Are we not new wave? : modern pop at the turn of the 1980s / Theo Cateforis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cateforis, Theo.

Series:

Tracking pop

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

New wave music--History and criticism.

New wave music.

Popular music--1981-1990--History and criticism.

Popular music.

Physical Description:

viii, 294 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2011]

Summary:

New wave emerged at the turn of the 1980s as a pop music movement cast in the image of punk rock's sneering demeanor, yet rendered more accessible and sophisticated. Artists such as the Cars, Devo, the Talking Heads, and the Human League leapt into the Top 40 with a novel sound that broke with the staid rock clichés of the 1970s and pointed the way to a more modern pop style.

In Are We Not New Wave? Theo Cateforis provides the first musical and cultural history of the new wave movement, charting its rise out of mid-1970s punk to its ubiquitous early 1980s MTV presence and downfall in the mid-1980s. The book also explores the meanings behind the music's distinctive traits-its characteristic whiteness and nervousness; its playful irony, electronic melodies, and crossover experimentations. Cateforis traces new wave's modern sensibilities back to the space-age consumer culture of the late 1950s/early 1960s.

Three decades after its rise and fall, new wave's influence looms large over the contemporary pop scene, recycled and celebrated not only in reunion tours, VH1 nostalgia specials, and "80s night" dance clubs but in the music of artists as diverse as Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and the Killers.

Theo Cateforis is Assistant Professor of Music History and Culture in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. His research is in the areas of American Music, Popular Music Studies, and Twentieth-Century Art Music. He is editor of the anthology The Rock History Reader. Book jacket.

Contents:

Tracking the tide : the new wave washes in and out

The second British Invasion and its aftermath : from new pop to modern rock

From neurasthenia to nervousness : the whiteness of the new wave

Camp! kitsch! trash! new wave and the politics of irony

"(I wish it could be) 1965 again" : power pop and the mining of rock's modern past

"Roll over guitar heroes, synthesizers are here . . ."

Kings of the wild frontier

Epilogue : The new wave revival.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780472115556

0472115553

9780472034703

0472034707

9780472027590

047202759X

OCLC:

687681471