SHARE A BRAINWAVE

Maybe it’s because I’m a musician, but the word wave immediately made me think of different musical terms/genres such as ‘new wave’ and ‘no wave’.

If you go visit allmusic.com and make a search for song titles with the word ‘wave’, the name Antonio Carlos Jobim pops up.. but then again he’s from Brazil and somehow I guess waves and the sunny beaches of Rio de Janeiro go together pretty well..

Anyhow I was on to the subject of musical genres..

According to Wikipedia Seymour Stein, who was the head of Sire Records, ‘needed a term by which he could market his newly signed bands, who had frequently played the club CBGB. Because radio consultants in the U.S. had advised their clients that punk rock was a fad (and because many stations that had embraced disco had been hurt by the backlash), Stein settled on the term “new wave”. He felt that the music was the musical equivalent of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s.^{[citation needed]} Like those film makers, his new artists (most notably Talking Heads) were anti-corporate, experimental, and a generation that had grown up as critical consumers of the art they now practiced.’

Again according to Wikipedia ‘No wave’ on the other hand ‘was a short-lived but influential art music and art scene that thrived briefly in New York City during the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk subculture.^[1] The term No Wave is in part satiricwordplay rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre. The term also highlights the music’s experimental nature: No Wave music belonged to no fixed style or genre.’

So I guess that using the word wave within a term, sort of has implications of something new, something that will overthrow what was there before.. a movement.. or according to the latter, something that does not want to fit in to something, but wants to oppose what wants to be regarded as representing something which ‘it’ is not ..

Inevitably ‘new waves’ of musical genres will always pop up, like for instance this whole thing about ‘new rave’, which is basically just rock ‘n roll, with just a little more emphasize on the drugs and the club kids; basically ‘Madchester’ all over again :-)

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