City Pop Three Los AngelesCity Pop Three Los Angeles

City Pop Three opened in February 2022 and argues a point rather than merely playing records: that American yacht rock and Japanese city pop are the same music heard from opposite sides of the Pacific. DJ White Velvet programmes it for m·radio in Fukuoka, mixing the West Coast studio sound of the late seventies and early eighties straight into the Tokyo records it helped shape, never announcing which country any given song came from and leaving the listener to work it out for themselves.

So Airplay's Nothin' You Can Do About It from 1980 lands next to Etsuko Sai from 1986, Toto from 1982 next to Toshiki Kadomatsu's Office Lady, and Kenny Loggins ahead of Tomoko Aran and Kingo Hamada. Heard back to back, the session players, the chord changes and the studio gloss turn out to be more or less the same thing, which is easier to notice than it is to argue.