Are We Not New Wave?

Series

• Tracking Pop

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.

Praise / Awards

• "Are We Not New Wave? is smart and invigorating and tells a compelling story that tracks the development of new wave as a phenomenon partly the result of punk but also a manifestation of a 'trend-cycle' obsessed music industry. This is a fascinating study of not just music but the complex contexts within which it is created, and the sedimented meanings that 'new wave,' in all its manifestations, carries with it."
  —John Dougan, Middle Tennessee State University

• "Are We Not New Wave? is destined to become the definitive study of new wave music."
  —Mark Spicer, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York