The Japanese pop artist Hiroshi Nagai, who painted the cover art for Light In The Attic’s new city pop compilation Pacific Breeze 2, once told Kaput that he was heavily influenced by an ad for a swimming pool cleaner in an old copy of House & Garden.
He was gripped by American pop artists after a trip to the United States in 1973, and despite living and working in Tokyo, the arching palm trees and deep block-blue skies that he painted came from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. “The summers in my paintings,” he said, “are still and forever the ones in the United States of America.” City pop was the soundtrack to Japan’s postwar boom, a sparkling refraction of funk, soul, and boogie made by and for a generation of thriving urbanites.
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