In the Name of Love

"In the Name of Love" demonstrates why Tatsuro Yamashita became the defining voice of Japanese city pop — a genre that takes the formal grammar of American AOR and soul production and inflects it with a specifically Japanese emotional restraint that paradoxically makes the music more affecting, not less. The production locates itself in a particular late-1970s sonic territory: fretless bass, electric piano running through chorus effects, and guitar tones that carry the clean, slightly compressed warmth of West Coast studio recordings. Yamashita's vocals carry an earnestness that Japan's music industry rarely permitted in more commercial contexts — he is not performing romantic feeling so much as inhabiting it, his phrasing suggesting someone for whom these words are not performance but testimony. The lyrical content, as with much city pop, concerns itself with the specific emotional textures of urban romantic life: the city at night, the possibility of connection across loneliness, love as both refuge and risk. Best heard through good headphones in the late afternoon when the light is changing and the day has delivered enough experience to make a song about love feel necessary rather than decorative.