sky and square-dance with trilling singers. “RIDE ON TIME,” the 1980 song used in a popular cassette tape commercial by Tatsuro Yamashita, the man often called the pioneer of city pop, hits like a credits soundtrack for someone ascending to heaven.
“It felt like hearing those jazzy UK disco groups, but even fucking better,” says Yung Bae, an electronic and future funk musician heavily inspired by city pop, of his first time hearing the genre. “You’re just like, bro, are they on crack? What! I don’t even know how to explain it.”
Compare the swooning grandeur of Matsubara’s Pocket Park to the hourlong “80s City Pop Playlist Perfect for Night Drives Heartfelt Mellow” mixes polluting YouTube. The difference is stark. City slop, which often explicitly states in the description that it was generated with AI, sifts through the same few shitstrumental loops. The drums punch and plod like textbook EDM; indistinguishable synths twinkle. Every now and then, some neon piano or a little generative-jazz.mp3 horn solo comes in like an accent piece. The song titles are all vaguely poetic nonsense hinting at furtive encounters: "Forbidden Love," "The Fate of Goodbye,” “Midnight Evidence,” “Serenade at the Street Corner.” Nolan says the AI writing is equally awful: it’s “the Taylor Swift-ification of Japanese lyrics,” where a couple of sophisticated words will be thrown in for no reason and all the phrasing is off. “You can tell it's not written by a human and probably not by someone who understands Japanese very well.”
Yung Bae worries that the genre, which has already been sampled to oblivion, could be fully ruined by AI. He finds the whole thing disrespectful, both to the art of music-making—he calls typing in prompts “the doomscrolling of production”—and the city pop OGs. “They did this shit 30, 40 years ago, even further back. I’m 30 now, bro, the least I could do is pay them some money and some credit,” he said. “I’m passionate about this shit, like, let AI come fight me in my backyard.”
The abysmal quality of so much AI city pop is partly why Sho, a 39-year-old from Shimane, started making AI city pop himself. He comes across like a conscientious culprit, recognizing the futility of resisting AI and wanting to deploy it for good—which, in this case, means making abundant goods out of a technically finite material, if you consider real city pop to be only the stuff made decades ago. He’s churning out hourslong AI city pop mixes that use correct Japanese lyrics, unlike the most atrocious videos. He dissed a couple of the biggest channels, like Chill City Pop and aya tune radio, for hurling out subpar music that doesn’t pay proper homage to the genre.
Sho, on the other hand, says he can spend a week working on a three-hour mix, and tries to get his music as close to city pop’s vintage elegance as possible. Over a Google Translate-assisted Discord conversation, the Japanese producer explained his process: After feeding his own piano and guitar lines into the audio generation software Suno, he gives it meticulous instructions, from adding reverb to washing the vocals out to incorporating specific instruments popular at the time, like the TR-808 and LinnDrum machines and electric piano. Then he’ll toss in atmospheric keywords like “romantic” and “urban.” Sho says he knows the music is complete when it makes him happy. He listens to the AI city pop on walks and with his dog, Abby, an adorable Italian greyhound.
So far he’s found decent success with his channel Beat Flickers, reeling in around 1 million yen, or close to $7,000, since launching last August. The music is better than the vast heap of AI stock-shlock. The vocals, normally a dead giveaway, have a robotic sheen, but the way they’re buried in the mix sounds realistic. I could imagine passersby with no knowledge of Japanese nor any cultural investment falling for the fake. He’s clearly excited by the possibilities of the tech, slowly toying with other AI genres like chill-hop and ambient. “I think it can get as close as possible, but I don't think it can surpass the indescribable charm that humans have,” he said. “But we don't know what the future holds, the possibilities are endless.” Outside of the internet, Sho helps manage and plan house renovation jobs, but he hopes to one day make YouTube music his full-time gig. He dreams of enlisting a real city pop artist to sing on his tracks.
DSPs like Spotify and YouTube haven’t done much to stymie the flow of generative gunk. YouTube gives creators the option to disclose whether their videos use synthetic material, but doesn’t require it outside of things like politically sensitive deepfakes. The company recently announced a “minor update” to more accurately demonetize repetitive uploads, which could help curb the flood of multihour mixes.
I grabbed coffee with another gatekeeper the other day: Jake, a 32-year-old white guy with aviator glasses and a Pikachu t-shirt who created the main Reddit forum for city pop lovers, with close to 75,000 members. He seems cautiously optimistic about AI, thinking it’ll become seamlessly integrated while not fully annihilating something like city pop; the casuals might imbibe dogwater beats on YouTube, but the real connoisseurs will still seek carefully curated music on Reddit. He instituted a “no AI” rule on the forum, which is popular albeit not fully effective. “A lot of contemporary attempts to make city pop fail to capture the spirit of the thing, and get flagged as AI even if they're really just middling attempts to recreate some of the energy,” he says. “It doesn't help that a lot of city pop fans, myself included, barely know Japanese, so a lot of the fan-produced music is instrumental and has that kind of Muzak-esque quality that is similar to AI-generated stuff.”
Later that day, I speak with Jaime Lukini, a 52-year-old Peruvian-American living in Porto who says he got flamed on Jake’s Reddit forum for posting his own AI city pop. “People in Reddit are really mean,” he laughs. Out of everyone I talked to, he’s the most excited about AI, revering it as a new instrument: A “complex, unpredictable, flexible assistant. It doesn’t replace creativity. It actually challenges it because the emotion still comes from the human. The AI just expands the canvas.” A longtime musician, he’s been uploading AI city pop to YouTube for less than a year, slowly trying to master the game of prompt-writing. YouTube’s announcement about clamping down on spam has freaked him out. “It’s like going against technology,” he says, baffled. “Everything that we are gonna be making in the future is gonna be with AI: Graphics, videos, fonts. So if we’re gonna demonetize channels because of the use of AI… it doesn’t make any sense to me.” (The update isn’t targeting AI videos en masse, though it should.)
There’s a twisted kind of logic to city pop’s trajectory, where the same recommendation algorithms that gave the genre a random resurgence would now also push people onto robo bootlegs—whatever drives clicks. The music exists in a vortex of context collapse full of people exoticizing Japan, treating it like Muzak. Detractors might argue that it doesn’t matter because people already treat the sound so disposably, but the actual history is being erased in such an uncanny way. The real singers who built the genre are being converted into perpetually smiling imaginary women. The talented instrumentalists are being swapped out for chewed-up LLM equations. AI has flattened the sound into a simulacra of a simulacra, a Mobius strip of slop.
"It’s become so formulaic. You're like, ‘Oh, I hear the drum pattern from ‘Stay With Me.’ Oh, I hear the progression from ‘Plastic Love,’” groans Nolan. “I worry, like, what if 50 years in the future, somebody is trying to do their research on the genre... how much of it is gonna be AI and how much of it is gonna be real, and how much is that gonna distort the view of the style?”