New Wave Outpost Forum

Not sure if this forum has ever done "greatest hits" lists for subgenres. "New wave/postpunk" includes so much. Off the top of my head:

NW power pop
ska revival
goth and darkwave
mod revival
postpunk funk
no wave
New Pop and synthpop
industrial/EBM
minimal synth

I don't know, might be fun.

Sure...is it greatest hits best of lists or studio lps?

How about songs from the 90's on down that sound like 80's new wave too?

[quote][i]Originally posted by roc51[/i]
<br>Sure...is it greatest hits best of lists or studio lps?
[/quote]

I was thinking greatest hits lists.

Is there going to be a separate category for postpunk as well?

[quote][i]Originally posted by Frank_Chickens[/i]
<br>Is there going to be a separate category for postpunk as well?
[/quote]

Hey Frank. We could do it however we want. Do you have some ideas for categories?

A lot of the problem is semantics. What is new wave and postpunk anyway? I've never answered this question to my satisfaction. In the UK, the term "postpunk" seems to include pretty much everything, including new wave. This seems to be how "Rip It Up And Start Again" uses the term "postpunk." Americans tend to use terms a bit differently.

I tend to think of it like this. "New wave" was originally a marketing term. For something to be new wave, it has to be released somewhere around 1978-1982, and have some popular commercial appeal, i.e., could conceivably have been played on a non-college radio station in the USA. Postpunk doesn't have as much commercial appeal, and may not have any, and is typically darker. That's why I like the term "darkwave" better because it's more specific. Some bands like Devo and Joy Division seem to me primarily postpunk rather than new wave, but against all odds somehow managed to get massive radio hits. So I'd classify them as NW/postpunk. The second wave of MTV bands I tend to think of as New Pop or New Romantics rather than new wave. I don't think of Duran Duran as new wave. There are problems with categorizing things this way, I know. It's still messy. And maybe someone has a better way to do it.

Seems we could do the lists however we wanted so long as we defined our terms so it was reasonably clear which category most songs fell into.

[quote][i]Originally posted by deevo0[/i]

Hey Frank. We could do it however we want. Do you have some ideas for categories?

A lot of the problem is semantics. What is new wave and postpunk anyway? I've never answered this question to my satisfaction. In the UK, the term "postpunk" seems to include pretty much everything, including new wave. This seems to be how "Rip It Up And Start Again" uses the term "postpunk." Americans tend to use terms a bit differently.

I tend to think of it like this. "New wave" was originally a marketing term. For something to be new wave, it has to be released somewhere around 1978-1982, and have some popular commercial appeal, i.e., could conceivably have been played on a non-college radio station in the USA. Postpunk doesn't have as much commercial appeal, and may not have any, and is typically darker. That's why I like the term "darkwave" better because it's more specific. Some bands like Devo and Joy Division seem to me primarily postpunk rather than new wave, but against all odds somehow managed to get massive radio hits. So I'd classify them as NW/postpunk. The second wave of MTV bands I tend to think of as New Pop or New Romantics rather than new wave. I don't think of Duran Duran as new wave. There are problems with categorizing things this way, I know. It's still messy. And maybe someone has a better way to do it.

Seems we could do the lists however we wanted so long as we defined our terms so it was reasonably clear which category most songs fell into.
[/quote]

To me post-punk funk were the environ of bands like 23 Skidoo and the like rather than straight ahead post-punk bands such as Joy Division and Toeeon. The term over here has clearly defined boundaries such as having bleak lyrics with music to match, all done with skeletal production to highlight this. It is not an all-encompassing term.

Your description of new wave is more or less the same one used to describe the first generation of punk here before it was called punk. It also describes a lot of the music from the US in the early 80s too. The closest I would say we ever got to that was with The Mobiles, Horizontal Brain and the Lonely Boys. We tended to favour a more cold production over the warmer US sound.

Post-punk lacked commercial viability here as well and New Romanticism was just the continuation of Glam Rock though infinitely preferable to that <shudder>. As for darkwave, to me it's just goth played on keyboards. The more cold, distant bands could be classed as that but over here that's what people expected synth bands to be (example: The Fast Set - Junction One) so it doesn't really fit in anywhere.

At the end of the day it's just a question of semantics so there's my tuppence worth about it all.

ive tried this at home before and cant even decide what i consider half the songs or bands thus in the end its all new wave as a generic catch all term.

[quote][i]Originally posted by newwavepop[/i]
<br>ive tried this at home before and cant even decide what i consider half the songs or bands thus in the end its all new wave as a generic catch all term.
[/quote]

I know, that's the trouble. I did find one article that made sense to me. After punk died in '78, there were three ways for bands to go: 1. pop (new wave); 2. experimental and iconoclastic (post-punk); 3. punk pushed as far as it would go (hardcore).