New Wave

Image is Everything

K. Adkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137363541
• eBook ISBN: 9781137363558
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

New Wave: Image is Everything traces the evolution of the often neglected pop music genre, new wave. Using artists from Elvis Costello to Cyndi Lauper as illustrations, the book argues that new wave was among the first flowerings of postmodern theory in popular culture.

1

An Introduction

Pressing play

In the opening moments of Stop Making Sense, the iconic 1984 concert film by the Talking Heads, David Byrne walks alone on to a bare, unadorned stage. He carries a boom box in his hand, an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder. Already we know this won’t be a typical rock concert: there are no enormous amplifiers, no complicated banks of lights, no garish sets. Byrne wears an outfit so nondescript and colorless he could be a confused member of the audience who has happened to wander up on stage. When he reaches center stage, he sets the boom box on the ground and says quietly, ‘Hi, I have a tape I want to play for you.’ He reaches down to press play, a pre-recorded drum beat begins, and he launches into a version of the Heads’ hit, ‘Psycho Killer.’ Some in the audience that night must surely at that moment have been reconsidering the price of their tickets. You could pay far less to see far more in a coffee house, or see it for nothing at a karaoke bar.

The first half of the show remains atypical of a rock concert. Over the course of several songs, the stage, indeed the band itself, is built up one piece at a time. Tina Weymouth, the band’s bass player, joins Byrne onstage to perform ‘Heaven.’ Next, Chris Frantz, sitting atop a riser with his drum kit, is wheeled in for ‘Thank You for Sending Me an Angel.’ Bit by bit, the other band members appear – keyboard players, guitarists, back-up singers – and at the same time the stage fills with risers, instruments, amplifiers, and eventually video screens, curtains, and lights. By the second half of the show, Stop Making Sense has become the traditional concert, complete with choreographed movements and Byrne’s garish ‘big suit.’ Opening as it does, though, with such pronounced simplicity, it complicates our expectations about what a concert, what a band, what rock music itself actually is. In many ways this moment in 1984 was the fulfillment, the apotheosis of a musical movement that had been building for almost a decade, the movement known as ‘new wave.’

The concert, especially the slow build-up of the first half, makes several points. First, it says something profound about the way a band forms and evolves, both in the literal sense of members being added to the group, but also in the sense of how a recording is often produced, one track at a time – rhythm, guitar, vocals, keyboards. In short, the Heads invite us to consider how music is made. Second, their approach forces us to focus on very specific components of song – single instruments and vocal inflections sometimes missed when listening to complex productions: thus, for example, ‘Psycho Killer’ highlights the guitar and vocal; when Tina Weymouth appears, our attention is drawn to the bass.

Most importantly, though, by beginning as it does, Stop Making Sense explores the line between the real and the artificial. On the one hand, the opening seems searingly real: reality stripped of even the possibility of artifice. The bare wood of the floor, the cinder block wall at the back of the stage, the scaffolding, are all raw and undisguised. When pieces of equipment arrive, they don’t do so subtly. Instead, everything stops between songs while the stage hands go about the normally behind-the scenes, physical labor that goes into setting up a show. The band seems at pains to hide nothing, to present themselves with total honesty.

Or that would be true, but for the boom box Byrne carries when he enters. Simply by pressing ‘play,’ Byrne calls into question the reality of everything that follows. After all, the whole point of seeing a concert is to experience a live performance, to watch music unfold in real time, to participate in its ‘realness.’ Fans hang on arrangements waiting for moments when a song will differ, even in the smallest ways, from how it sounds on an album: a concert is live; a concert is real. Byrne frustrates these desires by transforming live performance into pre-recorded sing-along, and in the process encourages us to see everything that follows as nothing but artificial, staged performance. Nothing is authentic here, the move suggests – no matter how authentic it may seem; instead we will see and hear merely a replay of a replay.

Several recent works on new wave have associated it with early twentieth century modernism,¹ and it might be tempting to read this concert in those terms. On the surface, for example, the Heads’ odd gestures seem to reference modernist playwright Berthold Brecht’s strategies of ‘defamiliarization,’ attempts to break up the flow of a drama and distance the audience from the content of a performance. Brecht’s tricks, such as having characters break the fourth wall or displaying placards explaining a character’s internal motivations, were meant to jolt his audience out of the dramatic experience, ‘stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them’ (Brecht qtd. in Brooker 191). In the same way, Stop Making Sense seems to jolt us out of the flow of the concert spectacle by frequently reminding us where the seams are in the structure. Just as we have settled in to the flow of ‘Psycho Killer,’ momentarily forgetting the strange way it began, everything stops once again when Weymouth enters, her amplifier in tow, and reminds us this is all a carefully constructed experience.

However, the Heads have something very different in mind from Brechtian defamiliarization, and the final effect of their performance has far more to do with postmodernism than with modernism. For one thing, by the second half of the concert the spectacle is firmly in place; the disruptions end altogether and we are encouraged to invest in the drama rather than question it. In other words, defamiliarization is no longer the goal, and in fact, as it turns out, it never really was. Everything springs from that very first move, the pressing of ‘play’ that signals nothing – not the bare floors, or the concrete walls, or the scaffolding – can be considered genuine. Instead, the show becomes something much more insidious than what Brecht had in mind: it becomes artificial performance masquerading as lived reality. Brecht wanted to disrupt the flow of his narrative, pushing the audience to think more deeply about his plays, so they might pay attention to the message and its application to real life rather than simply becoming absorbed in the world of the play itself. But this assumes ‘real life’ exists. Modernism in general desperately sought ways to recapture and reconstitute a meaning that was presumably lost in the early days of the twentieth century, what T.S. Eliot called ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ Stop Making Sense works in complete reverse to Brecht: the Heads hold out the semblance of reality only to destroy it. The performance seems not simply live, but stripped to a kind of bare honesty. And yet this seeming authenticity is only itself an illusion, the ‘simulation’ of authenticity. Thus, the effect is not a return to the ‘real world’ outside the drama, but rather a demonstration that nothing exists beyond that drama – there is no real world to return to, only artifice. There is no message because there can be no message; meaning – reality itself – has faded entirely, to be replaced by a simulation of that reality.

If Byrne’s boom box in 1984 is a kind of closing argument for new wave, it echoes some of the earliest experiments in the genre. The Human League, for instance, experimented with pre-recorded ‘live’ performance as early as 1978. As Ian Craig Marsh, an original founding member, describes their first gig,

We went onstage with a tape recorder, with the rhythm and bass on tape […]. We liked the idea of putting the machine where the drummer ought to be, with a spotlight on it. Then we’d come onstage, take our positions by the keyboards, and then very pointedly I’d walk over and press ‘play.’ (Reynolds 134)

Marsh continues, ‘We knew this would be a big windup to the rock ‘n’ roll fraternity, the keep-music-live crew’ (Reynolds 133). To some extent these comments reflect the typical attitude of an up-and-coming band eager to upset the establishment and create something original. They also hint, though, at a quite serious interest in exploring the nature of music and performance, and more than this, the difference between reality and artificiality. A performance like this one raises the rather playful question of whether a pre-recorded tape might be viewed as a ‘member’ of the band, but this question points to even more fundamental questions such as whether or not a digitized synthesizer with pre-programmed sounds constitutes a ‘real’ instrument and whether playing such a machine involves ‘real’ musicianship. In the end, considering the real-ness of digital sound ultimately invites us to consider the artificial-ness of the human being (a question the band’s name itself seems to highlight: a league of humans, after all, presupposes a league of non-humans must exist as well).

If these two historical instances might be seen as bracketing the new wave movement, another occurring midway between them serves as a third symbolic moment: the 1 August 1981 premier of MTV. Here again technology played a key role in how new wave evolved. In this case, that technology brought a measure of spectacle to music, foregrounding the artificial in ways pre-recorded music could only begin to hint at. Visuals on MTV and other video-based programs on both sides of the Atlantic now played at least an equal role to sound in defining the meaning and determining the impact of a song. If there was any single event that most raised questions about the distinction between the real and the artificial, this was it: 24 hours a day of highly stylized singers and heavily made up guitarists cheerfully faking their way through their songs in an effort to build their own celebrity.

New wave and MTV would develop a symbiotic, if uneasy, relationship during the network’s first few years. The network benefited from a readily available cache of relatively cheap content, and new wave artists were given increased exposure. But as is the case in Stop Making Sense, the situation was far more complex than it might at first appear. True, the ascendency of the image could and often did affect the nature of celebrity: bands who looked good and created interesting videos were the ones who were promised super-stardom in this new celebrity order. Yet many new wave artists were less interested in gaining fame or racking up album sales than in thinking about the nature of the image. In fact, years before MTV’s debut bands such as Television, Devo, and Blondie were exploring the limits of society’s increasing fascination with surface over substance, the tendency to invest in manufactured image over reality. The music video simply offered a useful laboratory in which to take this exploration to its furthest point. And these bands took advantage of the opportunity, embracing videos completely, not necessarily with the intent of claiming celebrity for themselves (though that was sometimes the end result), but rather with the intent of creating image-based personas for the sake of exploring the social and cultural line between real and artificial. In the same way the Human League raised the question of whether a pre-recorded tape could be considered ‘performance,’ Blondie raised the question of whether a pre-fabricated, empty image of celebrity could be considered a musical artist. Thus, Music Television and new wave fed off one another to an extent, but each had very different goals from the other.

No song or video could have expressed this state of affairs more succinctly than the video that famously inaugurated MTV, the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,’ a song that bemoans music’s move from radio to television, even while it celebrates that move. On its surface, the song recalls a long lost ‘golden age of music,’ a time when substance mattered because sound – substance – was all there was. In this mythical history, the image destroyed that musical purity: ‘pictures came and broke your heart.’ Some critics, such as Theodore Cateforis, have taken this as a straightforward lament for lost values. Cateforis writes, ‘At the time of its original release, on the cusp of the 1980s, the song described the dawning of a new modern technological era while lamenting the passing of an older modern time, the golden age of radio’ (5). But looked at in more depth, there are tell-tale signs that the Buggles’ relationship to this vanished past is much more ambiguous. In fact, the song works as a joke, a re-telling of the evolution of cinema in reverse, of how the ‘talkies’ came along and ‘broke’ many a silent film star’s ‘heart.’ Later in the song, the description of the ‘wireless’ of ‘1952’ further undermines any criticism of technology by drawing our attention to the technology of the past. In short, the song actually pokes fun at fears of a ‘new age’ by reminding us that new technology doesn’t ruin music’s purity since music was always filtered through technology of one kind or another.

Beyond these clues in the song itself, the Buggles tell their tale in video form – that is, they themselves embrace the image. Do they demonstrate the world has become increasingly fake? Absolutely. Yet they go to great lengths to incorporate that fake-ness, opening on an obviously fake moon shining above an obviously fake body of water. Many of the images they offer do represent a ‘vanished’ past, which Cateforis links to the modernist impulse to hang on to that past. But the relationship to the past in this video is a complex one. It is far too stylized to represent the ‘real’ past (as the fake set design helps to drive home). This is a nostalgic rendering of a past that never truly was. And as the video develops, it shifts to a fanciful vision of the future as seen through the eyes of that nostalgia. In other words, it calls into question the very ideas of time and history, suggesting that these have faded away to be replaced by simulations of the past, the future, and even the present. The song and video, then, represent less a modernist longing for a glorified past than what theorist Frederic Jameson has described as a postmodern ‘omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions’ (Postmodernism 286): the postmodern world doesn’t long for the past or look to the future; it appropriates their images for its own ends.

A history of definitions

This book’s goal is to explore the social and cultural forces that helped to produce the musical genre generally referred to as ‘new wave.’ In doing so, it will examine where new wave came from, how it developed, and what ultimately became of it. My larger project, however, is to define new wave, using those social and cultural forces to better understand a popular music movement complicated in its aims and even more complicated in its ultimate effects.

‘New wave’ is an admittedly difficult phrase to pin down. Part of this has to do with the history of its usage. The simplest explanation might be that it was initially borrowed from French cinema where it had referred to a rejection of classic filmic techniques; in reference to music it meant essentially the same thing: a brand of music that broke with the past, a ‘wave’ of performers who offered a fresh approach to what music might be. However, in the mid-70s, this meant punk rather than the sound that has since come to be associated with ‘new wave.’ Mark Perry, for instance, writing in Sniffin’ Glue, declared protectively,

I don’t wanna see the Pistols, the Clash etc. turned into more AC/DCs and Doctors of Madness. This ‘new wave’ has got to take in everything, including posters, record-covers, stage presentation, the lot! You know they’ll be coming soon, all those big companies out to make more money on the ‘new, young bands.’ (28 September 1976)

Even Malcolm McLaren, the manager who arguably created the punk movement, used the phrase ‘new wave’ in some of his first descriptions of his protégés, the Sex Pistols: ‘in early 1976, before the Sex Pistols had even recorded a note, McLaren insisted that the music be called “new wave”’ (Cateforis 21).

McLaren ultimately came to reject the term, settling instead on ‘punk.’ Meanwhile, the phrase ‘new wave’ was taken up by journalist Caroline Coon in reference to an experimental sound, to bands that she saw as developing alongside punk, but which she described as ‘definitely not hard-core punk, but because they play with speed and energy or because they try hard, are part of the scene’ (‘Punk Alphabet’). Her definition seemed to stick, though it would take time to see how this particular style would evolve. What she had in mind at the time were bands such as Pere Ubu and Television, bands with a somewhat heavier sound than what new wave would become. Yet bands like Devo and the Talking Heads could trace their lineage to these earlier bands (and in fact, it is not unreasonable to class Pere Ubu and Television as early new wave despite their relationship to mainstream punk).

If the phrase’s origins created confusion, so too did the way in which it evolved into a catchall category for a number of post-punk sounds. Dozens of ‘new’ movements and self-proclaimed sub-genres sprang up as punk’s influence began to fade: no-wave, new romanticism, new pop, art-rock, the mod revival, ska, synthpop, goth, rockabilly. Some bands invented labels so narrow as to apply only to themselves: ‘The Normal’s sound was electropunk’ (Reynolds 52); Chrome decided to ‘mix our punk shit with […] weird acid shit. And let’s call ourselves “acid punk”’ (Reynolds 268). To make matters worse, ‘new wave’ in some historical accounts refers to a post-punk sub-genre, alongside other categories such as new pop, while in others it is used as an umbrella term for the entire pantheon of late 70s/early 80s styles.

Another problem has to do ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Introduction
• 2 New Wave’s Rise in the U.K.
• 3 New Wave’s Rise in the U.S.
• 4 Making the Image Everything
• 5 Pure Image
• 6 The Return of Meaning
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index