Let’s face it. New Wave music has a bad rap. It’s associated with bad 1980s movies and “Old Wave” nostalgia night at your local dance club.
Having grown up in the era of both punk music and New Wave, I can say with some authority that New Wave music, at its best, was every bit as powerful—and a lot more meaningful—than punk. In fact, New Wave gave us some of the best music of the 20th Century. The Talking Heads. Blondie. Gary Numan. And on and on.
One of my favorite songs of the era is this little number by Romeo Void. You might remember it from an obscure (but not bad) 1980s movie called Reckless starring Aiden Quinn and Daryll Hannah, who dance to the song in one surprisingly effective scene.
I like the song because it’s like a mash-up of The Sex Pistols and a San Francisco poetry-slam. It hits.
Back in the 2010s, I worked at a tech company specializing in web development. It had a vast, open-office space filled with techies—mostly millenials—working on laptops. I got to be friends with many of these young people, and I was almost always impressed by how smart, friendly, open-minded, and politically active they were.
However, one thing I noticed about them was that they had almost no sense of cultural history. Movies older than ten years seemed to not exist for them (except Star Wars, maybe). Same with books. And I was horrified that they seemed to have a very narrow experience of musical history, even in the realms of rock and pop music.
Once in a while I would play a CD (yeah, an actual CD) on my computer speakers and one of the millennials would ask me what this or that song was. More than once, my head almost exploded. One occasion I was playing The Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” and a kid sitting nearby wrinkled his brow and said “I think I’ve read about this song, but I’ve never actually heard it.”
“Once in a Lifetime” had a huge impact on the culture back in 1981 when it came out, and for many years thereafter. People used to dance to it in clubs. Comedians (professional and high-school based) impersonated David Byrne’s famously weird, off-kilter dance syncopations. (I still do.)
But even when I first heard the song, The Talking Heads were already an “old” band. Classic, even. Everybody had fallen in love with their first hit “Psycho Killer” way back in 1977, when the power of punk rock was pulsing through the veins of the music world. The Talking Heads weren’t punk, of course—they were usually labeled as “New Wave,” although that didn’t seem quite right, either—but they did have a very punk sensibility. That is, they had an extremely skewed, cynical, and subtly enraged view of modern western culture that was very punk in its feel.
“Once in a Lifetime” is a hate-letter to capitalism in the Reagan era, but it’s more than that. It’s a funky dirge to the modern human condition. It’s also a hell of a good song to dance to.
Ah, New Wave music. I remember you well. Post-disco. Post-punk. Post-modern. Post-everything. Synthesizers. Spandex. Dry ice fog in the videos. Bizarro special effects.
What a lot of people fail to remember is how flat-out danceable a lot of New Wave music was, even in its most cerebral and soaring example, Gary Numan’s Cars.
Yes, that’s Numan—as in human, but not quite. The song is about a guy who becomes so alienated from the rest of humanity that he only feels alive when he’s alone in his car (where he “can only receive”). And yet the song feels completely real, sympathetic, and…well, human.
Ash Clifton, Writer 