After School / Rambling girls

“Rambling girls” - After School’s latest Japanese single - could very well be the anthem for Asian pop as a whole. A world that’s full of ‘rambling girls’. At least to me as an outsider. You never fully understand what’s going on, but you’re still entranced by their la la la. And so often, suspending belief is the biggest part of truly ‘getting’ Pop. 

“Don’t think, just feel it, la la la”

A simple statement that says so much. An exclamation of freedom - from language, from understanding, from thinking. The best songs often don’t make you think, but feel (as mentioned in a recent post). It’s hard to capture, but they do it here. Latin “On The Floor” style production cranked up times 100 and rolled in sugar meets jingly hip-hop beats sung in Japanese by a Korean girl group, resulting in this oddly “world” sounding song that just couldn’t exist in America or Europe. Even if it sounded the same, it just wouldn’t feel the same as After School’s take. This is an exuberant celebration of life.

The quality of the audio here in the (tacky) video doesn’t fully do justice to how immense this sounds through headphones. The detail in the production during the second verse especially is cracking.