The term New Wave itself is a source of much confusion. It was introduced in 1976 in Great Britain by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren as an alternative label for what was also being called "punk". The term referenced the avant-garde, stylish French New Wave film movement of the 1960s. The label was soon picked up by British punk fanzines such as Sniffin' Glue and then the professional music press. For a period of time in 1976 and 1977 the two terms were interchangeable. By the end of 1977, "New Wave" had replaced "Punk" as the definition for new underground music in the United Kingdom.
In the United States, Sire Records needed a term by which it could market its newly signed bands, who had frequently played the club CBGB. Because radio consultants in the U.S. had advised their clients that punk rock was a fad (and because many stations that had embraceddisco had been hurt by the backlash), they settled on the term "New Wave". Like those film makers, its new artists, such as The Ramones and Talking Heads, were anti-corporate, experimental, and from a generation that had grown up as critical consumers of the art they now practiced. At first most American writers exclusively used the term "New Wave" to describe British Punk acts. Starting in December 1976 The New York Rocker which was suspicious of the term "Punk" became the first American journal to enthusiastically use the term starting with British acts, and later appropriating it to acts associated with the CBGB scene.
Soon, listeners began to differentiate some of these musicians from "true punks". The music journalist Charles Shaar Murray, in writing aboutthe Boomtown Rats, has indicated that the term New Wave became an industry catch-all for musicians affiliated with the punk movement, but in some way different from it:
The Rats didn’t conform precisely to the notional orthodoxies of punk, but then neither did many other bands at the forefront of what those who were scared of the uncompromising term 'punk' later bowdlerized to New Wave. You weren’t allowed to have long hair! The Ramones did. Guitar solos verboten! The defence calls Television. Facial hair a capital offence! Two members of The Stranglers are in mortal danger. Age police on the prowl for wrinklies on the run! Cells await Ian Dury, Knox from The Vibrators and most of The Stranglers. Pedal steel guitars and country music too inextricably linked with Laurel Canyon coke-hippies and snooze-inducing Mellow Mafia singer/songwriterismo. Elvis Costello, you’re busted.
Music that followed the anarchic garage band ethos of the Sex Pistols was distinguished as "punk", while music that tended toward experimentation, lyrical complexity, or more polished production, was categorized as "New Wave". This came to include musicians who had come to prominence in the British pub rock scene of the mid-1970s, such as Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Eddie and the Hot Rods and Dr Feelgood; acts associated with the New York club CBGBs, such as Television, Patti Smith, Mink DeVille[5] and Blondie; and singer-songwriters who were noted for their barbed lyrical wit, such as Elvis Costello, Tom Robinson and Joe Jackson. Furthermore, many artists who would have originally been classified as punk were also termed New Wave. A 1977 Phonogram Records compilation album of the same name (New Wave) features US artists including the Dead Boys, Ramones, Talking Heads and The Runaways.
Later still, "New Wave" came to imply a less noisy, more pop sound, and to include acts manufactured by record labels, while the term post-punk was coined to describe the darker, less pop-influenced groups, such as Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Cure, and The Psychedelic Furs. Although distinct, punk, New Wave, and post-punk all shared common ground: an energetic reaction to the supposedly overproduced, uninspired popular music of the 1970s.
The term fell out of favour in The United Kingdom during the early 1980s because its usage had become too general
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