Plastic Love lives here, but its author has more than one room.
There is a small joke in the fate of an album called VARIETY when it becomes shorthand for a single atmosphere. Mariya Takeuchi released this Moon-era record in 1984, writing all its lyrics and music, with Tatsuro Yamashita producing. That division of labor deserves to precede the adjectives usually attached to a classic. Here is a collection made by a songwriter in collaboration with a producer, rather than an anonymous image of urban sophistication available for any convenient use.
Plastic Love belongs to the collection, alongside such titles as Mou Ichido and Merseybeat de Utawasete. Entering through the most familiar song is perfectly reasonable. Treating the entrance as the entire premises is something else. The variety promised by the title need not require a separate genre label for every track. It can mean something more basic: the same writer is allowed more than one manner of address. Authorship is not merely an honorary description here. It is a name occupying the practical columns for words and music.
Those credits also complicate an easy version of the imagined city, in which a woman supplies the attractive voice while the real construction happens elsewhere. A record can emerge from distinct, shared responsibilities without turning either participant into decoration. To discuss collaboration well is to preserve what each collaborator did. To discuss an era well is to keep its broad atmosphere from swallowing the particular work of making things. The singer in front of the record and the writer inside its credits are the same person.
Returning to VARIETY is consequently not a campaign against a familiar song. It is an attempt to restore that song’s neighbors. An album allows different titles, scales, and narrative positions to coexist; a listener can enter through one doorway and discover others. Its most durable variety may be the right of a songwriter not to be reduced to a single mood. A City Pop map that marks only the brightest window has not finished drawing the street. The track list invites us to walk a little farther and test how fully the album earns its name.