What killed New Wave???

[korova1]

Money. Just like everything else it touches.

[BigManRestless]

Live Aid.

[Screen 13]

The three past posts together do make for a very convincing short answer.

Ran It's Course - Added with the Disappointing albums and company-forced decisions to try to break a band by forcing the CEO's thoughts into the music with no regard for the actual fans (Who hardly count in the eyes of the business, anyways) or the musicians (Who are usually seen as just regular employees), those who were "Growing Out of Listening to the music" pretty much made their mark to split out of the party. Always happens in the Mainstream.

Money - Once the industry knew how to handle the "Rock Video Generation" and playing the scorched earth policy of rule it all, many certainly looked to Madonna as a model to base their Pop Scene on...while skipping over the important ingredient of good songs, which admittedly she had plenty of in a very low-IQ kind of way. This certainly meant pushing aside many bands and singers out of the promotional focus. With a lot of Video Vixens topping the scene (or at least those attractive enough to be the "lite" version of the playlist), Hair Metal was the Male side of this. All of this aided the companies once MTV finally conquered the Midwest and Desert areas, where anything "different" was rejected right off the bat from it's mainstream. They finally got back (and more) the money and the status they started to lose around '80, where they played the beggar and went for anything under the sun to make the industry look like it was active after the fall of Disco and the rise of boring MOR made the industry look very square (as it really was, anyways).

Live Aid - The Big Event, and the mark where some of the music scene had to be "Meaningful" to make an impact...otherwise known as the U2 factor. Like Madonna's dominating of Mainstream Pop, U2 did for Rock in the Late 80's, and once again with the lack of the actual good songs. Instructions: just put that guitar on Mega-Echo while you play that string, get the Drummer to play a BIG SOUND, and have the singer shout out about who sad the state of the world with lyrics that still sound like "I want you, Baby. but now I really care and I now know what love is" in a way that made Bono sound as thought-provoking as Jello Biafra, while some Producer creates a sound that made Phil Spector's Wall of Sound appear Lo-Fi Punk by comparison. Having it sound perfect for the then-growing CD market was also a plus to them. The Results: like Live Aid, you felt serious one second...and then a curious empty feeling grows.

There are more thoughts, but I think they are certainly more post-New Wave than anything else, especially if one remembers the short-lived Red Wedge part of the 80's UK music scene - Style Council/Billy Bragg/et al. Despite some good songs, it pretty much lost a lot of listeners. Kind of like a final chapter in trying too hard to get serious and more meaningful than Live Aid - some good points and a better focus, but with a less-interesting style of music to back those ideas (think post-"Digging Your Scene" Blow Monkeys...or, sadly, Post-Our Favorite Shop Style Council and, worse, those who wanted to be Indie without the Classic Pop sharpness of the Smiths).

[AS Swanski]

A lot depends on what you regard as "new wave" and what not. I generally prefer the term post-punk and this refers to bands that appeared immediately after the punk era and that were driven by some sort of idealism. Part of this idealism was artistic (they wanted to create something unique, often with minimal means), another part was political (the Cold War, high unemployment, racism, sexism).

By 1984, this idealism had waned. You can't invent the wheel every day, so the artistic drive was gone, and outrage about politics and society rarely lasts a lifetime - people get used to things, grow older and become milder, the world changes etc.

As a result, many of the original new wave/post punk bands had split up by the mid 1980s and those that survived had found their musical style and simply became a band like any other, recording albums and touring to make a living, instead of playing music to make an artistic or political statement.

So what killed new wave? It killed itself. Like every artistic movement.

[newwavepop]

not enough people got behind it before it got past them?

to me it wasnt killed off it just sort of faded away because people naturally change as time goes by and the bands started changing. i mean look at the early omd compared to just the mid 80s omd, they got alot poppier and not as good overall material, it just happens.


also grunge did not kill glam metal. i always hear that but its not true. chery pie by warrant and everything about you by ugly kid joe and unskinny bop by poison, that type of stuff killed off glam metal.

[djcraig]

[quote][i]Originally posted by newwavepop[/i]
<br> chery pie by warrant and everything about you by ugly kid joe and unskinny bop by poison, that type of stuff killed off glam metal.
[/quote]
Yeah, cause compared to such stellar achievements as Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me", White Lion's "When The Children Cry" and Winger's "Seventeen", THOSE songs just didn't measure up!

[b]"All of the sudden people were looking at us thinking we looked ridiculous­, and we did."[/b] -Bret Michaels on the emergence of Nirvana.




<a href="http://www.djcraig.net/los_angeles_dj">DJ Craig</a>

[middlesexnj]

As excellent as New Wave was, it was never HUGELY popular, so saying it was "killed" is kind of silly. Like any type of genuine art form it evolved. I'd say it was, like everything else, influenced negatively by multinational corporations, and basically evolved into so-called "alternative" music. Since that was not as much of a genuine art form, that did die out, being killed by boy-bands, altered-voice pop, and the rest of the crap the music industry puts out today.

[Surly]

[quote][i]Originally posted by profpike[/i]
<br>"new wave" was already over by the time I did college radio ca. 1984. It was "new music" or "alternative" already by then.

[/quote]

Yes, this is true. In Cleveland, we had a "new wave" station for a brief period of time in 1983. They called it "Modern Music." Rival rock station WMMS saw them as a threat for a bit and ran ads that they, because of the "MM" in the middle of their name, were Cleveland's "Modern Music" station. They were certainly influential in the '70s, being the station that was among the first to play Bowie, Rundgren, etc, but by the '80s they became as corporate and calculated as one can imagine.

I always enjoy watching the extended video for "Never Say Never" by Romeo Void, where a shot of a hand-written chalkboard sign outside of a club touts "new wave" music at the venue!

I'd say 1984 was the last year anything was categorized as "new wave" at all. I also remember being very happy in 1988, thinking "Great! Information Society is going to bring back new wave!"

"Words like conviction can turn into a sentence"

[newwavepop]

yes djcraig, talk dirty to me was a masterpiece compared to cherry pie.

and i think grunge looked way more ridiculous than poison. im rather fond of enjoying a little glamour and style while you are young and good looking.

[zill]

Roxette

[djcraig]

[quote][i]Originally posted by zill[/i]
<br>Roxette
[/quote]True dat! [:D]

<a href="http://www.djcraig.net/los_angeles_dj">DJ Craig</a>

[SonicBoom]

The fast growing popularity of rap and hair metal during the mid/late 80's might have had something to do with it. Another possibility is when bands like Duran Duran and the Thompson Twins went ultra commercial and everyone was trying to sound like them. It caused the genre to lose some creativity.