City pop, sonoridade e nostalgia: uma análise da produção de sentido a partir do fonograma em gêneros musicais

Abstract

This study investigates the global phenomenon of the City Pop revival, a Japanese musical genre from the 1970s and 1980s, and its contemporary resignification mediated by digital platforms and Future Funk remixes. The research seeks to understand how the genre’s sonority is inseparable from its technical materiality and how the phonogram acts as a media support for the materialization of nostalgia and techno-orientalism, analyzing the aesthetic efficacy of the works through the secondary level (sonority), moving beyond approaches centered exclusively on lyrics or melody. The theoretical framework establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue between Iuri Lotman’s Semiotics of Culture, Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall, Canclini, Simon Frith, and Pablo Vila), and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, interpreting City Pop as an “open text” in constant cultural translation. The methodology is anchored in Sérgio Molina’s technical-musical framework, utilizing categories such as musical event, achronic and diachronic densities, spatialization, and moment-form to analyze the sonic architecture of the works. The investigative path begins with a historiographical survey of the genre as a product of Japan’s accelerated modernization, where sound portability (walkman) and studio sophistication created an aspirational and intermedial lifestyle. Subsequently, the digital revival is discussed under the aegis of Simon Reynolds’ retromania and Paul Ballam-Cross’s reconstructed nostalgia, a process in which the West consumes Japan as a fetishized sonic commodity, operating within the concept of techno-orientalism. In the Brazilian context, the study identifies glocalization processes and the formation of collective identity communities mediated by digital curators and performative events. The empirical analysis confronts the original phonograms of Plastic Love (Mariya Takeuchi, 1984) and Stay With Me (Miki Matsubara, 1979) with contemporary remixes by South Korean DJ Night Tempo. The results demonstrate that contemporary intervention radicalizes circularity and suspends the teleology of the original works, transforming the dramatic narrative into objects of intensified repetition and technological consumption. It is concluded that City Pop is not a musical fossil, but a palimpsest of meanings whose vitality resides in the “translation of tradition” and the sovereignty of the secondary level, reaffirming the phonogram as a living and technically structured text within the contemporary semiosphere.