New Pop
| New Pop | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early 1980s, United Kingdom |
| Other topics | |
New Pop was a British music movement rooted in the post-punk movement of the late 1970s. In terms of style, most of its bands had little in common with each other, but it consisted mainly of ambitious, DIY-minded artists who achieved commercial success in the United States through the cable music channel MTV. "New Music" is a roughly equivalent but slightly more expansive umbrella term used by the music industry and by American music journalists during the 1980s to characterize the "new" movements like New Pop and New Romantic. New Music was a pop music and cultural phenomenon in the US associated with the Second British Invasion.
Many New Pop artists created technologically oriented music that sweetened less commercial and experimental aspects with a pop coating.Entryism became a popular concept for groups at the time. New Music acts were danceable, had an androgynous look, emphasized the synthesizer and drum machines, wrote about the darker side of romance, and were British. They rediscovered rockabilly, Motown, ska, reggae and merged it with African rhythms to produce what was described as a "fertile, stylistic cross-pollination". Author Simon Reynolds noted that the New Pop movement "involved a conscious and brave attempt to bridge the separation between 'progressive' pop and mass/chart pop – a divide which has existed since 1967, and is also, broadly, one between boys and girls, middle-class and working-class."
The term "New Music" or "New Pop" was used loosely to describe synthpop groups such as the Human League, soul-disco acts such as ABC, new wave acts such as Elvis Costello and the Pretenders,jangle pop bands such as Orange Juice, and American MTV stars such as Michael Jackson.Stephen Holden of the New York Times wrote at the time that New Music was more about its practitioners than their sound. Teenage girls and males that had grown tired of traditional "phallic" guitar driven rock embraced New Music. New Music was a singles oriented (both 7 inch and the then new 12 inch) phenomenon, reverting the 1970s rock music album orientation.
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