The end of my last entry got me thinking… “Computer Love” was definitely not a one-off thing. There was an entire genre within a genre of New Wave songs about technology.
This started even before New Wave was a thing, with a band in the ’60s making a video that looks and sounds exactly like it’s from the ’80s:
That video was so far ahead of its time that it could even have been filmed this decade!
David Bowie practically invented the New Wave genre and influenced every artist within that movement. Much of his early music expressed both a fascination with the rapid developments of the world and a sense that those changes could rapidly destroy the world.
OMD took the Apocalyptic theme even further and created a song about the atomic bomb. It’s strangely upbeat, but I’ve found that one of the most interesting elements of New Wave music is the unexpected juxtaposition of upbeat music with dark lyrics.
Heaven 17, which was named after a fictional band mentioned in “A Clockwork Orange”, riffed on the same theme:
Of course, with the nod to “A Clockwork Orange” in their name, Heaven 17 very much leaned into themes about dystopia and technology run amok. Like many New Wave bands, they wrote catchy, dance-able tunes and matched them up with dark lyrics. In the late 2010s, I saw them perform live in NYC, and Glenn Gregory said of one of their songs, “that’s just as relevant now as it was when it was written.”
The dystopian future that Heaven 17 referenced with their name was brought to the screen with a soundtrack that shaped the vibe of New Wave music. It mixed high-brow and low-brow elements, compositions from the distant past with instruments that sounded like something from the near future. Like a lot of later New Wave music, it was both dark and strangely catchy. It’s not considered New Wave, but it certainly was an influence, and it demonstrated the potential of what synthesizers could do. Wendy Carlos walked so that others could run.
Not all tech-themed New Wave songs were about technology gone wrong– some were optimistic and upbeat (without having the mix of upbeat sound and dark lyrics):
“Together in Electric Dreams” pre-dated mainstream use of the internet by more than a decade but precisely captured what it felt like when people became able to communicate cheaply over long distances. Instead of exploring the anxiety and alienation of progress, it reflected feelings of warmth, connection, and optimism.
One of the writers of “Together in Electric Dreams,” Giorgio Moroder, once scored an entire silent film using New Wave music. The second part of this article will explore how that worked perfectly with the theme of the film!