What is New Wave?

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 U.S. 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".

Soon, however, listeners themselves began to differentiate these musicians from "true punks". The music journalist Charles Shaar Murray, in writing about the Boomtown Rats, has indicated that the term New Wave became an industry catch-all for musicians affiliated with the punk movement, but in some way different from it:

The Rats didn’t conform precisely to the notional orthodoxies of punk, but then neither did many other bands at the forefront of what those who were scared of the uncompromising term 'punk' later bowdlerised to New Wave. You weren’t allowed to have long hair! The Ramones did. Guitar solos verboten! The defence calls Television. Facial hair a capital offence! Two members of The Stranglers are in mortal danger. Age police on the prowl for wrinklies on the run! Cells await Ian Dury, Knox from The Vibrators and most of The Stranglers. Pedal steel guitars and country music too inextricably linked with Laurel Canyon coke-hippies and snooze-inducing Mellow Mafia singer/songwriterismo. Elvis Costello, you’re busted.

Music that followed the anarchic garage band ethos of the Sex Pistols was distinguished as "punk", while music that tended toward experimentation, lyrical complexity, or more polished production, was categorised as "New Wave". This came to include musicians who had come to prominence in the British pub rock scene of the mid-1970s, such as Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Eddie and the Hot Rods and Dr Feelgood; acts associated with the New York club CBGBs, such as Television, Patti Smith, and Blondie; and singer-songwriters who were noted for their barbed lyrical wit, such as Elvis Costello, Tom Robinson and Joe Jackson. Furthermore, many artists who would have originally been classified as punk were also termed New Wave. A 1977 Phonogram compilation album of the same name features US artists including the Dead Boys, the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Runaways.

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, as Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Cure and The Psychedelic Furs. 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.

Tom Petty (probably in jest) has taken credit for "inventing" New Wave. He has been quoted as saying that journalists struggled to define his band, The Heartbreakers, recognising they were not punk rock, but still wanting 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."

Definition of New Wave in the United States

Within the United States, the term has since become applied indiscriminately to any band, with attitude, that did not embrace the simplistic, loud-fast playing style, whether that meant that their sound was Disco-inspired, Funk, Reggae, Ska, or Experimental. Thus, The Police, the B-52s, Soft Cell, and Human League are equally considered New Wave, even though certain keyboard-led bands of the early 1980s, such as Devo, Duran Duran and Depeche Mode are considered the most iconic bands of the genre. For many of these bands further less ambiguous labels exist, such as New Romantic, synthpop or power pop.

When MTV started broadcasting in 1981, the music encompassed by this broader definition of New Wave got a boost as many music videos were of this genre. Many of the artists had been innovators in the use of videos to promote themselves in the years prior to MTV by showing them primarily in clubs. The first video aired on MTV was the song Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles, a New Wave classic.

Other bands or performers who were part of the early 1980s New Wave music scene were "pop stars" in England, but failed to find an audience on American FM radio stations. MTV helped introduce New Wave music to America since the bands had already made a video for their British and other European fans. As a result the early MTV years became known as the "Second British invasion".

New Wave revivals

In the early 1990s, the British music weekly NME grouped together a number of guitar-based bands under the unwieldy banner New Wave of New Wave. These groups, including S*M*A*S*H, These Animal Men, Elastica and Echobelly, drew on the aesthetics of 1970s New Wave, including spiky guitars, tight-fitting suits and skinny ties.

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 first decade of the 21st century, the electroclash scene in Brooklyn and London (at clubs like Nag Nag Nag and Beyond Club) revived the synth-pop 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 Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, The Bravery and New Orleans' Mute Math. Other bands who have brought back New Wave music in the new decade have been The Epoxies , The Start , The Sounds as well as the re-union of Squeeze.

New Wave fashion

New Wave fashions were a conscious reaction to the hippie styles of the 1960s, which had spilled over into the mainstream by the late 1970s. Thus, flares and long hair for men were replaced by more body-conscious clothing and shorter, often spiky, hairstyles. The tight-fitting suits and thin ties worn by Blondie on the cover of their album Parallel Lines , long sleeve black and white striped shirts, and tight fitting "pipe" jeans, epitomise the New Wave look, which harks back to the rock and roll styles of the pre-hippie era.

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, typified by the dayglo aesthetic of the band X-Ray Spex. 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. An important offshoot of new wave fashion was the New Romantic movement, which emphasized androgyny and extensive use of synthetic-looking cosmetics for both genders.

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 (ex creative director of Dior Homme.)

Source: Wikipedia