1/10/2023 0 Comments World for two new waves![]() For one, the music had already assimilated some of disco’s familiar turf, specifically through the spectacular boom in urban clubs known as rock discos. New wave appeared to fit this bill in many different ways. Most of all they were looking for some magical genre that could fuse disco’s formula of “high rates of turnover and low production costs” with the consistently high sales that the top rock albums provided. Even though members of the industry looked upon disco’s failure with disillusioned eyes, they still held out hope that they could harness the music’s selling power in some way. In such an atmosphere, labels were understandably anxious to resuscitate their failing health. As Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door fell far short of the bands’ previous triumphant sales, it appeared that the recession was resistant to any convenient remedies. Even the proven superstar rock acts that the labels rushed for a fall release, hoping that they would help offset disco’s lost potential revenue, managed relatively disappointing returns. Billboard bemoaned the relative anonymity of the music and the movement’s “dearth of superstars.” The problems, however, extended beyond just disco. Disco, which was more a producer-oriented than artist-oriented style, and which thrived on extended remixes and twelve-inch singles rather than albums, was having difficulty prospering within the industry’s standard rock-driven marketing model. ![]() Throughout the first half of 1979 disco continued to dominate the singles charts thanks to radio programming and the club scene, but a glance at the more highly prized album charts, where disco’s profile was comparatively modest, told a different story. The industry had gotten drunk on the genre, however, as labels expanded their disco department staffing and pursued new artists with reckless abandon. The year 1978 had been a banner year, largely thanks to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack’s unprecedented sales and the rise of disco dancing as a mainstream pop culture phenomenon. Many in the industry were quick to point their fingers in blame, and inevitably they were directed at disco. Serge Denisoff has called “The Great Depression of ’79.” The result was a bloodletting that had decimated a significant portion of the industry’s workforce. Five months later Rolling Stone estimated that the number had increased to two thousand. In August, BusinessWeek reported that the music industry had cut one thousand employees in a workforce of only fourteen thousand. Companies began to lay off employees at an alarming rate. In such a climate CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff may have exaggerated only slightly when complaining, “Our customers literally ran out of money.” An industry accustomed to yearly upward profits was sent reeling, and, faced with a sea of abnormally large overstock returns and sharply declining sales, the major record labels panicked. To a large extent the troubles befalling the industry were symptomatic of a larger national recession, compounded by the oil crisis and skyrocketing gasoline prices. At the same time, new wave’s heightened presence must also be understood within the more complicated context of a desperate American music industry that was facing its worst financial crisis in decades. ![]() Image: many respects, the increase in new wave sales during 1979 was simply a case of a slow-building genre with deep roots that was beginning to gain more momentum. ![]() Two albums in particular, the Cars’ Candy-O and the multiplatinum debut from Los Angeles power pop quartet the Knack, had sold remarkably well and had swept Billboard’s end-of-the-year “Reader’s Rock Polls.”īook: Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980sĪffiliate: jsessionid=14477D2495CAF54963D58B1E92900829?id=152565 (University of Michigan Press) Two new British artists, the Police and Joe Jackson, had also cracked the Top 40 singles chart, and better yet had also each placed two separate releases in the Top 40 albums chart. Elvis Costello’s third album, Armed Forces, was in the Top 10, as was Blondie’s third album, Parallel Lines. While anyone looking at either Billboard’s singles or album charts needed to squint to spot a new wave artist in 1979, for those who were paying attention to such things, the few that had made an impact offered signs that the genre’s fortunes were on the rise. New Wave in America, 1979 to 1981: The First Rise and Fall No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted with permission for PopMatters from Chapter 1 of Are We Not New Wave?: Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s, by Theo Cateforis, © 2011 (footnotes omitted), published by the University of Michigan Press.
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