Making a case for new wave

People often ask me what it is that makes me a fan of new wave. This is a fair question, especially since, before I got into college and got exposed to the wonders of 80s night clubbing, I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to anything released in the 1980s. It’s a question I’ve put some thought into, but I still don’t know if I have a satisfactory answer. First and foremost I like it because it’s catchy. I’m a singer, and I make no apologies for being intensely drawn to melodies, which new wave music has in spades. Pop songs are extremely difficult to do well, and part of the mark of a good pop artist is the ability to make it seem easy, effortless, and fun. The surface of a good pop song is so shiny and attractive that it’s easy to disregard the work that went into it on a deeper level. New wave artists excel in this, which plays a large part in why they’re not often taken seriously. The music’s fun. It’s catchy. You can dance to it. These are all reasons why I like it, but they’re also reasons why not many people want to give the genre any respect.

On another level, I love new wave because it’s full of contradiction. It’s pop music whose seeming mindlessness actually belies a deeper social consciousness. It’s music for people who are confused about the world and about their place in it, but who insist on having a good time anyway. New wavers perhaps aren’t as overtly angry as punk rockers, but they do share a lot of the same misgivings about the society around them and they do have something to say. Punk, generally, embraced nihilism. New wave was a more cynical music. Punk wanted to destroy the future; new wave knew it could not stop it from coming, but it was going to party anyway. That contradiction is what first drew me to the music. I remember dancing in my patented Molly-Ringwald-being-chased-by-bees style to the music pumping out at ludicrous volumes from the club speakers and thinking ‘this is some of the saddest happy music I’ve ever heard’. The tension created by these differences—dark lyrics and dark subjects layered over exuberant melodies and rhythms—began to convince me that there was more to new wave than I had previously thought.

On the whole, new wave has yet to be really looked at and appreciated in the way that, say, the 50s rock n roll or 60s psychedelic movements are now, and I think that’s due to a.) the fact that there hasn’t been all that much time for retrospection and people are still coming to grips with things that happened in the 1980s, and b.) most people (academics especially) don’t realize that new wave actually has a lot to say about where it comes from and who it’s for. This will come in time, I hope. And, of course, I hope to be one of the ones bringing these things about.