Midsummer Madness – 88 Rising

This week, I’m going to be recommending a specific song. I’ve recently been obsessed with this song, and it always gets stuck in my head. The song is Midsummer Madness by 88 Rising. My main reason for writing about this is because it seems like barely anyone has heard of this song (despite it having 81 million listens on Spotify) or the group 88 Rising, so today I am here to educate you all. 

88 Rising is really cool and unique because they aren’t actually a group or band. They are a bunch of solo artists that come together under the name 88 Rising and create songs/albums. 88 Rising is the name of the record label that manages all of these artists, and it’s a pretty new company founded in 2015 by Sean Miyashiro. It began as a music collective and management company that just contacted a bunch of up and coming artists they discovered through the internet. To me, the most interesting part of 88 Rising is that they are comprised of mostly Asian American artists. It is pretty rare to see an Asian American in today’s music, so it was really nice to see this kind of Asian representation. Sean Miyashiro has said that one of his goals for their music group is to represent Asian immigrants and all immigrants in general. I think this idea of hand picking and finding artists, then putting all of them together is so genius and out of the box. This unique concept is probably my favorite part about 88 Rising as a whole.

I recommend you give their album a listen, especially Midsummer Madness because that’s my personal favorite. Other songs that I like from that album include, I Want In, Head in the Clouds, and History. Their songs fit into the mainstream music that is playing on the radio today. So if you aren’t into the popular rap type of music, it might not be your cup of tea. However, because there are so many different artists on one album, there are so many different kinds of songs as well. That is what sets 88 Rising apart from others.