New Wave Now

The July Blender has a pretty good primer on new wave by Douglas Wolk. He divides it into reasonable catagories such as the first round of Brit new wave performers (Costello, Dury, Squeeze [although maybe they should've been a bit later]), proto new wavers (Bowie, Roxy, Iggy), American (Blondie, Heads), guitar bands (XTC, Banshees, Cure), synth bands (Human League, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell), etc. Wolk is also savvy enough to mention a few people who deserve to be remembered but mostly aren't, such as the Only Ones and Pylon.

Although he gives lip service to the separation of punk and new wave, I wasn't sure where he drew the line. He listed Siouxsie and the Banshees, but left out the Jam. You can argue that the Jam started out as punks, but so did Siouxsie, and by the time of All Mod Cons, the Jam had moved on. He mentions Billy Idol, but overlooks GenX. Again, the first Generation X album was definitely punk, but don't forget "Dancing with Myself" appeared on the third GenX album before Billy released it as a solo single. Was his criteria if you started punk, you stayed punk (unless you broke up the band, a la Billy Idol and John Lydon--PIL also gets a mention)? The Stranglers may have maintained a good punk front with "Peaches," but "Golden Brown" gave the lie to that a few years later (when a friend of mine heard La Folie, he exclaimed, "I knew it--they've been progrockers in disguise all along!"), and in case we still hadn't gotten the hint, Feline gave up any punk pretense whatsoever (although the cat had been pretty much out of the bag since The Gospel According to the Meninblack, if anybody'd actually listened to that album). And where's Magazine? "Shot by Both Sides" is arguably punk, but it's also a declaration that this band would have no allies in any movement, and Howard Devoto studiously moved away from punk with the first album (maybe Wolk would say he took them out of new wave, too). Finally, we can't overlook the Clash--after the Pistols, they were the prototypical punks. They stayed true to the cause for a little while, but London Calling proclaimed that they were stretching the boundaries, Sandanista! kicked the legs out from under anyone who still thought they were punks, and by the time they got around to "Rock the Casbah," no one could classify them that way at all. But these are just a few quibbles. All my complaints would do would be just to open the list up a little farther.

As an added bonus, Blender gives us their list of the 40 best new wave singles of all time. And they want us to fight about it. I own 28 of the songs, and there are a handful more that I'd be happy to have if they were tucked into the right compilation, so I don't have a lot of argument. But I don't know that "Take on Me" really rates, and I'm sure we'd all be happy to take "I Ran (so far away)" off the list. You might be able to argue that they wanted to include songs we'd all know, but then you'd have to explain the inclusion of the Normal's "Warm Leatherette." I'd complain that the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" ranks ahead of Gang of Four, not because "House" isn't a great single, but because it becomes great by completely lifting the essence (if not quite the dialectics) of Gang of Four. I'd probably have included "Gangsters" by the Specials; something by Siouxsie, probably "Christine" (which does appear on the U2-compiled CD available with the latest MOJO); Echo and the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon" (although I've been picking up the remastered Echo CDs, and the music doesn't seem to hold up as well as I'd've wished); "Come on Eileen," a much-reviled song that still brings a smile to my face; possibly "Turning Japanese," which just seemed to personify "new wave" when it came out; and, speaking of what seemed to be iconic new wave at the time, maybe "I Melt with You." In all these complaints, though, I'll forever be appreciative to Blender for not including a song I've always loathed but that I'd've expected to be a sure thing: "My Sharona." To whoever made this list, I'm forever in your debt.

(I'm studiously ignoring choice number 40, which obviously doesn't belong on a list of this sort and is clearly present just to piss off people like me. New wave didn't have as much aggression as punk, but few of the performers minded sticking their thumb in your eye every now and again, so I'm just assuming the 40th single was offered in that spirit. And who knows, when that song was chosen, maybe somebody in the Blender offices pointed out, "This will be so annoying, we don't even need 'My Sharona'!")

(June 14--Edited to add a word inadvertently left out of the final paragraph.)