After a recent piece on Greil Marcus' Mystery Train ran in this place, a reader directed me to King Adkins' New Wave: Image Is Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, $95), which was recently published as part of the Palgrave series on pop culture, music and identity.
The book examines the cultural implications of new wave music and its ties to postmodernism, which probably removes it from most beach reading lists. Yet it's not dry at all. It's entertaining, insightful and mounts a persuasive argument that connects new wave with postmodernism -- which might be best understood as a cultural "condition" of general distrust and skepticism about the nature of art itself.
While nonacademics might be intimidated by the emphasis on postmodernism, New Wave explains the concept quite well. Adkins begins his book with a discussion of the Talking Heads' 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense in which he describes how the band plays with our expectations of what constitutes a musical performance. When David Byrne first takes the stage, he carries an acoustic guitar and looks as earnest as any folksinger. But the show begins with him pressing play on a boom box that provides the rhythm track for "Psycho Killer." As the concert proceeds, additional members of the band join Byrne onstage as the trappings of a rock concert slowly accrue. By the time the show is over, Byrne is bouncing around in a cartoonishly oversized suit and the band is augmented by backup singers. We've followed an arc from faux folksinging authenticity to show-biz spectacle. This is how records are made, track by track, layer by layer. And so we're left with the question of what the song actually is -- the performance, or the artifact, or the coded notes and lyrics on a page?
Adkins, who teaches literature and writing at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, was born and reared in Sheridan. He was 10 years old in 1981 when MTV came on the air. While his hometown cable company didn't carry the station, he could watch it at his grandparents' house in Little Rock. I read the book, and decided to ask him about it by phone and email.
Q: Punk rock is by and large understood as a reaction to the corporatization of pop and rock in the late '60s and early '70s; it's idealized as a cultural revolution meant to take rock 'n' roll back to Year Zero. It prized authenticity and passion over virtuosity and other show-biz failures. Like the street kid Eugene says in the opening moments of Penelope Spheeris' 1981 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, punk rock was (supposed to be) a music without rock stars -- it was a democratic cultural practice where the stage was level with the audience.
That wasn't entirely true, of course, and the Sex Pistols were in some ways as groomed and manufactured as The Monkees. Yet while the Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren was as much a businessman as Colonel Tom Parker was to Elvis Presley, the punk ethos held that anyone could make the music, and that making music didn't make anyone special.
A: One problem with using "new wave" as a label (and I think I own up to this in the book) is that it has, over the years, become a kind of catch-all for everything produced in the 1980s. In one sense, I'm OK seeing my book in those terms; that is, the period seems to me so tightly integrated that most artists, from Marvin Gaye to Willie Nelson, might fit under the umbrella. I do try to avoid labeling someone like The Kinks as new wave, even though their '80s work is definitely of a piece with what was happening (Think Visual is for me as new wave as Gary Numan's Replicas). I think I limit my choices and approaches in the book to artists who represent a purer strain of new wave simply because it makes the historical moment easier to understand. In the conclusion, in fact, I suggest that new wave influenced culture so thoroughly it might be regarded as a more important historical turning point than punk (though punk gets far more press). In short, new wave (or more broadly, postmodernism) was and is inescapable.
Q: Exactly. While there were relatively few established artists who embraced punk rock -- Pete Townshend and Neil Young were notable exceptions -- a lot of established artists including Young, Linda Ronstadt and Rosanne Cash flirted with new wave.
A: I'm actually at work on an article dealing specifically with artists like The Kinks, artists who took on the new wave sound and ethos: Genesis, Yes, Hall & Oates, Jackson Browne. I'm planning to use "Come Dancing" as the focal point, a new age hit that thinks about what it's doing and the relationship of the new musical landscape to the old.
Q: My impression of new wave -- which to me encompasses everything from the first Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers records to Blondie to Soft Cell to Bauhaus and New Order -- was that it was less a reaction to punk than a correction; an owning up to the aspirational motives of a lot of the players. New wavers want to be stars, and they did want to write and perform songs that worked more or less as traditional pop songs work; they needed to be in tune and their songs worked in more or less conventional modes. To me, new wave signaled the rock star restoration of glamour. To be absolutely honest I still think one of the easiest ways to decide whether a post-punk band is actually new wave is to examine their wardrobe.
A: You might be on to something with your suggestion that wardrobe makes the difference. I say that, though, with two important reservations. First, I don't associate new wave with glam (I'm not suggesting you are either, but it's a common fallback position for scholars who don't deal with new wave). I certainly recognize that someone like Nick Rhodes consciously appropriated glam in his look, but for my purposes -- thinking about the era in terms of effect as much as intention -- true glam of the early '70s involved clear messages about youth alienation. A band like Duran Duran, on the other hand, wasn't sending out messages, only reflections of reflections of reflections (images of images of images).
Second, I try to make some distinctions in the book. One is between British and American versions of new wave. The other important one is between what I call "early" and "late" versions of new wave. For me, both versions offer some fascinating contradictions. I like what you say about new wave as a shift towards more marketability, the often unacknowledged desire on the part of some "punk" groups to turn a profit (though, as you say, that idea is complicated by figures like McLaren). I think, for instance, The Police fit that bill quite well: a band that played punk in the beginning because that's where the crowds were, but who could not have pivoted more quickly once they realized the winds were blowing in more mainstream directions. Yet even an artist as notoriously self-absorbed as Sting still sang about the media age (i.e., postmodernism) in dystopian terms. Elvis Costello, Blondie, Talking Heads all achieved fame while disparaging the very world that was giving them that fame. Blondie's case offers an interesting illustration of what happened to many of them. The band actually pushed against fame, adopting the most cartoonish pose possible, but that only seemed to make them more famous. An odd feedback loop developed in these instances, where the artists were adopting ironic celebrity images while fans were taking those images at face value, and in some cases the artists themselves began to buy into this fan adoration.
By the time Duran Duran showed up, the feedback loop had progressed to the point where these younger bands simply bought wholesale into the idea that "image is everything"; irony disappeared entirely. Which sounds like a criticism, but in some ways these are the really interesting artists, the ones who are this new media world: No more prophesying the Matrix; the Matrix has arrived.
In early new wave, then, artists understand what's happening, criticize it, but participate in it nevertheless. In late new wave, the artists are blissfully unaware but they represent the purest expression of image. Early new wave artists are intellectual hypocrites, while late new wave artists are dumb but genuine (that's way too simplistic, but not wrong).
I may have gone too far afield here, but to return to your point: Wardrobe can be a defining characteristic, but not always in straightforward ways.
Q: In the book you talk about the "nervousness" of some new wave vocalists -- David Byrne of the Talking Heads, Ric Ocasek of The Cars -- and I want to connect that to Roger Daltrey's stuttering in "My Generation" and Buddy Holly's hiccuping. I have my own pet theory about rock 'n' roll being all about the unregenerate pose of bored stupid youth, and that maybe some of the decadence of early '70s rock can be attributed to the professionalism and maturation of the second-generation rockers (Beatles, Stones-era guys). Don't know where I'm going with this, only that punks sound like kids, and I generally associate new wavers with the somewhat affected vocals of Ian Curtis or Robert Smith.
A: As for your theory about voices, I'm not sure I can add much. I think you make a really interesting point about punk singers and children. At least in the early days of new wave, I might suggest that the angst that accompanies the voice has something to do with the self-consciousness of these artists: the fear of a coming postmodern world coupled with a sense of being a child trapped in an adult's body (Gary Numan and Soft Cell might be the perfect expression of these impulses, because their characters are trapped in both senses at the same time). I'll have to think that one through a bit more though. Maybe where classic '70s rock takes on a "preachy" adult voice, new wave singers (Costello, Ocasek, Numan) feel more trapped in that adult role?
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 06/28/2015