Music Reviews: New Wave

By the time the 1980s rolled around in Japan, rock music had gone through numerous cycles of boom and bust, starting with Beatles-inspired pop in the 1960s (aka “Group Sounds”), to Hendrix-tinged blues covers, to the Japanese language folk rock movement active in the mid 70s. The youth of Japan, now beginning to feel the downstream effects of the postwar economic miracle were clamoring for a new creative artistic movement to supplant the faded glory of globalized... Read More

Immortalized in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 film Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads’ 1983 tour was the theatrical rock tour that ended all theatrical rock tours before it and raised the standard for those following. Choreographed but natural, theatrical but not outlandish, designed but also not, the newly reissued Stop Making Sense still resonates in its societal commentary and continuing influence.