I just wanted to say I couldn’t have said it better.
You make it sound so simple. And your description is probably pretty close to how I would have defined it.
My only problem is that in the late 70s early 80s, I kept hearing the term used to describe synth dance groups: Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran; pop: Cyndi Lauper, Go-Gos, INXS, dBs; or simply groups that were otherwise hard to categorize: Men Without Hats, Devo.
But I’ve never been very much for “naming” music or artists - especially as the categories get ever smaller.
If you feel yourself missing new wave, check out one of my favorite subgenres of music: Dance Punk. There’s a list of artists here.
I pulled the following from here:
*Movements and styles such as Synthpop (Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Human League, Soft Cell) and New Romantic (Ultravox, Visage, Classix Nouveaux, Spoons, Peter Godwin, early Talk Talk) were, to many, the defining styles of new wave. Gary Numan’s “Cars,” Soft Cell’s stark electronic take on “Tainted Love,” and The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” helped push this new futuristic synthesizer-driven sound into the US mainstream. New romanticism, on the other hand, never managed much of an impression in the US—it remained very much a European (and Canadian) movement. Despite the general inadequacy of pigeonholing, there were the other requisite, defining styles from the era: Goth (Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Cure, Specimen, Bauhaus), Postpunk (The Chills, Gang of Four, The Sound, Joy Division, Comsat Angels), Ska (Madness, The Specials, The English Beat, The Untouchables, Bad Manners), Rockabilly (Dave Edmunds, Stray Cats, Polecats, The Cramps), and Power Pop (The Vapors, The Producers, 20/20, The Records). And still that’s only scratching the surface. *
I’m not really sure what they are saying. If only the first 2 “styles” - Synthpop and New Romanticism - are new wave, well, we considered much of that dance music, and they omit a whole bunch of what we thought was definitely new wave. If they are saying all of the styles they list are new wave, well, I have a hard time accepting as a workable definition one that encompasses both Soft Cell and Dave Edmunds. I mean, Dave Edmunds has long been one of my all time faves, but never for a second did I think of him as the same style as Gang of Four.
Hey, Nick was (& is) The Jesus of Cool!
Old Hippie Fart that I am, the Punk/New Wave era was quite refreshing. At the time I was mostly listening to alt.country & Americana–before those labels were invented–& scorning overblown stadium rock. I may have liked Old Farts like Lowe & Edmunds more than the Sex Pistols–but the kids in the mosh pit needed the noise. (That was me, over by the bar. Dressed in black, talking with the other Old Farts.) But Texas boy Joe Ely toured with the Clash. And The Blasters came out of LA…
As a woman, I got off to the attitude shown by Blondie, the Pretenders, Romeo Void & Marianne Faithful.
Categories suck.
Another good punk book: From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin.
And I agree with WordMan – Blondie are punk in the musical history sense of the word, but don’t sound punk the way we think of it now.
Totally different head, man. Totally.
I really enjoyed that book too - It does a great job of describing the Cleveland music scene and its contributions to early punk…
And **Dinsdale ** - I can pretty easily parse the paragraph you quote in your thread - but am limited on time right now. The bottom line is that Punk’s biggest effect, at its heart within music, was to rip things up and start again. In its way, it was a second Big Bang, after the first Big Bang in the 50’s. All sorts of musical styles emerged, blended together, or were reinvigorated by the return-to-rebellion that punk represented.
Before punk, there was a British movement called Pub Rock, that featured Nick Lowe in the band Brinsley Schwarz. When punk exploded, pub rock faded a bit - but Elvis Costello had Lowe produce his albums (and covered What’s So Funny, which was originally done by Brinsley). Nick Lowe also teamed up with Dave Edmunds and the other two guys (Bremner and someone?) to form Rockpile - which took rockabilly but infused it with a bit of punk’s rebellion…
You see where I am going? The point is that the New Romantics, Synthpoppers, rockabilly dudes, etc. all emerged from punk’s big bang(let) and then grew, evolved and overlapped from there…
I just like classifying music so I can find similar sounding artists on my iPod quickly. I generally, but not always, defer to the classifications and definitions established by allmusic.com or Wikipedia.
“New Wave”, IMHO, is kind of a transitional genre where 70s Punk (Sex Pistols), Pop (Madonna), Reggae (Bob Marley) and College Rock (which would eventually become Alternative Rock) (REM, U2) converged in the 80s. In includes and is intermingled with subgenres like Ska (The English Beat), Synth Pop (New Order), Dance Rock (INXS) and so on.
The consummate New Wave band IMHO would be The Police. Punk influenced with a touch of reggae, radio friendly and you can dance to it.
I only know Blondie’s major singles so admittedly I’m a bit ignorant as to their overall sound. As I feel their sound is closer to The Police than The Ramones AND that they have hit radio singles in the first place, I would have to rule they be classified as New Wave, not Punk.
See, this is the part I don’t get. You don’t define a subculture by what it isn’t doing. You define it by what it is doing. Just saying that, “hey man, they were all doing different stuff” doesn’t make it a subculture, it makes it a bunch of people doing it different stuff.
The Talking Heads weren’t doing what the punk bands were doing. Neither was, I’m pretty much sure on this, Blondie. Just because they were playing music that was different or doing different things than the mainstream doesn’t make them punk.
If you were softer than the Ramones, you weren’t playing punk music. I’m sorry but I have to draw the line somewhere. I’m drawin it at the Ramones and let’s be honest, even that is being very kind.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t make sense and I must disagree - obviously, YMMV.
WE didn’t define the punk subculture - the punks did! When the members of Television approached Hilly Kristal to play at his Country Blue Grass and Blues club in the Bowery (which is how CBGB’s got it’s name), a bunch of friends hung out together. At the same time, 3 guys got together and started a magazine called Punk and they were plastering downtown with flyers. The friends in the various bands were, at the beginning, the only folks going to CBGB’s - Television would play with the Ramones and Patti Smith and Talking Heads watching, then the Heads would play with the others watching, etc. And the Punk magazine guys were part of the scene and wrote about it. It wasn’t until CBGB’s had a “new music” event that got a ton of press attention that punk started to get buzz.
And your statement about being kind by drawing the definition of punk to include the Ramones, well, surprising. Arguably, the Ramones are THE band that exists perfectly at the intersection of the “historical/social” definition of punk vs. the “musicial genre” definition…
Thanks for making my tbr pile that much taller. And thanks for your responses.
Still, it kinda does come down to “I know it when I hear it”, doesn’t it?
You have to remember – I lived through the New Wave. A lot of the term like “synth pop” or New Romantic were coined later (The OED dates “synth pop” from 1982; “New Wave” dates from 1977; “New Romantic” dates from 1980). People then went back and said retroactively, “Oh, that group was doing synthpop back then.”
(BTW, the OED defines “New Wave” as “A style of rock music that emerged in the late 1970s, originally associated with punk rock but typically less aggressive in performance and musically more melodic and experimental, often characterized by spare guitar lines and an edgy vocal delivery.”)
But in the late 70s, New Wave was a particular type of music. Punk was hard, loud, and fast; New Wave took that spirit and used more melodic tunes and more synthesizers (though, as the OED indicates, synthesizers weren’t required). New Wave really wasn’t about dancing; it was anti-dance (i.e., disco).
Well, it was anti-disco, but not anti-dance necessarily. I defy you to listen to the B-52’s and not dance.
I don’t think so. Even if we accept the well-written explanations above, it seems more like an academic exercise, where the “style” is attributed by “who knew who”, instead of simply “how it sounds.”
Around 78-79 or so, we were listening to a fresh style of music: Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Blondie, the Pretenders, Talking Heads, the Police, Joe Jackson … The links to punk were pretty clear, but the music clearly wasn’t punk. I mean, a neophyte could pretty easily tell any of these bands from the Clash, Sex Pistols, or Ramones - who were also recording at the time - tho they began ever so slightly earlier.
We didn’t know what to call this music, so we decided to use the commercial term New Wave. It served the purpose of distinguishing it from more broadly commercial stuff such as Journey, Styx, Kansas, REO Speedwagon, etc. But it very quickly became obvious that that designation was lacking, as more and more diverse sounds came out, and people kept asking, “Is this New Wave?”
It really was amazing how often people asked what was or wasn’t new wave. No one knew. I think mainly because it was primarily used as a marketing label. In my mind, if people can’t reach some basic agreement as to what a style is, well, calling it a style has limited use.
In my mind, “New Wave” pretty much simply referred to new music from a relatively brief period - say 78-80, that was not entirely commercial. And I’d probably draw a pretty broad brush for music that was released right around there. But then cut it off pretty quickly. After 1980 or so, I think whatever New Wave might have been, it morphed out into diverse new categories.
But it does makes sense. I don’t define a goth girl by the fact that she doesn’t wear overalls and sundresses. Alot of girls don’t wear those, so as a descriptor it’s not very useful. She’s a member of the goth subculture precisely because she wears heavy eyeliner and is pretentious and never shuts up about death and being a vampire and death. What she does is what defines her subculture, not what she doesn’t do.
It sounds like what you’re describing is some NY zine’s definition of punk being whatever they thought was local and cool and alt at the time. I guess that’s as fair as anything else, but for over 30 years most people have known that punk is a musical style that sounds nothing like New Wave, because those two genres have nothing in common except time frame, use of some of the same instruments and the bands knowing each other from back in the day. Even to the degree they have a common root doesn’t make them both punk, anymore than Motown is the blues because they both draw from the same African musical influences. Motown wasn’t the blues, and it didn’t matter how many of them came from the South, or might have called themselves bluesmen, or how much the blues might have informed the music.
At the time, the difference was obvious: no one could ever mistake the slow wicked slide of real East Texas steel guitar with some slicked-up, processed-for-whitey Berry Gordy production. By the same token, no one could ever confuse the awesomely ferocious energy of California punk scene with Byrne’s refined, ironically modernist lyrics.
But in retrospect maybe we pretend the vocabulary wasn’t there to avoid calling it like it was then and is now: Talking Heads, not punk. Maybe because we see punk and hardcore as more artisitically legitimate than studio-made New Wave stuff. But just because the Heads jammed with the Ramones doesn’t make them punk. Just because they shared an audience, or because other people called the Heads punk doesn’t make it so. They’re defined but what they actually did. If people called them punk for lack of a better word, that’s a misidentification.
In fact, if you think about it, the idea obscures Byrne’s contributions considerably. He was a real genius, not just someone trying to be the next Joey Ramone. Who had heard of samba back then? ‘World music’ didn’t even really exist yet. Byrne was a savage space cadet.
But he just was not a punk rocker.
That’s a great book. I didn’t like the stuff about Jim Morrison though.
I agree with what you’re saying in this thread.