The Tokyo Pop!

The Tokyo Pop consists of Simon and Peter. We’re friends and we’re trying hard to make some music for you.

AND WE STILL EXIST!!!

History

The Tokyo Pop signs a contract

The Tokyo Pop was formed in 2001 or 2002 (we can’t remember when exactly), when we were in tenth grade. The name was taken from a terrible movie we forced ourselves to watch one night. As you can see in the photo, we signed a contract and shook hands to mark that historic day. We recorded an album featuring seven original songs on Simon’s 4-track in his attic. We managed to finish it during the last week of school in June, 2002. It was called Project Success (named after this public school program we were forced to participate in) and it’s quality is the subject of fierce debate. Some people argue that “it’s not that bad,” while others claim “it’s not that great.” We haven’t made an album since then, but we’ve written a few more songs. You can download them from this very web page! Be sure to check back too—we hope to upload more songs as we write them.

The Name

Simon has succinctly and effectively summed up the story behind our name:

“Tokyo Pop is the boringest movie ever made that was released to the public. It’s story goes like this: a woman is boringly fed up her life in the US, and moves spontaneously to China or Japan, and wanders around for a long time. The movie focuses on boring, mundane things that the girl must do when she first moves there: find a taxi, eat, poop, sleep, find a boring job, walk boringly to boring places. Eventually she meets some band and slowly and boringly integrates herself into the band. She and the lead singer fall in love, but only through a slow process. All of this takes place over about an hour or two. There are little to no funny jokes. After they fall in love, I can’t really remember what happens. I think the two break up and she moves back to the US, and it’s supposed to be a sad ending, but it’s not because it’s so boring. I’ve watched the movie two or three times. The first time I watched it I was probably 12 or 13, and I watched it because it was rated R and I was hoping to see a naked woman. There was no nudity, at least I can’t remember any. If there was, it was probably so boring it would dampen even a 13-year-old’s concrete penis. The second time I watched it as a joke, and I watched it with Peter. It was a challenge to waste our time. We watched it good, and we watched it long. Years or months later we founded a band by the name of Tokyo Pop because it made us laugh for a brief period of time. Several moments later we no longer found it funny.”

Our legal problems and how we fought the system from the outside in, and lost almost immediately

“To our dismay, we found out that Tokyo Pop is a popular anime distributor in Japan or China. Although never contacted by the official Tokyo Pop company, we imagined, through a series of fantasizing sessions, what would happen if the company sued us for using their name. The idea was devastating, and it took us moments to recover. Once recovered, we evaluated our thought processes by weighing in factors with enormous benefits. The results were devastating, but despite controversial feelings, we decided to fight the system in order to keep the name Tokyo Pop. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to contact a Tokyo Pop representative, and we gave up soon after failing. This is why we cannot call ourselves ‘Tokyo Pop’ and must call ourselves ‘The Tokyo Pop’.”

Songs

Each song is available for download in three different audio formats: FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3. We recommend FLAC, since it’s a lossless format and will sound the best. The Tokyo Pop is all about quality. If you have a slower internet connection or prefer a smaller file, try Ogg Vorbis—it’s a better quality format than MP3 and has no patent restrictions. Most people use crappy audio software like iTunes and have crappy portable audio players like iPods though, so for them we’re providing MP3 copies of our songs. If you want an alternative to iTunes, check out these, and also consider installing Rockbox on your iPod.

All songs, photos, writing, and artwork by The Tokyo Pop are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Share them, sell them for millions, do whatever you want with them or to them… just give us credit and keep the copyleft license.

Right-click the link to your preferred audio format next to the song title and choose “Save Link As…” to download.

Finally, the wait is over. Here is Project Success, our first and only album, in all its barely listenable glory. Because we feel that it must be heard as a whole to truly appreciate it, you can download the entire thing as one big ZIP file.

Here’s the tracklist:

  1. Return of Tokyo Pop
  2. Burn Motherfucking Toe-key-ohh
  3. Pop Rules
  4. You’ve Found the Special Prize
  5. I Might Be Gay
  6. I Like How the Movie Never Questions the Fact That He Rocked Hardcore
  7. The Glorious Revolution
The Tokyo Pop in bed