New Wave

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. more...

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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 practised. 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 Invasions 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, Blondie, Television, Patti Smith, The Jam, The B-52's, Devo, Elvis Costello, and Tubeway Army, among others, were called "New Wave". However, those artists were all originally classified as punk.

Eventually, the term was 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 (English) Beat, R.E.M. and The Police were equally New Wave, even though these bands would have as little in common as they would with punk bands such as The Clash or The Stranglers.

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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org