New Wave Music - Reception in The United States

Reception in The United States

In the summer of 1977 both Time and Newsweek magazines wrote favorable lead stories on the "punk/new wave" movement. Acts associated with the movement received little or no radio airplay or music industry support. Small scenes developed in major cities. Continuing into the next year, public support remained limited to select elements of the artistic, bohemian and intellectual population, as arena rock and disco dominated the charts.

Starting in late 1978 and continuing into 1979, acts associated with punk and acts that mixed punk with other genres began to make chart appearances and receive airplay on rock stations. Blondie, Talking Heads, The Police and The Cars would chart during this period. "My Sharona", a single from The Knack, was Billboard magazine's number one single of 1979. The success of "My Sharona" prompted record companies to rush out and sign New Wave groups. New Wave music scenes developed in Ohio and Athens, Georgia. 1980 saw brief forays into New Wave-styled music by non-New Wave artists Billy Joel and Linda Ronstadt. Devo scored a massive hit with "Whip It", which charted at #14 on Billboard's Hot 100, as well as #3 on the Canadian Singles Chart and #77 on the Australian Singles Chart. The release during this period of Gary Numan's album The Pleasure Principle would be the pop chart breakthrough for synthpop acts with a cool, detached stage presence and no "definable gender characteristics".

Early in 1980 highly influential radio consultant Lee Abrams wrote a memo saying with a few exceptions "we're not going to be seeing many of the New Wave circuit acts happening very big over here (in America). As a movement, we don't expect it to have much influence." Lee Ferguson, a consultant to KWST interviewed at the time, said Los Angeles radio stations were banning disc jockeys from using the term and noted, "Most of the people who call music New Wave are the ones looking for a way not to play it." Despite the success of Devo's socially critical but widely misperceived song "Whip It", second albums by artists who had successful debut albums, along with the newly signed artists, both failed to sell and radio pulled most New Wave programming.

The arrival of MTV in 1981 would usher in New Wave's most successful era. British artists, unlike many of their American counterparts, had learned how to use the music video early on. Several British acts signed to independent labels were able to outmarket and outsell American artists that were signed with major labels. Journalists labeled this phenomenon a "Second British Invasion". MTV continued its heavy rotation of videos by New Wave-oriented acts until 1987, when it changed to a heavy metal and rock dominated format.

In a December 1982 Gallup poll, 14% of teenagers rated New Wave music as their favorite type of music, making it the third most popular. New Wave had its greatest popularity on the West Coast. Unlike other genres, race was not a factor in the popularity of New Wave music, according to the poll. Urban Contemporary radio stations were the first to play dance-oriented New Wave artists such as the B-52's, Culture Club, Duran Duran and ABC. By this period the definition of New Wave music in the United States (and the Philippines) had changed from the less rebellious, more commercial version of punk that it had been described as a few years earlier. For most of the remainder of the 1980s the term "New Wave" was used in America to describe nearly every new pop or pop rock artist that largely used synthesizers. New Wave is still used today to describe these acts, as well as late 1970s and 1980s post-punk and alternative acts.

Fans, music journalists, and artists rebelled against this catch-all definition by inventing dozens of genre names. Synthpop or "Technopop" as it was described by the U.S. press, which filled a void left by disco, was a broad subgenre that included groups such as The Human League, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, a-ha, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Yazoo, Ultravox, Kajagoogoo, and the Thompson Twins.

New Wave soundtracks were used in mainstream "Brat Pack" films such as Valley Girl, Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, and The Breakfast Club. John Hughes, a director of several of these films, was enthralled with British New Wave Music and put music from acts such as The Psychedelic Furs, Simple Minds, and Echo and The Bunnymen into his films, helping put New Wave into the mainstream. Several of these songs remain standards of the era. Critics described the MTV acts as shallow or vapid, but the danceable quality of the music and quirky fashion sense associated with New Wave artists appealed to audiences. The use of synthesizers by New Wave acts influenced the development of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit. New Wave’s indie spirit would be crucial to the development of college rock and grunge/alternative rock in the latter half of the 1980s and beyond. New Wave is considered part of alternative rock today.