Are We Not New Wave?—Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s
By Theo Cateforis (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2011)
Here’s a book that is incapable of answering the very simple question in its very title.
It doesn’t set workable definitions of “punk” or “new wave,” basically just wanting to write about the bands it wants to write about. In assessing an era of music that was largely defined by regional movements, college-prof author Theo Cateforis focuses instead on Devo (part of a thriving Akron industrial-town music scene in the 1970s) as an “art-school” band and The B-52s (from the fertile and diverse Athens, Georgia scene) for its camp-kitsch elements. This is a cosmetic gloss on music that runs deep beneath its surface. Cateforis also overstates critical reaction to these bands to prove his points
I’ve learned to be wary of overacademicized university-press books on pop culture. I should have known better about this one. I liked the candid, colorful Devo photo on its cover. I was surprised, given the Devo-coverage, not to see The Waitresses, Tin Huey, Pere Ubu or Rocket from the Tombs listed in the index, but checked Are We Not New Wave? out of the library anyway. The language will make your eyes glaze over, and you realize after a while that the only real problem evident in sections like “Power Pop and the Problems of Genre” are Cateforis’ difficulties fitting some of these bands into narrow and arbitrary categories—something he continually accuses mainstream critics of doing
Ultimately, you feel that this book centers on the most commercial and accomplished “new wave” bands because Theo Cateforis either wasn’t there or wasn’t paying attention while the movement was actually happening. Oh, for a real historically based, rather than theoretical, study of the new wave!