A manufactured surface can conceal feeling. It can also give feeling somewhere to live.
Plastic is an odd material for love. It can imitate something expensive or assume a shape that nature never supplied. Considered disposable, it frequently outlasts its owner. The title of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” admits these contradictions into emotional life. Must sincerity arrive entirely unprocessed? Or are manners, practiced expressions, and carefully maintained appearances among the manufactured things that make it possible to venture outside? A polished surface need not indicate that whatever lies beneath it is equally secure.
The song appeared second on VARIETY, released on April 25, 1984. Takeuchi wrote its words and music; Tatsuro Yamashita arranged it. Its position matters. Within an album called VARIETY, one emotional stance need not represent an entire person, much less an entire decade. Other songs remain nearby, suggesting other possible lives. One way to understand urbanity is through this adjacency: people with incompatible histories nevertheless occupying the same stretch of time.
Artificiality also raises a question about popular art. A record is made, and arrangement, recording, and release organize the conditions in which feeling reaches somebody else. To distrust emotion because its presentation is accomplished would be rather like requiring a moving letter to have bad handwriting. Takeuchi’s authorship and Yamashita’s arrangement constitute distinct parts of this making. A stable form can accommodate an unstable feeling without rendering it counterfeit. Craft is sometimes the support that vulnerability requires.
There is, moreover, more than one manufactured object here. A twelve-inch single released on March 25, 1985, offered an extended club mix and a new remix; the album’s 2014 anniversary edition gathered alternative versions as bonus tracks. A song situated within an album could face the world again in another size. Extension and reorganization need not signify increasing distance from an origin. They can reconsider a record’s uses. Duration and circulation help determine what company a song can keep.
Returning to “Plastic Love” need not begin with longing for an eighties life one never lived. A nearer approach is the everyday maintenance of a presentable self: finding a usable manner when private experience has become untidy. Plastic can hide something, but it can also hold something together. The title remains interesting because it leaves both possibilities available, declining to make authenticity a simple test of materials.