New Wave Music

Internet Radio Radio Nigel

"New Wave" is an imperfect name for an outburst of lively music that took place in the early 1980s (and late 1970s), but it's the best name we've got. I am including postpunk and the ska revival in this category (my apologies to those who think that's overly-broad). Some new wave artists made several albums, but overall the genre was based on singles. Many of these singles are now available in CD collections, and hooray for that!

I've put together three new wave pages:

Here's a quick index to the CD compilations:

Looking for more? Tune into Day Glo Radio to hear some of this stuff. The New Wave Outpost is also a great place to look. See especially their '80s Song of the Week!

New Wave and Me

The punk explosion loosened up a number of genres from the stagnancy of the late 1970s. Rock no longer required 20-minute guitar solos by virtuosos, which freed up a lot of garage bands. Pop no longer required 20 engineers to overproduce songs, and was sounding pretty spiffy with the wider availability of less expensive synthesizers. And disco, already collapsing under the weight of its own pomposity, was losing its audience as dancers gravitated towards reggae beats, ska music and to the sounds of spunky amateurs with cheap synthesizers.

A lot of this music had little to do with each other, but at some point somebody came up with the vague term "new wave" to describe this loosening phenomenon. Media hacks tried to concoct a trend out of it (as they've done more recently with the term "grunge"), leading many to revile the term, but like I said up there at the top of the page, it's the best we've got.

I once lived on a steady diet of AOR (Album-Oriented Rock -- what's called "Classic Rock" these days), but I knew something was in the air when the radio stations started playing "Roxanne" by the Police, "Good Times Roll" by the Cars, "Take Me To The River" by Tvlking Hevds, and Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" These songs grabbed me right by the ears!

Somewhere in there, The B-52's played on Saturday Night Live. I remember watching it with a bunch of my friends, who immediately split into two side: those who loved them and those who hated them. Guess which side I ended up on? :-)

When I picked up and moved to Massachusetts, I had to grapple with one of the most profound social questions of every age: which radio station to listen to. I made my decision when I tuned into WBCN and heard "A Message To You, Rudy" by The Specials. At the time, they were easily the most daring commercial station around, and they introduced me to other 2-Tone artists, the likes of Elvis Costello and Nina Hagen, and all the wonderful Boston bands that were around. And I was on my way ...

('BCN eventually reverted into playing boring rock & heavy metal, ultimately becoming just another boring gosh-aren't-we-hot-because-we-have-Howard-Stern station, so I started listening to college radio and to WFNX, which was staffed by refugees from college radio. These days I mostly stick to college radio.)

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