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While I was browsing the future funk subreddit I saw a thread about Lum Invader, and PedalPDX made a really good explanation and thought I would share it with you guys!
"Anyhow, I can't really offer any insight into how it got started (probably someone just made a YouTube video and it caught on from there), but I feel like I can hazard a pretty good guess why. Sonically and thematically, future funk probably draws most heavily from the 80s, right? A huge amount of the samples that serve as the basis for these songs are drawn from either soul/funk or city pop -- in both cases, primarily from the 80s. And in terms of tone/style, it's a very optimistic, dance-y, good times version of the 80s. This isn't the 1980s of the Cold War or Iran-Contra or the AIDS epidemic; it's the day-glo 80s, and in particular the 80s of Japan's bubble economy. It's a very distorted, optimistic remembrance of the 80s (coming, unsurprisingly, from producers that either didn't live in the decade or were too young to remember it).
Lum is a really good visual indicator of that -- Urusei Yatsura's art style has that certain kind of rounded, adorable quality that's synonymous with 80s anime, a style that really fell away in the 90s, when things got a lot harsher and more angular. Just looking at it evokes Japan's economic boom, because Urusei Yatsura emerged arguably in anime/manga's peak years, at least in terms of domestic (and by that I mean Japanese) popularity. Like, folks in Japan were both so wealthy and so into anime that they'd blow, what, the equivalent of $30 on a single episode of an OVA in those days? And Lum is simultaneously sexy, but also kind of innocent -- which again, is in line with future funk's whole ethos."
What are your thoughts?
"Anyhow, I can't really offer any insight into how it got started (probably someone just made a YouTube video and it caught on from there), but I feel like I can hazard a pretty good guess why. Sonically and thematically, future funk probably draws most heavily from the 80s, right? A huge amount of the samples that serve as the basis for these songs are drawn from either soul/funk or city pop -- in both cases, primarily from the 80s. And in terms of tone/style, it's a very optimistic, dance-y, good times version of the 80s. This isn't the 1980s of the Cold War or Iran-Contra or the AIDS epidemic; it's the day-glo 80s, and in particular the 80s of Japan's bubble economy. It's a very distorted, optimistic remembrance of the 80s (coming, unsurprisingly, from producers that either didn't live in the decade or were too young to remember it).
Lum is a really good visual indicator of that -- Urusei Yatsura's art style has that certain kind of rounded, adorable quality that's synonymous with 80s anime, a style that really fell away in the 90s, when things got a lot harsher and more angular. Just looking at it evokes Japan's economic boom, because Urusei Yatsura emerged arguably in anime/manga's peak years, at least in terms of domestic (and by that I mean Japanese) popularity. Like, folks in Japan were both so wealthy and so into anime that they'd blow, what, the equivalent of $30 on a single episode of an OVA in those days? And Lum is simultaneously sexy, but also kind of innocent -- which again, is in line with future funk's whole ethos."
What are your thoughts?
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