This album full of spiritually-minded pop-funk was the product of a pair of teenage artists—vocalist/drummer Chris McDaniels (then 16 years of age) and elder brother, guitarist, producer, and arranger London McDaniels (all of 17 in 1978). The brothers had grown up in Southern California among the music business…
Japanese ambient music grew out of the 1980s “economic miracle” that saw the country undergo massive urban development and industrial expansion, with Tokyo emerging as a global financial and cultural mecca. Hiroshi Yoshimura, a sound designer by trade and a musician since age five, was the defining figure of a close-kept movement he and fellow pioneer Satoshi Ashikawa called “environmental music”…
Four years after the release of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, children in the British Isles were treated to another misleadingly cheerful-looking jaunt through a postlapsarian landscape in Graham Oakley’s 1986 book Henry’s Quest. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the extent to which the British culture of the 1970s and ’80s seemed determined to inculcate feelings of dread and hopelessness in young people, but with its superficially light-hearted tone, Henry’s Quest took a different approach…
Veteran comics writer Larry Hama is best known for his work on Marvel’s G.I. Joe franchise, where he took what could have been a cynical toy line marketing tie-in and created a dynamic and hugely popular universe where salty commandos do battle with snake-themed terrorists in a neverending covert ouroboros of action…
In the almost-two decades between Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999), a particular form of cyberpunk existed across various medias. It was an era in which William Gibson and Bruce Sterling novels reigned supreme, Max Headroom was on the air in America, while the Bubblegum Crisis anime was being produced in Japan…
Fate magazine, born in 1948 at the outset of both the Cold War and the flying saucer era, was a digest-sized periodical dedicated to the exploration of the paranormal. Fate leapt from the fecund imagination of Ray Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories magazine for most of the 1940s…
A little over two years ago, theorist and cultural critic Mark Fisher took his own life at the age of 48. I remember feeling numb at hearing the news; not out of sadness but more a sense of deja vu, of familiarity…
Assassin, spy, organizer of literary journals: Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin could only have been created by the Russian Revolution. An early member of the Cheka, or secret police, Blumkin spent his short life engaging in political conspiracies and travelling the globe…
By The Mutants
Steve Barron may not be a household name, but if you grew up watching MTV in the 1980s, you definitely know his work. Creator of some of the most iconic and memorable images of the music video network’s first five years, Barron was one of the early innovators who turned music video into a real art form…
British folk-rockers Steeleye Span were arguably at the height of their powers and popularity in the mid-1970s, and their television series Electric Folk, broadcast on BBC2 in 1974 and 1975, shows exactly why. The series showcased the band’s blend of traditional British folk music and rock and roll to perfection, with the added bonus of being recorded in some of Britain’s oldest stately manors…
Released respectively in 1976 and 1980, these The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit posters were sold in Athena, the British chain of art retail shops whose best-sellers—including Tennis Girl, also released in 1976, and Syd Brak’s 1982 Long Distance Kiss—were ubiquitous signifiers of the evolving aesthetic and sociological landscape in Britain…
In the late ’70s and afterwards, UFOs hit the big time in pop culture with countless books about abduction experiences, major Hollywood motion pictures, and quickie B-movie documentaries. But before this turn into widespread exposure, ufology was largely a field defined by tightly-circulated, sometimes even self-published, written and photographic evidence…
By Tom G. Wolf
Death is a touchy subject for most people. Intellectually, we know it’s inevitable, and yet it’s almost never discussed—until necessity intervenes. And for those of us who have spent time contemplating how we’ll depart this mortal coil, it tends to be in a fairly hopeful fashion: we’re lucid, surrounded by friends…
One of the most irksome things about my drizzly homeland of the United Kingdom is the widespread domestic habit of mistaking the material benefits of industrial and Colonial wealth, post-war socialism, and a happy lack of mass violence—all of which, for a good half century, guaranteed a relatively safe and stable life, good opportunities to better your lot, free healthcare, welfare, and a relatively graft-free state—for something as ineluctable as rain…
By Jake Pitre
The loss of filmmaker Nicolas Roeg at the age of 90 in November was deeply felt by cinephiles. Roeg was one of the most singular voices in movies for much of the twentieth century, influencing directors as varied as Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. When considering his legacy, it’s worth highlighting his most accomplished decade: the 1970s…
