Pop Tap Beat is the gift that keeps on giving! Here we are with its latest exclusive addition that is living a 2nd online in the present day due to video takedown and meme magic...
Plastic Love
プラスティック・ラブ
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PTB |
 |
★2 (106) |
★4 (181) |
★5 (343) |
★7 (462) |
- |
103
plstlv (Plastic Love)The latest of the PTB debuts is an 80ies entry into the City Pop genre, created and performed by one of the Japanese sensations of the genre: Mariya Takeuchi (竹内 まりや), from the Shimane prefecture's Hikawa district.
Daughter in a family running a long-established inn -the Takenoya-, she pursued literature-based studies both as a foreign transfer student in her high school years (from where her nicknamed "Mako" is originated) and in her home country at Keio university. Her musical debut was with RCA Records, releasing hit songs for three years from 1978, including her first No.1 charted album Love Songs. After a year-long hiatus, she and her husband Tatsurō Yamashita (山下達郎) both signed a contract with Moon Records, the partnership of which lasts to this day in conjunction with a later deal with Warner Music Japan. The 2020 re-release of her 2012 song Inochi no Uta (いのちの歌) also made it to chart 1st at Oricon, making of Mariya Takeuchi the oldest Japanese artist to accomplish such a success!
Back to the Moon partnership, it started in 1984 with the release of the album Variety, among whose tracks is also found this here track, one of the albums where Mariya is the singer and her husband Tatsuro is its producer. Penning a song about a woman's lamentation over the loss of her love of a lifetime in city pop key, the song itself got a single release the year after, garnering not that big of a traction with about 10.000 coipes sold as a single. The curious tale of its popularity, however, leaps ahead in time of 30 more years with some spare change, thanks to one of the many copyright-claiming controversies that loom around the users of YouTube (and you can see how we -having to deal with occasional gameplay video removals for songlist pages- take this issue quite highly in consideration!)
In 2017, an anonymous user from the Americas going by the nickname of "Plastic Lover", started uploading on a personal YouTube channel unmonetized videos starring the tracks from the Variety album in custom cuts, driven by the fondness for its personal music-listening discoveries. Among those, the most popular was a custom Plastic Love cut, which managed to attract the most clicks for the correct artist name crediting, as well as a photo of the singer in the thumbnail, snapped by photographer Alan Leverson for another of Mariya's singles. In order to be able to place a trademark on the photo for a project partnership proposal by Warner Records for usage in a Takeuchi-centric project, Leverson was advised by his lawyer to fill a copyright strike on Plastic Lover's video upload, which resulted in the video's removal in 2018 and an enraged Internet mob sending all sorts of slurs on him for the act. Upon coming into a mutual agreement with Plastic Lover, who credited Alan Leverson as the image's producer, the video was soon reuploaded, but by the time this story was brewing behind the scenes, many an Internaute took the reins on their hands to reupload the song in all sorts of custom photo collages, Plastic Love covers and all sorts of mem-oriented productions! For those who are further interested in this unique story, both the nicknamed Plastic Lover and Leverson were interviewed on the matter, resulting in the following article on Pitchfork.com (link).
Even-note small clusters are the bread and butter of this old-styled Oni notechart, hiding within its notes a notable digit-repeating counter not at the usual note amount but at its density, clocking at a clean 3.33 hits/second.
