How sexy was New Wave, for the love of eyeshadow?

October 18, 2005 9:34 PM

Discography as iconography of a po-mo epoch. Relayed from Boing2 because it's the glorious visual epitaph for GenX nostalgia. I'm almost crying over here, and activating eBay.
posted by objet (14 comments total)

An enviable collection, to be sure.
posted by VanRoosta at 9:43 PM on October 18, 2005

It's interesting how he uses the term New Wave. To me, when I was a high school kid in the late '80s, that meant electronic stuff like Depeche Mode, OMD, Soft Cell, etc. We even used the term "wavers" for people that liked this music and adopted it's fashion sense.

Apparently we were really misusing the term. Go figure.
posted by teece at 10:06 PM on October 18, 2005

"Boing2"?

In the future, even the abbreviations will be abbreviated.

/grouch
posted by ook at 10:48 PM on October 18, 2005

Technically, shouldn't it be Boing^2?
posted by freebird at 10:56 PM on October 18, 2005

2(boing)
posted by sourwookie at 11:17 PM on October 18, 2005

boing twinned

BEHOLD! the abbreviation that is longer than the original word.
posted by Parannoyed at 12:05 AM on October 19, 2005

teece, he sort of acknowledges that. I think it's now common, though, to speak of the 1980s as the New Wave era.

To me New Wave wasn't disco/dance, wasn't rock, and wasn't punk (but its roots were in punk).

Those are gorgeous, though, and most of them I'd never seen (I think I've bought about three singles in my entire life).
posted by dhartung at 12:32 AM on October 19, 2005

wow. i've got about 1/4 of these... but my collection has more punk.

new wave used to be considered a totally different style than punk - it was way more pop. though i do remember when even bruce springsteen was called punk.

very nice site, thanks for the link.
posted by lapolla at 1:15 AM on October 19, 2005

This is more like a discography of a pomade era than a po-mo era.
posted by srboisvert at 2:07 AM on October 19, 2005

at first, I thought this was impressive.

Now, it's still impressive, but when I realized that this was someone who legitimately thought the go-go's and the bangles were awesome.... it's also cringe inducing.
posted by shmegegge at 4:25 AM on October 19, 2005

Sigh. I know that everyone thinks that the music that was current when they were sixteen was the best but the late seventies/early eighties was a great time for music. At least until MTV started and screwed everything.
posted by octothorpe at 4:27 AM on October 19, 2005

Wow, those cover designs are so... so 80's. Radical!
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:29 AM on October 19, 2005

trippy thing is that the gang of four is live on kcrw as i write this... new wave was me & virgil & vincent & his boyfriend all lining up along the wall of the disco across from the dj booth after the 2am peak crowd started to thin out - all of us decked out in thrift store irridescent raincoats covered with safey pins & buttons, and underneath the coats superskinny ties & amazing sharkskin suits. we'd stand in a line with our drinks & smokes & stare at the booth and do a thumbs down for every song until the dj stopped playing that fucking copacabana kind of shit - you know, disco streisand & dumma summer enough was enough was enough was enough - and then, in a not so subtle shift the first notes of 'whip it' would bounce across the floor and we'd all fly out arms akimbo throwing our drinks on the horrified old queens with their izod pullovers (collars flipped up of course) and we'd dance through a superset of b52's, ramones, blondie, madness & of course the sex pistols even though they were punks...and we'd dance until our spiky hair was wet & matted against our foreheads. when we weren't sneering down our noses at disco from our mascara'd eyes we'd be in my basement apt. listening to joe jackson, kate bush, nina hagen, elvis costello & the goddess patti smith. octothorpe's right, late 70's was a cool time ... now 'scuse me while i pull myself back to the present.
posted by basis4insanity at 11:46 AM on October 19, 2005

"New Wave" was the marketing term used to sell stuff to people who would have been scared of anything associated with punk. And also the term punks used for all those bands trying to glom onto the punk vibe but were really just pop posers.


And octothorpe is right. Go read Rip It Up and Start Again

(NYC in the late '70s, early '80s ruled. Good drugs, easy sex, great music.)
posted by Ayn Marx at 5:01 PM on October 20, 2005