Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Theo Cateforis is Assistant Professor of Music History and Culture in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University.  His research is in the areas of American Music, Popular Music Studies, and Twentieth-Century Art Music. He is editor of the anthology The Rock History Reader.

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ARE WE NOT NEW WAVE?

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Contents

Introduction................................................................................................1ONE. Tracking the Tide: The New Wave Washes In and Out......................................................17TWO. The Second British Invasion and Its Aftermath: From New Pop to Modern Rock.............................45THREE. From Neurasthenia to Nervousness: The Whiteness of the New Wave......................................71FOUR. Camp! Kitsch! Trash! New Wave and the Politics of Irony...............................................95FIVE. "(I Wish It Could Be) 1965 Again": Power Pop and the Mining of Rock's Modern Past.....................123SIX. "Roll Over Guitar Heroes, Synthesizers Are Here ..."...................................................151SEVEN. Kings of the Wild Frontier...........................................................................182EPILOGUE: The New Wave Revival..............................................................................217Notes.......................................................................................................225Bibliography................................................................................................257Index.......................................................................................................277

Chapter One

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines a new wave as "a movement, trend, or vogue, as in art, literature, or politics, that breaks with traditional concepts, values, techniques, or the like." There are numerous examples that fit this bill, ranging from the 1960s new wave of British theater and the influential early 1980s New Wave of British Heavy Metal to, of course, the music that serves as the subject of this very book. Regardless of how or where one encounters a "new wave," its signifying power traces back to the phrase's original etymology, that of the late 1950s French cinematic new wave.

In 1957, Françoise Giroud, the editor of the French cultural magazine L'Express coined the nouvelle vague (new wave) to describe a group of young filmmakers that she saw as poised on the edge of a cinematic revolution. While the French directors who would become known as the core of the new wave—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and others—neither accepted nor promoted the label themselves, there nonetheless was a common cause that united their works. They were all critics, students of film, who had grown dissatisfied with the homogeneity and standardized division of labor typified by the era's major international studio productions. Because movies at that time were bound to relatively conventional narrative practices, they believed filmmaking had failed to achieve its full potential as an art form. Only if directors were allowed the complete control and freedom of an auteur, they argued, could films approach the more fluid, rapid motion of poetic discourse and language. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960) achieved international critical acclaim, and soon after new wave became a ubiquitous neologism. It has since been a label borrowed many times over to signify a collective group committed to realizing afresh the means of an artistic medium.

A concept like new wave, however, does not simply materialize out of thin air, and one can locate numerous historical and cultural precedents that anticipated the term's entrance into the language. One might point, for example, to the Ars Nova as an early example of a musical new wave. Originally a term found in the fourteenth-century writings and teachings of Philippe de Vitry and other French composers, Ars Nova was adopted by twentieth-century music historians to denote the institution of new music codifications in the 1320s and the subsequent flowering of French polyphony. Granted this status, the Ars Nova has come to signify not only a movement, but, metonymically, an entire historical epoch. A new wave need not always be so large, though. It can also be a more ephemeral "trend" or "vogue." One might consider the fashion industry and its waves of rapid turnover as a cultural practice dictated by this type of new wave. Newness, here, is written into the succession of competitive designs, such as Christian Dior's extravagant, controversial postwar new look, whose "huge, swirling skirts" and "cantilevered bust" revolutionized 1950s women's fashion before succumbing to the next stylish vogue. While both these examples antedate the first known appearances of the term new wave, they share a theme central to the majority of its subsequent usages: a "new wave" serves as a shorthand for a pivotal turning point, and a progressive, modern change away from entrenched standards.

Throughout the 1960s, the new wave worked its way into all types of settings. It provided the title for a 1962 Dizzy Gillespie album and popped up again in the 1965 free jazz compilation The New Wave in Jazz, featuring the experimental works of John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and others. In 1967 a singer-songwriter duo even released an album of conventional soft pop under the misleading moniker of the new wave. Over the years, the application of the new wave label has expanded far beyond these initial uses, drawing the new wave well outside the realm of the arts. A Google search for new wave, for example, returns over 55 million hits, many of them referring to high-tech businesses, such as New Wave Communications and New Wave Research, that draw on the label's cutting-edge connotations. Still other listings refer to innovative products such as New Wave Chess & Checkers, a game board made unique by its lightweight insertable "3-D" player pieces. The game's creator, Paradoxy Products, was so smitten with its revolutionary design that they even placed the title "New Wave" under trademark. In every instance the use of a new wave sets apart the object as something fresh, exciting, and utterly modern.

Not all new waves come by their name as easily as the Chess & Checkers game, however, and in this chapter and the following one we will see precisely how convoluted a path the new wave label traveled as it wound its way through the music industry from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. Through this roughly decade-long period, a series of new waves would repeatedly rise and fall in brief two- to three-year chunks. Rock critic Greg Shaw, whom we will encounter again in chapter 5, often contended that rock's history could be broken down into precisely such a succession of short cycles, and in many respects new wave's repeated ebb and flow would seem to support his theory. After new wave's initial appearance as part of the original mid-1970s British punk movement, the label was continually reinvented, and in some instances renamed, to designate a "new" flurry of musical activity. Whether it served as a rallying point or an object of derision, the new wave nearly always found itself at the center of some contested territory. And at each turn, its appearance raised the inevitable query: what does it mean to be "new"?

In order to address this question, I approach new wave as a cultural formation, one defined by an interaction of musical production, music industry practices, and critical...