Buried in the archives of the hyper-positive '80s Japanese commercials, a music mystery unravels, featuring UFOs and cigarettes.
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At the end of each month, Afterglow presents a staff-picked list of new albums and singles that left a lasting impression on our ears.
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25 years later, a consensus is growing that Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now, was too harshly criticized on its initial release. Was Be Here Now a good album that was unfairly maligned, or was its criticism well-deserved? Could it have been both?
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“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to witness.”
At the core of “Dune” is an atmosphere of mystery, and the score behind Denis Villeneuve’s latest adaptation helps the film translate this sense of ambiguity not simply into a visual experience, but into a sweeping sonic landscape.
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Can they be ridiculous sometimes? Sure, but Japanese animation wouldn’t be the same without the excessive positivity of its opening music. It’s nice to walk around with a bit of cheesy optimism sometimes.
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At the end of each month, Afterglow presents a staff-picked list of new albums and singles that left an impression on our ears.
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If there’s one thing that got us through the (continued) hellscape that was 2021, it was music. Afterglow’s Editorial Staff revisits their favorite albums that softened the blow.
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Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill was released 35 years ago last month. Though an undeniably seminal work, and a part of a process that saw the growth of hip-hop’s popularity, some questions about its continued relevance continue to crop up: What did the growth it brought about entail, and what does Licensed to Ill say about that process?
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Enamoring a generation of listeners who have never experienced the 1980s, Japanese city pop creates a mysterious link to the past for its present-day fans. Its ability to evoke nostalgia for a world they never lived in is a curiosity that can possibly be explained in three ways, each personal to me.
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At the end of each month, Afterglow presents a staff-picked list of new albums and singles that left an impression on our ears.
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The conspiracy theory that K-Pop is carefully-orchestrated national propaganda from the Korean government is growing in popularity. Not only is this idea untrue, it is also potentially dangerous.
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Even after decades of professional management, football clubs are still grounded in the communities of their birth, not their billionaire owners. There’s no better proof of that than football chants.
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Eighteen years after Leslie Cheung’s untimely death, his music and the pop culture of 1980s Hong Kong seem more relevant than ever.
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A huge chunk of K-pop disappeared from Spotify due to a licensing dispute between the streaming platform and the Korean tech giant, Kakao. Spotify won.
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The MiniDisc, or MD, was a marvel of engineering that made sharing music easier than ever. And yet, this is probably the first time you’ve heard of it.
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It’s fair to say that the reception to “Cyberpunk 2077,” the biggest video game release of 2020, has been… mixed. While many parts of the game fall flat, “Cyberpunk 2077” gets one thing very right — the aural aesthetic of Cyberpunk.
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The country’s music serves as a beacon of freedom, but not even that is safe from its cynicism.
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