Future Funk, Tatsuro Yamashita, and Why Physical Media Still Matters

 

It’s time to tell you all a story.

It’s Summer 2015. I’m at home on summer vacation from college. It’s in the high 60’s, so I have my windows open and the sweet summer breeze keeps rolling in. I’ve recently gotten a Dreamcast with one of the first paychecks I got from my movie theater job, and a copy of Shenmue, and I’m asking around in-game for the location of some sailors. All of a sudden, I started to hear some music. It’s muffled first, as if a car was blaring it outside my house.

♪ Sunao ni nareba ♪

♪ Tsuzui teta ai ♪

♪ Shizun ofu no umi wa warai fuu ga kooru wa ♪

It was a Japanese song, which seemed appropriate given that Shenmue takes place in Japan. And it had a retro sound to it, like something from the ‘80’s, which was also appropriate given that Shenmue takes place in the ‘80’s. But, then the music grew louder, the beat behind it became faster and bass heavier. This was no longer a period appropriate for Shenmue. This music was something different, something new, and distinctly non-diegetic. I paused my game and walked out of my room and found that it was coming from my brother’s room next door. My brother had these two big stereo speakers he had hooked up to his rinky-dink laptop that he would blast music of all sorts through, flooding our house in whatever music he chose to listen to. In this instance, it was this upbeat, Japanese dance song.

♪ Aaa, anata o otte ♪

♪ Tasogare no Bay Shiti ♪

♪ Aaa, meguriaetara damatte ♪

At first, I didn’t think very much of it. But after a while, I found myself bobbing my head and tapping my toes to the music, as I’m sure my brother had been too. The song in question was Bae City Rollaz by Yung Bae, a Future Funk remix of the song Bay City by Junko Yagami, and my brother loved it. So much in fact that Junko Yagami’s voice would flood our suburban home for the subsequent two months.

This would be my introduction to the world of Future Funk, a nascent subgenre of Vaporwave. However, while Future Funk samples heavily, like its parent genre, it focuses much more on upbeat quality than the slower, almost atmospheric qualities of Vaporwave. Future Funk primarily sampled from disco, house, and, most notably, citypop music (a genre I will explain later.) While Vaporwave’s aesthetics were more based on consumer goods, neon geometric shapes, and Greco-Roman sculptures, Future Funk focused primarily on tropical images of beaches and palm trees, as well as retro anime like Urusei Yatsura, City Hunter, and Sailor Moon.

I had always loved the retro aesthetic (if my purchase of a Dreamcast in 2015 wasn’t evidence enough.) So, I took to this genre like a pig to neon-colored slop. I would buy Yung Bae’s first album, Bae, which had Bae City Rollaz on it. Then I would buy Bae 2. And then BA3. And then all of his Japanese Disco Edits albums. Then I would get into MACROSS 82-95 and Saint Pepsi (aka Skylar Spence.) Much of the soundtrack of my college life was Future Funk remixes of Disco and Citypop songs. The voices of Anri, Toshiki Kadomatsu, Mariya Takeuchi, and more artists flooded my car and dorm room, and yet I did not know that they were.

But, as my time with the genre wore on, I started to realize that much of the music I liked was actually hidden behind the French house beats that Future Funk artists put them with. One song in particular made me brake from the genre almost entirely: I was listening to Yung Bae’s Japanese Disco Edits 2 and the final track of the album was titled Daydream (Edit.) I loved this song a lot. The singer had such a beautiful, somewhat delicate, yet still powerful voice. The horns, guitar, and bass were all groovy. The only odd thing was the drumbeat on top of it, which was a little faster paced then the rest of the song. As a result, I wanted to find the original. However, I was having difficulty, as many Future Funk and Vaporwave artists refuse to say what songs they sampled from. Luckily, I had a friend who was really into Japanese music and I reached out to him to find the original. As it turns out, the title of the original song was staring me in the face the whole time. The original was DAYDREAM by Tatsuro Yamashita, a man who would become one of my favorite artists of all time. Turns out all Yung Bae did was add the beat, slap “(Edit)” on the end of the title, cut it up a bit, and slapped his name on it.

 I would drop listening to Future Funk a few weeks later, and would instead be heavily engrossed in a new, bygone genre of Japanese music: Citypop. Taking influences from a wide variety of Western genres, like disco, funk, jazz, and the like, Citypop became a really popular genre in Japan during the late 1970s and 1980s. One of the major pioneers of this genre was that same singer that captured my attention in DAYDREAM: Tatsuro Yamashita.

Much like I had done with Yung Bae, I went to listen to the album DAYDREAM came from: Ride on Time. I fell in love with his sound. Then I listened to his album For You, which remains today my favorite album of his, featuring my favorite song of his: LOVE TALKIN’ (Honey It’s You). Then I listened to Go Ahead!, Boku no Naka no Shounen, Big Wave, and COZY. Each album after the next full of just really great music. It seemed like Yamashita was just batting a thousand musically for me.

As a testament to such, I still listen to his music today, and rarely if ever listen to Yung Bae anymore. That’s not to rag on Yung Bae or the Future Funk genre. Without them, I might not have ever been exposed to Tatsuro Yamashita’s music. Yung Bae continues to make music and in fact, at the time of this post, has released a 6th Bae album. Funnily enough, Tatsuro Yamashita also continues to make music. His most recently released album, SOFTLY, came out in 2023 (my favorite song off of that album being RECIPE).

It also seems like a lot of other people have had a similar story to mine, since Tatsuro Yamashita’s popularity has only risen since the mid-2010s. He’s gone on to influence another one of my favorite artists, Ginger Root, and his more Citypop-inspired albums like Nisemono and Shinbangumi. He’s also been sampled by major modern artists like when Tyler the Creator sampled his song Fragile on his song Thank You.

Despite his influence on a lot of modern artists, one of the first things you’ll hear people talk about is that he’s not on any music streaming platforms. In an interview in 2022, before the release of his recent album (which you can read here thanks to the translation efforts of Kayo Kyoku Plus), he talks about how he probably won’t ever get into streaming services because he feels they take all the money while not being a part of the musical process. So far, the only platform he’s really trusted has been YouTube. This has caused a lot of frustration among fans, many of whom would find it more convenient to just listen to his music on Spotify rather than dropping money on one of his albums.

While I cannot deny the convenience that streaming services provide to many people, I can’t help but be bothered by these people begging Yamashita to drop his music on streaming services. I couldn’t really articulate why for a while. Then, I saw a video by Rick Beato titled The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse. And he articulated perfectly.

At one point in the video, he discusses how part of the reason music is getting worse is because of its ease of access. For $10.99 a month you can get virtually every piece of music ever created on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc. As a result, people (he mentions young people specifically, but I would even extend that to people of my generation) don’t value music that much. They didn’t have to work hard to get it or actively seek it out. For the price of one CD, you can get the entire catalog of all your favorite artists.

“There is no sweat equity put into obtaining it, having it part of your collection, having it part of your identity, of who you are. These are the bands I believe in. These are the artists I love. And I’m going to share it with my friends. I’m going to bring the record to school. I’m going to play it for my friends after school when we’re all hanging out, reading the back cover of it and seeing who played on it. These things meant something. What was on here meant something. […] It was important.”

I don't agree with everything that Rick says in this video. For one, I don't think modern music is any less interesting that that of bygone eras. But I will say, the internet has made many things easily accessible. Heck, without it, I wouldn’t have been able to find out about Yung Bae, Future Funk, or Tatsuro Yamashita to begin with. But at the same time, it has made the things we seek out trivial. The media we consume is disposable and easily digestible. We didn’t have to work hard to seek out new music or develop our tastes. They’re just there to listen to and forget.

I don’t think Tatsuro Yamashita wants his music to be lost in that vast mass of information. He doesn’t want it to be treated like a candy bar you devour and never think of again. He wants you to work for it. He wants it to mean something to his listeners. I deeply understand that.

It’s made me think of why I collect the things I do. All the movies, games, and albums that take up my room. I get this stuff not to hoard it for myself, but because it means something to me and I want the ability to share it with others, something that more and more companies don’t want me or anyone else to do. While all our media is slipping out of our hands and being placed in the hands of people that couldn’t give a damn about it, I’m glad that there are still champions of physical media like Tatsuro Yamashita. I know not everyone may have the means to drop $20 or so on a regular basis to buy a CD, but if there’s a musician or band you love, consider doing so. And if you do, listen to it front and back. Everywhere. Share it with your friends. And never, ever shut up about it.