New wave music
 |
| New Wave | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Punk Rock, Pop, Funk, Disco, Reggae, Ska, Glam Rock |
| Cultural origins | Late 1970s and early 1980s, New York City, Chicago, United Kingdom |
| Typical instruments | Synthesizer - Guitar - Drums & Drum machines - Keyboards - Bass |
| Derivative forms | Electroclash, Bubblegum |
| Subgenres | |
| Electropop - Mod revival - New Romantic - Synthpop SynthPunk (complete list) | |
| Fusion genres | |
| Futurepop - Synthpunk - 2 Tone | |
New Wave is a term that has been used to describe many developments in music, but is most commonly associated with a movement in Western popular music, in the late 1970s and early 1980s inspired by the punk rock movement. The genre was fashionable during the 1980s and became somewhat popular again during the 2000s. New Wave music was initially rock music, with a punk attitude, mixed with other genres such as Funk, Disco, Reggae and Ska.
Overview
The term New Wave itself is a source of much confusion. Originally, Seymour Stein, the head of Sire Records, needed a term by which he could market his newly signed bands, who had frequently played the club CBGB. Because radio consultants in the US had advised their clients that punk rock was a fad (and because many stations that had embraced disco had been hurt by the backlash), Stein settled on the term "new wave." He felt that the music was the musical equivalent of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s. Like those film makers, his new artists (most notably Talking Heads) were anti-corporate, experimental, and a generation that had grown up as critical consumers of the art they now practiced. Thus, the term "new wave" was initially interchangeable with "punk rock". During this period of interchangebility, the "new wave" was seen by many as a third distinct movement in rock music, the Rock and Roll of the 1950s being the "first wave', the British Invasion of the 1960s being the "second wave". This latest "third wave" of the 1970s was then the "new wave".
Very soon, listeners themselves began to see these musicians as different from their compatriots. Music that followed the anarchic garage band ethos of The Ramones (such as the Sex Pistols) was distinguished as "punk", while music that tended toward experimentation, lyrical complexity, or more polished production, such as Talking Heads, The Nerves, Blondie, Paul Collins' Beat, Television, Patti Smith, The Jam, The B-52's, Devo, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson and Tubeway Army, among others, were called "New Wave". However, those artists were all originally classified as punk.
Tom Petty (probably in jest) has taken credit for "inventing" New Wave. In the book Conversations with Tom Petty by Paul Zollo (Omnibus, 2005), he says journalists struggled to define the band, recognising they were not punk rock, but still wanted to identify them with Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols. He also suggests — again, probably half-jokingly — that the song "When the Time Comes" from the You're Gonna Get It! album (1978) "might have started New Wave. Maybe that was the one."
While the late 1970s definition of New Wave remains the interpretation that is generally accepted in the United Kingdom, within the United States the term became applied indiscriminately to any band, with attitude, that did not embrace the simplistic, loud-fast playing style, whether that meant that their sound was reggae, ska, or experimental. Thus, The Police, The Records, R.E.M. and The (English) Beat were equally New Wave, even though these bands had as little in common with each other as they would with punk bands such as The Clash or The Stranglers. In the UK, such bands would not be categorised as New Wave.
Later still, New Wave came to imply a less noisy, more pop sound, and to include acts manufactured by record labels, while the term "post-punk" was coined to describe the darker, less pop-influenced groups. Although distinct, punk, New Wave, and post-punk all shared common ground: an energetic reaction to the supposedly overproduced, uninspired popular music of the 1970s. Many groups fit easily into two or all three of the categories over their lifespan.
When MTV started broadcasting in 1981, New Wave got a boost as many music videos were of this genre. New Wave artists had been innovators in the use of videos to promote themselves in the years prior to MTV by showing them primarily in clubs. Subsequently, New Wave became strongly associated with the decade, often being seen as the quintessential 1980s music.
New Wave is sometimes considered to have died by about 1986, although it still influenced pop music production up to about 1992. In the late 1990s, the Omaha, Nebraska-based band The Faint drew heavily upon New Wave to create its debut album Media, released on Saddle Creek Records in 1998. In the 1990s, the popular band No Doubt drew influence from New Wave. In the first decade of the 21st century, the electroclash scene in Brooklyn and London (at clubs like Nag Nag Nag and Beyond Club) ironically revived the New Wave aesthetic for kids born in the 1980s. Many other indie rock bands re-popularized New Wave sounds as part of the post-punk revival movement with varying success, most popularly The Killers and The Bravery.
New Wave fashion
New Wave is also commonly used to describe the style and fashion associated with New Wave music. Examples include hairstyles of the band A Flock of Seagulls and the Thompson Twins, and Elvis Costello's bi-colored glasses poster. There were several major fashion components of New Wave. There was an eclectic revivalism, which included iconic revival fashions of the 1950s and 1960s. Examples include thin neckties, rockabilly fashions, and mod styles, and Paisley prints from the 1960s.
Another aspect was a desire to embrace contemporary synthetic materials as a protest and celebration of plastic. This involved the use of spandex, bright colors (such as fluorescents), and mass-produced, tawdry jewelry and ornaments. As a fashion movement, then, New Wave was both a post-modern belief in creative pastiche and a continuation of Pop Art's satire and fascination with manufacturing.
New wave fashion also drew heavily from similairly iconic fashions from more current musical movements. Punk rock had an early influence on the wild hair, garish colors and disposable fashions associated with new wave; and many new wave fans also affected a dark, minimalist fashion rooted in the fashions of goth rock, no wave, post punk and other genre only loosely associated with the wider new wave scene. There was a similair fashion give and take between new wave and the more funk/disco oriented dance subculture, as well.
New Wave revivalists are currently very popular in New York, Boston and LA (centering around nightclubs like New York's Misshapes, Boston's Manray nightclub and featured in art and fashion magazines like Visionaire). The style has also recently been a major influence in high fashion, for example in the most recent collections of designers like Scott Gerst and Hedi Slimane.
Media
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New Wave styles
- Electropop
- Mod Revival
- New Romantic
- Power pop
- Rockabilly revival
- Sophisti-pop
- Synthpop
- Synth rock
- La Movida Madrileña