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History of Popular Culture—Week 5, Assignment 4

With the late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ punk rock movement fading, music in the U.S. again saw a resurgence of creativity and expression. Many new genres of music came to the mainstream market between 1984 and 1999.

The term “New Wave” was given to a new style of music that evolved from punk rock. Sire Records’ cofounder Seymour Stein coined the term because he saw punk rock’s mainstream popularity fading and wanted a new term to market these new artists separately from punk rock. The genre is also known as synthpop due to its prevalent use of the synthesizer.

New Wave music was diverse. Initially, artists who were considered New Wave included Blondie, The B-52s, and Elvis Costello. But as its popularity grew, New Wave groups became identified more by their common beliefs—strong anti-corporate, anti-establishment, experimental musical attitudes—than by the sounds of the music they played. The style grew to include better known groups such as The Police and R.E.M. The artists’ music reflected their mutual distaste for and energetic reaction against the “supposedly overproduced, uninspired popular music of the 1970s.”

The New Wave era began to die out around 1986, but the style and thought affected American popular music until about 1992. Even today, references are still made in mainstream movies such as Ace Ventura and The Wedding Singer to the hairstyles of New Wave poster child group A Flock of Seagulls.

Other punk-influenced genres popped up, with moderate successes and followings throughout the nation. These included Gothic rock, post-punk, alternative rock, emo and thrash metal. These are more generally described as heavy metal, punk rock and hardcore punk.

Hip hop saw its beginnings in the mid-1970s, but rose to widespread popularity in the 1980s. Hip hop music became a large part of pop culture in the 1980s. The style was characterized by two key components: scratching, a turntablist technique involving moving a vinyl record back and forth while playing; and rapping, a style of music that merges speech and poetry with very loose melodies, often with the backdrop of sparse, synthesized instrumentation.

The early 1990s’ musical evolution was mostly through two fronts—rap and grunge.

Grunge music replaced “hair metal” bands, so-called because of their tendency to tease their long hair into a large, puffy mass. Inspired by punk rock, the grunge genre of alternative rock was itself characterized by the heavy distortion and feedback of “dirty” guitar, strong musical riffs, and heavy drumming. The style embodied the typical teenager’s feelings of the time—anger, frustration, sadness, fear, and as such was fully embraced in the early ’90s.

Rap music—or “gangsta rap,” as it is sometimes called—while closely tied to the 1980s’ hip hop movement, took distinct steps in the musical evolution of the early ’90s to become its own independent style. Its lyrical focus is on the inner-city lives of gang members and other affiliated criminals. It is from the “gangsta” culture that ebonics phrases, such as “da hood” and , came into popular usage.

Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s#Music
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_trends_in_music_%281980-1989%29
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_trends_in_music_from_the_United_States
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_music
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Flock_of_Seagulls
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sire_Records
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthpop
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratching
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapping
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glam_metal
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_music
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangsta_rap
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_hood
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics