Rare New Wave Music

Revivalism is a trend in itself. Music, fashion and activities popular in previous decades have all been revived at one time or another. In the case of New Wave, the term was first popularised in the 1960s French cinema. New Wave denotes all facets of culture but most especially that of music. The adult of the 1990s fondly regard New Wave as the music of youth in the 1980s.

Complete Selection of New Wave Music

The Hellenistic Greeks invented historical self-consciousness as we know it when, five hundred years after the original efflorescence, they revived the Archaic style for contemporary markets. This ambiguous advance in the history of taste was not without detractors--"Cessavit deinde ars" proclaimed the Elder Pliny of Greek art after Lysippus--and a general disapprobation of revivalism has persisted to this day. For every Renaissance there's a half-dozen neo-Gothics. But what are you supposed to do when all culture is revivalist?

On the threshold of the millennium, revival culture is the only thing going. The pace of revivalism has accelerated to such an absurd degree that while one revival period might be ascendant at a given moment, there are always several others from which to choose. In the space of a decade, we've done '50s, '60s, '70s; an unwritten law of physics compels us to revive the '80s.

Which is why retro-New Wave makes so much sense now. But there's more to this incipient trend than the exhaustion of all other models. The difference between New Wave revivalism and the rest is that we New Wavers acknowledged our moment's revival potential as it was originally happening. If you were punk, you might have worn a "Disco Sucks" T-shirt; if you were New Wave, you had already reevaluated disco and come to love it. For us, late-'70s revivalism was happening as soon as the '80s began, which gives the current '70s revival a decidedly recherche feeling.

New Wave Music : Full Line

New Wave revivalism is metarevivalism. The name "New Wave" is itself retro, harking back to the nouvelle vague of '60s French cinema. This was not an era of discriminating taste. A catch-all movement, blithely unrigorous and quintessentially passive, it encompassed everything from Joy Division to Haircut 100, and mined every postwar decade for stylistic flourishes. The B-52's looked to the future via the '50s; Roman Holliday the '40s. Claire Grogan of Altered Images appeared as a '50s Audrey Hepburn on one of their album covers. The Jam affected the style of early-'60s Mods. For chrissakes, Tenpole Tudor got themselves up as medieval scouts. See also daft punk music, and pages relate to new wave music | more