New Wave Popular Songs
Kathy Douds
New wave is a music genre that encompasses pop-oriented styles from the 1970s through the 1980s. It is considered a lighter and more melodic "broadening of punk culture".[4] It was originally used as a catch-all for the various styles of music that emerged after punk rock.[29][30] Later, critical consensus favored "new wave" as an umbrella term involving many contemporary popular music styles, including synth-pop, alternative dance and post-punk.[14][31][30] The main new wave movement coincided with late 1970s punk and continued into the early 1980s.[31]
New wave commercially peaked from the late 1970s into the early 1980s with numerous major musicians and an abundance of one-hit wonders. MTV, which was launched in 1981, heavily promoted new-wave acts, boosting the genre's popularity in the United States.[30] In the UK, new wave faded at the beginning of the 1980s with the emergence of the New Romantic movement.[31] In the US, new wave continued into the mid-1980s but declined with the popularity of the New Romantic, new pop, and new music genres.[32][33] Since the 1990s, new wave resurged several times with the growing nostalgia for several new-wave-influenced musicians.[34][35][36]
New wave music encompassed a wide variety of styles that shared a quirky, lighthearted, and humorous tone[37] that were popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[4] New wave includes several pop-oriented styles from this time period.[4] Common characteristics of new wave music include a humorous or quirky pop approach, the use of electronic sounds, and a distinctive visual style in music videos and fashion.[30] According to Simon Reynolds, new wave music had a twitchy, agitated feel. New wave musicians often played choppy rhythm guitars with fast tempos; keyboards, and stop-start song structures and melodies are common. Reynolds noted new-wave vocalists sound high-pitched, geeky, and suburban.[38]
As new wave originated in Britain, many of the first new wave artists were British.[39] These bands became popular in America, in part, because of channels like MTV, which would play British new wave music videos because most American hit records did not have music videos to play. British videos, according to head of S-Curve Records and music producer Steve Greenberg, "were easy to come by since they'd been a staple of UK pop music TV programs like Top of the Pops since the mid-70s."[40] This rise in technology made the visual style of new wave musicians important for their success.
A nervous, nerdy persona was a common characteristic of new wave fans, and acts such as Talking Heads, Devo, and Elvis Costello.[41] This took the forms of robotic dancing, jittery high-pitched vocals, and clothing fashions that hid the body such as suits and big glasses.[42] This seemed radical to audiences accustomed to post-counterculture genres such as disco dancing and macho "cock rock" that emphasized a "hang loose" philosophy, open sexuality, and sexual bravado.[43]
New wave may be seen as an attempt to reconcile "the energy and rebellious attitude of punk" with traditional forms of pop songwriting, as seen in the rockabilly riffs and classic craftsmanship of Elvis Costello and the 1960s mod influences of the Jam.[44][31] Paul Weller, who called new wave "the pop music of the Seventies",[45] explained to Chas de Whalley in 1977:
Although new wave shares punk's do-it-yourself artistic philosophy, the musicians were more influenced by the light strains of 1960s pop while opposed to mainstream "corporate" rock, which they considered creatively stagnant, and the generally abrasive and political bents of punk rock.[5] In the early 1980s, particularly in the United States, notable new wave acts embraced a crossover of pop and rock music with African and African-American styles. Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, both acts with ties to former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, used Burundi-style drumming.[47] Talking Heads' album Remain in Light was marketed and positively reviewed as a breakthrough melding of new wave and African styles, although drummer Chris Frantz said he found out about this supposed African influence after the fact.[48] As the decade continued, new wave elements would be adopted by African-American musicians such as Grace Jones, Janet Jackson, and Prince,[49] who in particular used new wave influences to lay the groundwork for the Minneapolis sound.[50]
The Velvet Underground have also been heralded for their influence on new wave, post-punk and alternative rock.[51][52] Roxy Music were also influential to the genre as well as the works of David Bowie, Iggy Pop[53] and Brian Eno.[54]
The term "new wave" is regarded as so loose and wide-ranging as to be "virtually meaningless", according to the New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock.[55] It originated as a catch-all for the music that emerged after punk rock, including punk itself,[30] in Britain. Scholar Theo Cateforis said that the term was used to commercialize punk groups in the media:
Between 1976 and 1977, the terms "new wave" and "punk" were used somewhat interchangeably.[33][62] Music historian Vernon Joynson said new wave emerged in the UK in late 1976, when many bands began disassociating themselves from punk.[9] That year, the term gained currency when it appeared in UK punk fanzines such as Sniffin' Glue, and music weeklies such as Melody Maker and New Musical Express.[63] In November 1976, Caroline Coon used Malcolm McLaren's term "new wave" to designate music by bands that were not exactly punk but were related to the punk-music scene.[64] The mid-1970s British pub rock scene was the source of many of the most-commercially-successful new wave acts, such as Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Eddie and the Hot Rods, and Dr. Feelgood.[65]
In the US, Sire Records chairman Seymour Stein, believing the term "punk" would mean poor sales for Sire's acts who had frequently played the New York club CBGB, launched a "Don't Call It Punk" campaign designed to replace the term with "new wave".[66] Because radio consultants in the US had advised their clients punk rock was a fad, they settled on the new term. Like the filmmakers of the French New Wave movement, after whom the genre was named, new wave bands such as Ramones and Talking Heads were anti-corporate and experimental. At first, most American writers used the term "new wave" exclusively in reference to British punk acts.[67] Starting in December 1976, The New York Rocker, which was suspicious of the term "punk", became the first American journal to enthusiastically use the term, at first for British acts and later for acts associated with the CBGB scene.[63] The music's stripped-back style and upbeat tempos, which Stein and others viewed as a much-needed return to the energetic rush of rock and roll and 1960s rock that had dwindled in the 1970s with progressive rock and stadium spectacles, attracted them to new wave.[68][page needed]
The term "post-punk" was coined to describe groups who were initially considered part of new wave but were more ambitious, serious, challenging, darker, and less pop-oriented.[according to whom?] Some of these groups later adopted synthesizers.[69] While punk rock wielded a major influence on the popular music scene in the UK, in the US it remained a fixture of the underground.[68]
By the end of 1977, "new wave" had replaced "punk" as the term for new underground music in the UK.[63] In early 1978, XTC released the single "This Is Pop" as a direct response to tags such as "new wave". Songwriter Andy Partridge later stated of bands such as themselves who were given those labels; "Let's be honest about this. This is pop, what we're playing ... don't try to give it any fancy new names, or any words that you've made up, because it's blatantly just pop music. We were a new pop group. That's all."[70] According to Stuart Borthwick and Ron Moy, authors of Popular Music Genres: an Introduction, the "height of popularity for new wave" coincided with the election of Margaret Thatcher in spring 1979.[71]
In the early 1980s, new wave gradually lost its associations with punk in popular perception among some Americans. Writing in 1989, music critic Bill Flanagan said; "Bit by bit the last traces of Punk were drained from New Wave, as New Wave went from meaning Talking Heads to meaning the Cars to Squeeze to Duran Duran to, finally, Wham!".[72] Among many critics, however, new wave remained tied to the punk/new wave period of the late 1970s. Writing in 1990, the "Dean of American Rock Critics" Robert Christgau, who gave punk and new wave bands major coverage in his column for The Village Voice in the late 1970s, defined "new wave" as "a polite term devised to reassure people who were scared by punk, it enjoyed a two- or three-year run but was falling from favor as the '80s began."[73]
Lester Bangs, another critical promoter of punk and new wave in the 1970s, when asked if new wave was "still going on" in 1982, stated that "The only trouble with New Wave is that nobody followed up on it ... But it was really an exciting burst there for like a year, year and a half."[74] Starting around 1983, the US music industry preferred the more generic term "new music", which it used to categorize new movements like new pop and New Romanticism.[75] In 1983, music journalist Parke Puterbaugh wrote that new music "does not so much describe a single style as it draws a line in time, distinguishing what came before from what has come after."[39] Chuck Eddy, who wrote for The Village Voice in the 1980s, said in a 2011 interview that by the time of British new pop acts' popularity on MTV, "New Wave had already been over by then. New wave was not synth music; it wasn't even this sort of funny-haircut music. It was the guy in the Boomtown Rats wearing pajamas."[76] Similarly in Britain, journalists and music critics largely abandoned the term "new wave" with the rise of synth-pop.[77] According to authors Stuart Borthwick and Ron Moy, "After the monochrome blacks and greys of punk/new wave, synth-pop was promoted by a youth media interested in people who wanted to be pop stars, such as Boy George and Adam Ant".[71]
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