Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Tim Sommer, “The Sound of the Sinceros,” Trouser Press, February 1980, 12. 2. Jim Green, “Blondie: Progress Report from the Power Station,” Trouser Press, September 1979, 14. 3. Joe Gore and Andrew Goodwin, “Your Time Is Gonna Come: Talking about Led Zeppelin,” One Two Three Four 4 (Winter 1987), 7. 4. Quoted in Robert Elms, “B-52’s,” New Styles New Sounds Magazine, April 1982. Reprinted in The Third Pyramid: The B-52’s Archive, http://www.btinternet.com/ ~roc.lobsta/newsounds.html. 5. The average tempo on the B-52’s debut 1979 album is 159 BPM. Compare that with two of the 1970s’ top-selling studio records: Led Zeppelin 4 (108 BPM) and Fleetwood Mac Rumours (107 BPM). This number is skewed, of course, by the fact that both the Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac albums are populated by numerous songs hovering in the 70–80 BPM range. Nonetheless, between the Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac records there are a total of only three tracks that register a tempo faster than that of the B-52’s’s slowest song (135 BPM). 6. To name just one such station: K-15 AM, Phoenix. See “Hello It’s Me,” Trouser Press, December 1980, 2. 7. For a good overview and critique of the different disciplinary understandings of modern, modernity, and modernism, see Susan Stanford Friedman, “De‹nitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” MODERNISM/modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513. 8. Ibid., 503–5. 9. Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,” New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984): 54. 10. Jon Stratton, “Beyond Art: Postmodernism and the Case of Popular Music,” Theory, Culture & Society 6, no. 1 (1989): 31–57. 11. Andrew Goodwin addresses the many problems that arise from reading postmodernism ’s aesthetic attributes onto assumed sociological and cultural formations 225 in “Popular Music and Postmodern Theory,” in The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader, ed. Nigel Wheale (New York: Routledge, 1995), 80–100. 12. See, for example, Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 13. Horn and the song’s cowriter Bruce Wooley have claimed that “Video” was inspired by J. G. Ballard’s 1960 short story, “The Sound-Sweep,” which describes the rise of inaudible ultrasonic music, and the subsequent passing of a once glorious opera diva. See Ballard, “The Sound-Sweep,” in The Voices of Time (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985), 41–79. 14. For an analysis and interpretation of the song’s production techniques, see Timothy Warner, Pop Music—Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 41–49. 15. For more on the in›uences between disco and new wave, see Charles Kronengold , “Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Oriented Rock,” Criticism 50, no. 1 (2008): 43–82. 16. Ira A. Robbins, ed., The New Trouser Press Record Guide, 3rd ed. (New York: Collier , 1989), vii. 17. See, for example, Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979); Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Neil Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture and Anarchy in Postwar England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Steven Taylor, False Prophets: Field Notes from the Underground (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Robert T. Wood, Straightedge Youth: Complexity and Contradictions of a Subculture (Syracuse , NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006). 18. See, for example, Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Christina Bodinger-deUriarte , “Opposition to Hegemony in the Music of Devo: A Simple Matter of Remembering ,” Journal of Popular Culture 18, no. 4 (1984–85): 56–71; Gillian Rodger, “Drag, Camp and Gender Subversion in the Music and Videos of Annie Lennox,” Popular Music 23, no. 1 (2004): 17–29. Two notable exceptions that address the new wave movement directly and in depth are John Covach, “Pangs of History in Late 1970s New-Wave Rock,” in Analyzing Popular Music, ed. Allan Moore (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 173–95, and Kronengold, “Exchange Theories.” 19. Ira A. Robbins, ed., The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983). 20. Glenn A. Baker and Stuart Cope, The New Music (New...