New Wave Style Overview
New Wave Music Description
New wave is a genre of rock music, and a term which became popular in the late 1970s and the early 80s with connections to punk rock, disco, and electronic music. The term refers to the outgrowth from punk combined with the cross-pollination happening in music in the late 70s, when non-mainstream musicians began incorporating a wide range of seemingly disparate sounds with a DIY rawness. Early punk, dub reggae, funk, art rock, glam pop, kraut rock, and experimental electronic music were all very influential on this new wave of rock musicians. For a very short period in the 70s the term was interchangeable with Punk, especially in the US, where the industry was wary of the "punk fad" (Malcolm McLaren described New Wave as simply a means of repackaging the "old wave"). There were also different usages in the UK and the US mainstream media. Some music journalists consider New Wave to be a genre that takes the energy and ethos of Punk and combines it with more sonic and structural experimentation. Still, many consider New Wave to be such a broad umbrella term that it loses any defining power, similar to Alternative Rock which came later. As a result many artists and fans use related subgenres like Synth-Pop, Post-Punk, Goth-Rock, New Romantic, and Dark Wave to point to more specific qualities embodied in the diverse New Wave sound. By the mid 80s the term was less frequently used by both the music industry and journalists, but in the late 1990s and into the 21st century a resurgence and nostalgia for popular 80s music has brought the term back into popular usage.