Talk:New wave music

Typical instruments issue
Although there are hardly any direct sources for New Wave (since the genre's definition is very vague) you can see by looking at many artists that practice New Wave, that a primary typical instrument is the Electric/Bass Guitars, which are typically not included in Pop genres. The thing I noticed from certain editors to the page is that they are making the genre seem more of a synonymous term for Synthpop, which is not true. Pet Shop Boys, for example, ran solely on Synthesizers, hence being called Synthpop and not New Wave. However, bands such as Duran Duran and Talking Heads ran primarily on guitars, hence being described (in some sense) as "New Wave". My suggestion is that Electric/Bass guitars be included in the "typical instruments" section, due to research from bands classified as "New Wave" and to separate the definition from that of Synthpop. - Somebody told me, you had an Airplane Master (talk) 02:58, 11 August 2020 (UTC).

EDIT: An unrelated thing I just noticed was that the article states that New Wave was inspired by 1960s pop, as stated on the Pop Music article itself, "Pop" and "Rock" were roughly synonymous in the 1960s.


 * I have always had a problem with the parameter "instruments" in the infobox of musical genres, as if there is any musical genre defined solely by its instruments. Imagine a rock song without electric guitars: you would have "I'm Free Now" by Morphine, "Changes" by Black Sabbath, and many more. The guidance at Template:Infobox music genre is very thin... It only says that we can write down "The instruments that are popularly associated with the genre", and it says that filling out the parameter is optional, meaning it's okay to leave it empty.
 * This makes me crazy. What are typical instruments of new wave? It depends on the song, the band, the particular concert, etc. Some new wave songs have piano, but many don't. Plenty of new wave songs have electronic drums instead of an acoustic drum kit, but we are not telling that to the reader in the infobox.
 * It's my stance that the infobox should only have very simple facts in it. If the facts start getting complicated, then they should be moved out of the infobox and described in prose in the article body. We should have a paragraph in every music genre article describing the typical instruments.
 * I would rather see an empty "instruments" parameter here. The instrumentation of new wave is not simple. Binksternet (talk) 02:16, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree that "typical instruments" is a rather useless parameter, not just for new wave but for virtually every music genre, and should be removed from the template. ili (talk) 06:25, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * From a British perspective the comment about Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran and Talking Heads is on the right lines, with that early clip of Duran on the Whistle Test (before they became very much just a New Romantic pop band) fitting in quite well with all the other punk and new wave acts on the programme. Synthpop bands were called synthpop because most of them 'ran solely on Synthesizers' (and proper synthesizers with knobs, switches and twiddly bits not just electric keyboards) though you might see synth drums and a bass, as - unless you are a fan of Level 42 - the rhythm section is not really important in the pop history of synth v guitars...more of a punchline to a good muso joke. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.173.247 (talk) 15:52, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

British New Wave and Synthpop
On wiki there are articles for British jazz, British hip hop, British soul, British rock music, British rock and roll, Britpop, British rhythm and blues, British pop music and British popular music...now if there are so many differences between what the terms new wave and synthpop mean to people in the UK and USA, shouldn't there be articles about these popular genres viewed only from a British perspective, maybe called British punk and new wave and British synthpop (with obviously no hyphens used). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.173.247 (talk) 15:32, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Some Song Suggestions?
Break My Stride - Matthew Wilder RoakleyTheBirb (talk) 00:13, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

The Smiths?
Wasn't The Smiths one of the most influential/best know "New Wave" / "Alternative" bands? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.189.248.62 (talk) 03:26, 25 March 2022 (UTC)


 * The Smiths are influenced by the hardcore punk scene so no they don't count as New Wave. They are better described as Alternative Rock as Alternative Rock is influenced by Hardcore Punk, not traditional 70s Punk. New Wave Rock is rooted in 50s rock n roll. The Smiths music isn't based on 50s rock n roll. FreakyBoy (talk) 16:56, 8 June 2022 (UTC)


 * "The Smiths are influenced by the hardcore punk scene"... this is so flabbergastingly wrong I can't begin to list the ways it is wrong. The core of The Smiths, Johnny Marr and Morrissey don't list any hardcore punk bands as their influences. See Johnny_Marr where the closest to hardcore punk is maybe The Velvet Underground and that's a long stretch. As for Morrissey, I don't see how Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw fall in the punk category, but I guess you could say he was influenced by Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Blondie, but not so much hardcore punk. --Anonymous 75.226.100.219 (talk) 03:02, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Removing part of the popularity in the US section
Does anyone have an issue with the removal of this paragraph from the Popularity in the US section:
 * An African-American "new wave" also arose in the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, driven, according to AllMusic, by "drum machines, synthesizers and programming [becoming] common studio tools". Following the minimalist approach of Stevie Wonder and Parliament-Funkadelic, post-disco explored the electronic and experimental side of African-American music by incorporating Jamaican music, electronic art music, jazz, blues, and in the latter years European and Japanese synthesizer music. Expanding disco music, post-disco took many forms, such as the rhythm and blues-based NYC boogie, the post-punk–based alternative dance, the underground-club-culture-centered Chicago house with its own style of dance called jacking, and futurism–leaning Detroit techno. According to Afrika Bambaataa ("Renegades of Funk") and Arthur Baker, embracing new wave, synth-pop music was influential to both underground and mainstream black dance music electro, dance-rock, and Minneapolis sound.

I'm personally very confused by this paragraph's inclusion in the article. From what I can tell, this is about post-disco which already has its own Wikipedia article. User:ILIL your thoughts? Editingpersona (talk) 23:28, 18 March 2022 (UTC)


 * I'm just as confused. ili (talk) 15:16, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Rename and break-up origins/etymology and scope section and Popularity in the United States
So I've been editing this article for a class I'm in the past few weeks, and one thing I think would really help the article improve is to rename the "Origins/Etymology and Scope" section to a "History" section broken up into the early 1970s, mid to late 1970s, and 1980s. I've done this (as well as some changes to the Characteristics section that I've somewhat implemented in the article already) in a sandbox draft in case anyone has any suggestions/thoughts. I've also done the same thing for the Popularity in the US section, which is also in that sandbox draft.

From what I can tell, this article isn't super active, so I'll probably implement these changes sometime tomorrow unless anyone replies not to. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Editingpersona (talk • contribs) 01:14, 19 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Well... It needs to be noted there's been a longtime semi-consensus that the article (barring perhaps the lead) needs to be blown up and rebooted, so any efforts made at "saving" it in its current state are futile. I intended on writing a completely new article that relies primarily on the books Are We Not New Wave and Rip It Up and Start Again, then going back to the current revision to see if there's anything salvageable, but I simply haven't had the time.
 * If you're up to that task, Rip It Up has two editions available on Archive.org. Likewise, you can download an Are We Not New Wave PDF on Library Genesis. Maybe there are also other useful books about new wave out there. ili (talk) 15:13, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
 * @ILIL So I've thought about this for a bit and while I agree that the article's content definitely needs some work and I'm okay with helping with that, I don't think trying to improve the article in its current state is necessarily futile for a couple reasons. 1) Blowing up the article is going to take a while and the changes I proposed in my sandbox draft can be implemented right now. And 2) I think the changes I proposed in my sandbox draft could be a useful framework that gets carried over to the future article. I essentially just tried to organize the section similarly to the Synth-pop article.
 * So I'm just going to go ahead and implement the changes I proposed in the sandbox draft. At the very least they're an improvement to the article that will help until the time is taken to blow it up. Editingpersona (talk) 18:11, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
 * I just stumbled upon this article now and would also like the add that the lede is a mess. Primarily, it suffers from the problem common to articles on genres, that it spends too much time talking about different usages of the name. Wikipedia articles are on topics not words. We need to decide on a definition of "new wave" and make the article about that. Article for other definitions can have their own articles. Ashmoo (talk) 11:02, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * If you just stumbled onto this article now, then you probably should have read past the lede before editing it to reflect your original research. If you took the time to read the sources cited in the lede, then you would find that no one actually agrees on the definition of "new wave". Editors are not truth-finders. If the sources describe new wave as a loosely defined genre, and they do not agree on a single definition, then this website has no business insisting on a single arbitrarily chosen definition, per WP:UNDUE: Wikipedia should not present a dispute as if a view held by a small minority is as significant as the majority view. If you want your preferred definition of "new wave" to be dominant, Wikipedia is not the appropriate avenue to do so.
 * "Articles for other definitions can have their own articles"? – This is a particularly confusing suggestion. What exactly are you proposing? That we split this article into New wave music (X definition) and New wave music (Y definition)? ili (talk) 14:39, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

New Wave Is Still Around
Some of the content in this article looks as though it is in the mindset of someone from the late 90s/early 2000s. New Wave never went away, and if anything most pop music today sounds more like new wave than anything else. Avalon2k41 (talk) 20:39, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Welcome to Wikipedia. If you would like to change the contents of this article, you should find some WP:Reliable sources saying that new wave is still around, and WP:CITE those sources when adding more explanation about the current state of things. The best sources are from musicologists, music critics, and professional journalists. Binksternet (talk) 22:56, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Proto-New Wave? Lothar and the Hand People
Should Lothar and the Hand People's 1968 cover of "Machines" be included in some way shape or form, the only outlet that has ever talked about it presaging new wave is cracked magazine. To add on, I doubt the song was influential if at all, but it exists in its own bubble as being incredibly ahead of its time.

It sounds like DEVO and the Flying Lizards years before they'd start. https://www.cracked.com/article_19094_6-songs-that-were-decades-ahead-groundbreaking-music.html Aradicus77 (talk) 00:04, 1 May 2023 (UTC)


 * @Aradicus77 Cracked is not reliable. Tireauclaire (talk) 21:54, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

On Wikipedia, a vast amount of music is wrongly labeled as 'New Wave'
After making some substantial improvements to the page itself, I've noticed that a vast quantity of artists, albums, and singles are mistagged as 'New Wave' on Wikipedia, often with no source attached. Those that are sourced usually come from shoddy, offhanded references to a particular artist/record as 'new wave' in poorly researched, often irrelevant articles from contemporary web publications not specialised in music journalism. If Wikipedia's editors are going to claim that a vast amount of music is 'new wave' which was never considered as such in the time and place in which it was produced, they ought to at least be aware of how the music was actually described by contemporaries. Of course, there is little, if any, primary source material which would agree with their claims, which is precisely the problem. If Wikipedia is going to accurately record history instead of rewriting it, I'd challenge my fellow editors to look harder, for better sources, and to remove inaccurate descriptions of 'New Wave' to refer to 80s pop music wherever they should come across it. Smash-Hits78 (talk) 23:04, 18 November 2023 (UTC)


 * You're proposing that we stop summarizing the literature which says "new wave" and instead follow your lead in re-interpreting sources, or in choosing to ignore or minimize the ones that are not in line with your ideas.
 * You repeatedly removed the new wave genre from Culture Club, and you were reverted. Good sourcing exists to support the group as new wave. You can't dismiss James E. Perone's Listen to New Wave Rock!: Exploring a Musical Genre, page 52, or AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine, or MTV News, or New Wave: Image is Everything by K. Adams writing "...new wave at its height... with bands like Duran Duran and Culture Club..." There's also Professor Theodore Cateforis putting Duran Duran and Culture Club into the new wave category in his book Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s.
 * Obviously, we have many sources to draw from, and a difficulty arises when sources are in contradiction. The best we can do is tell the reader about contradictory themes, naming one or more authors as representing the contradictory views. But we should never decide for ourselves that one segment of the literature is wrong. Binksternet (talk) 00:15, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Just want to say Smash-Hits78 is absolutely right. Never ran into him on my previous account Janglyguitars (which I foolishly locked myself out of), but he seems to have been pretty spot-on in his edit history. The fact is that 'New Wave' was not used in the context that it appears in on so many pages here related to 80s British pop, and it is anachronistic and wrong of Wikipedia to display such disregard for historical truth. I wrote about this issue more on the talk page for New Order, but this is an issue plaguing so many pages that it almost seems a hopeless endeavour (though I shall do my best). Jinglyjangle (talk) 05:09, 25 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Having repeatedly encountered inappropriate categorisations, as New Wave, of UK bands, I came here to find if anyone else had raised the issue so it's no surprise to me that it has been. I'm not sure if this is a WP:WORLDVIEW issue, in that perhaps a much broader or just different US usage of the term is being employed (are all the sources noted above American?), or it may be that the term has started to be applied in a way that it was not at the time. The notion of Culture Club or Duran Duran, in their pomp, being referred to as New Wave seems alien and bizarre. Examples such as Ultravox are more along the lines of unnecessary pigeon-holing; it's not the worst of potential fits but it's at best superfluous. As noted, if a source has coined the term in relation to a band, it's hardly going to be possible to counter that with a source saying they're not of that genre.
 * It's different, in that the term was in contemporary usage, just not for many of these acts, but there are similar with pestilential rerospective coinings of spurious supposed genres, such as sophistipop and yacht rock. Likewise, British invasion/second British invasion is only that from one part of the world's perspective, and by definition not that of their place of origin. On reflection, maybe reliable sources have written about these differences in categorisation or miscoinings? Mutt Lunker (talk) 01:14, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Most sources I've seen are American, yes, though I've sometimes seen some contemporary UK sources call things New Wave that no UK source would have done forty years ago. I think Wikipedia, combined with lazy journalists, probably has a lot to do with this. Yet another reason, if one were needed, to lament the death of the physical music press in favour of online 'journalism'. Just imagine, forty years ago, being told that next century the NME would include ABC, Duran Duran, and Culture Club records on a list of the greatest 'New Wave' albums. Agreed 100% on the sophistipop nonsense as well (in both cases, I always want to scream 'It's just POP!').
 * I have seen some sources mention the 'alternative' usage of New Wave, like this article (blog post?) by Mark Simpson where he refers to 'Early ’80s British synthpop — or “new wave,” as it was known in the United States', before himself adopting this particular usage through the rest of the article (if only I were so flexible). And here, Simon Reynolds refers to 'what we in the UK called New Pop — in the US people talked about New Wave or New Music or Second British Invasion'. On Wikipedia itself, in fact, the issue is noted in this section of the New Wave article, with a quote from Andrew Collins illustrating the discrepancy. I think it does that pretty well, but the problem remains of all the miscategorised music. And I do think it's fair to call it a miscategorisation, rather than just a different point of view, based on how the music was actually described by American critics at the time, as opposed to how it was popularly (mis)understood. Returning to that section in the New Wave article, it pretty clearly lays out what leading critics like Christgau, Bangs, and Eddy thought, and they more or less echo my own. The distinction would seem to lay in how critics and the music industry wrote about music, versus how some in the American public saw things. And interestingly, this division is sort of evident in the article itself, with the 'History' section basically corresponding to the critical/historical view and the 'Popularity in the United States (1970s-1980s)' section going according to the 'popular' idea. As an encyclopaedia, ostensibly based on reliable written sources, Wikipedia should doubtless give preference to the former, and were it to actually rely on what was written (rather than what was apparently said, by some) it would inevitably give more weight to the (rather more informed) view. Unfortunately, since some editors prefer to consult authorless articles, obscure podcasts, and fan pieces over the work of actual music journalists (who might, you know, have been there or written a thing or two), we get a lot more of the other side. So it goes, so it goes.
 * I've started a longer discussion about this issue, by the way, over at this page, if you'd like to comment there (not sure if anything will come of it, but I'd appreciate your support nonetheless). Jinglyjangle (talk) 15:45, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

Dating new wave - let's try this again
Ok, @Binksternet, I thought I was done here and erased my account information (including password) but I saw you reverted me, so gonna do these last few things and then we're done.

Let's have a look at the sources. Nickson, a UK source, has a section "New Wave music in the 1970s" and says the genre was overwhelmed at the beginning of the 80s by the New Romantics. He makes no mention of new wave in the section for 80s music, except on one of the indie pages by mentioning how new wave guitars inspired the indie bands. On the other hand, AllMusic, a US source, says new wave was "during the late '70s and early '80s" and died in 1984. Cateforis, a US author whose entire body of work on new wave is heavily focused on America to the exclusion of any other country, says in his "Death of New Wave essay" that the new wave period was "sometime in the late-1970s to the mid-1980s". Ok. Now for a few more.

Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs, both of whom covered new wave heavily in the 70s, say the genre was ending or had ended as the 80s began and lasted anywhere from one to three years. Chuck Eddy, who wrote for the Voice in the 80s, says it was already over by the time of new pop bands' popularity on MTV (so, the early-mid 80s). Andrew Collins, in his piece for the Guardian, offers the formation of Duran Duran (1978) and the breakup of the Jam (1982) as two possible ending dates. He then splits the difference basically by saying Elvis Costello, new wave's patron saint, had abandoned the genre by 1980 but that it continued in the US until 1986 or later. The owner of CBGBs said he thinks of 1974 as the beginning of new wave.

Clearly there is no consensus here. If we want to be more specific than just 1970s-1980s, the closest we could nail it to would probably be "mid-70s to early 80s". It's clear that going by the sources used in the article, and attempting to have an opening sentence that isn't biased to one country's perspective over another's, new wave is about equally associated with the 1970s as it is the 1980s, if not a little more with the former. However, it's better to air on the side of inclusivity and summarizing the literature, presenting all points of view, so the inarguable best solution is to say 1970s through the 1980s.

As for the reverts you made on synthesizer, Blitz Kids, and Second British Invasion, I'm not going to let you pretend that was anything other than pointless dick waving. You know how to read an article and click on a source, you know what constructive versus disruptive editing looks like, and you know perfectly well what overreaching and being disingenuous look like. An apology would be nice, but I know that's too much to ask for so ceasing to revert what are self-evidently well-supported and non-tendentious edits (like the "genre that uses the synthesizer as the main instrument" being associated with the synthesizer) would suffice. If you can do that we'll be done here, I can't speak for jinglyjangle or anyone else but after this I want no further part with this website ever again. Black Hand 1914 (talk) 18:28, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

New Wave of Germany (Deutschland)
Yes Germany has too many New Wave music in the 1980's but as we all comprehend' it is sang in an International English Language like Milli Vanilli from Germany to London, New York East Coast to and later the West Coast. 103.224.94.25 (talk) 21:48, 12 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Is there a change you're hoping to make in the article or something? Sergecross73   msg me  00:22, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 14 May 2024
"if you smell bad we dont like you " -Greenday 2601:98D:C200:1810:BAA5:37C5:D57:B7CC (talk) 22:28, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Jamedeus (talk) 22:43, 14 May 2024 (UTC)