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NEW WAVE
Pop had stamped its unique and distinctive style on every year since the mid-1950s with the exception of the late 1970s. At that time, the music business was still in a state of shock after the punk explosion and it wasn't until the dust had settled at the end of the decade that it was possible to get a clear view of the state of the industry and make a roll call of the survivors. The only thing that can be said with certainty about that period is that it was a time of diversity and consolidation.

On the positive side, there were dozens of significant new artists maturing at a good pace and establishing themselves as a new elite. This so called New Wave, is a less anarchistic post-punk movement which promised to put some of the raw energy of punk into mainstream pop but instead became a catch-all term for a new generation of artists who came to prominence in the post-punk era. Most notable among this "new wave" as it was initially called were Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, The Smiths, U2, The Police and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Less propitious was the number of revivals that cluttered up the charts with cover versions of old songs and which appeared to be a desperate attempt by the establishment to pretend that punk had simply never happened. In quick succession, there was a rockabilly revival led by The Stray Cats and Elvis impersonator Shakin' Stevens, a ska revival fronted by Madness, The Specials and The Selecter, and a heavy metal revival which revived the careers of Motorhead, Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath and AC/DC. There was even a punk revival of sorts with the advent of Hardcore (which took the furious pace of punk and increased it to an incomprehensible degree). And as usual, there was a cross-fertilization of the new and old resulting in forms such as Thrash Metal.

The New Wave was not so much a reaction against Punk as an insidious and cynical distillation of the punk ethic. It was a predominantly American movement in which bands adopted the couldn't-care-less attitude of the original punk bands and psyched themselves up to play with the same intensity, but much of it was a safe, Xerox copy for middle-class kids. The best of the New Wave bands (Blondie, The Cars and Talking Heads) made some great records and left an indelible impression because they brought something extra to the formula, but they were the exception.

NEW ROMANTICS
The mainstream pop music of the 1980s was primarily party music and bands and fans dressed accordingly. But the "New Romantics" as the first wave was called, didn't want to go back to the 1950s retro rock of the Glam era. They saw themselves as being at the dawn of the digital age with 24-hour music television on tap from satellite, music videos threatening to replace live concerts and computer technology promising to make every hopeful amateur sound like a professional musician. They wanted to create a sound that evoked the brave new world to come, which they imagined only electronic keyboards and drum machines could produce.

For less than the price of a decent electric guitar and amplifier, any teenager in the 1980s could buy a keyboard and reproduce the sound of an entire rock group at the touch of a button, with a far more authentic sound than the crude, rasping electronic synthesizers of the 1970s. You didn't have to be a real musician to sound good. You didn't even have to be able to play accurately on time. A spot of judicious editing and the computer could be programmed to play the keyboard, a bass synth and a drum machine note perfect each and every time. Pop become programmable.

Those who managed to establish an identity and bring some color back into the charts during the decade included the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, New Order, The Human League, Eurythmics, Wham, OMD (Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark), Culture Club and Duran Duran.

By the mid-1980s, the sweet sound of American soul music had acquired a harder edge and a rhythmic dynamic that reflected the reality of life in the inner cities. Disco has been dismissed as passe' and funk had become almost a parody of itself. Black music had been in danger of losing its soul to show business until its beat and bass lines were sampled by a new generation who were determined to bring it back down to street level.

DJ Afrika Bambaata potentized the new sound of soul in the Bronx district of New York in the early 1980s. He simply wanted to make a new dance form that would appeal to a multi-ethnic audience in the clubs and also to the kids, who was break dancing to portable beat boxes in the parks. His idea was to take the sermonizing style of the Jamaican DJs who rapped , or "toasted" over their records and weld it to the electronic beat of German synthesizer band Kraftwerk, who believed had pioneered the music of the future. It was an unlikely partnership but it proved to be an inspired match and an extremely prodigious one. Bambaata remixed Kraftwerk's tapes using samplers, sequencers and drum machines to create his own version of their music on a track which he called "Planet Rock". With this one record, he initiated the age of the DJs as producer and created a new, predominantly black dance form, which was to mutate into a myriad diverse dance styles including House, Rap, Jungle and Techno.

HOUSE
House Music took its name from the Powerhouse club on the south side of Chicago where the resident DJs fed slickly produced mid-1970s disco records through a MIDI computer. This method enabled them to over-dub additional keyboard lines and drum fills live in the club and in perfect sync to the beat, without having to remix the track in a studio. It effectively made new records from the old to the delight of the dance crowd, although it had little to do with creating music as the DJs could only play simple lines in sync with the aid of the machines. The keyboard lines were usually subterranean wall-shaking bass figures rather than top-line melodies and there was an emphasis on special sound effects such as "Scratching" (manipulating two copies of the same record on the turntable by hand). With such a limited musical vocabulary, House soon lost its novelty. By the end of the 1980s, its trademarks has been assimilated into mainstream pop by acts such as Soul II Soul, KLF and the Shamen. Early examples of the genre were the singles "Jack Your Body" by Chicago DJ Steve "Silk" Hurley, "Pump Up The Jam" by Belgium's Technotronic and a more laid-back British version spun by M/A/A/R/S/ ("Pump Up The Volume"), S-Express ("Theme from S-Express") and Bomb The Bass ("Beat Dis").

TECHNO
Techno took over the House when the latter became passe'. Techno was an intense, "soulless" computer generated dance music which has been created in Detroit by faceless whiz kids who fused hardcore funk to the electronic noise of Kraftwerk and the repetitive sequenced bass lines of the Eurodisco maestro Giorgio Moroder. The result mimicked the robotic, pneumatic sounds of the machines of the city's car plants and perhaps, proved particularly popular in other industrial centers, specifically Frankfurt and Sheffield.

Techno in turn separated into two polarized camps - a more mellow ambient form, as an exemplified by bands Orbital and Underworld, and even harder and more frantic variation incorporating raga reggae styles. This was initially known as Jungle (but renamed "Drum and Bass" to avoid accusations of racism) of which the Prodigy were acknowledge as prime exponents.

RAP
Rap began in the black and Hispanic ghettos of New York in the late 1970s as a form of self-assertion by under-privileged kids who saw themselves as having been abandoned by the system. Their protest took the form of a half spoken-half sung rhyming monologue improvised over the existing records in the manner of the Jamaican DJs and radical black artists The Last Poets.

The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" (1979) may have been the first worldwide hit in this style, but it was not typical. Instead it was their label mate Grandmaster Flash who provided trhe template for the hard, intimidating soapbox xtyle that was to dominate black music for the next two decades. "The Message" (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was a top ten hit both sides of the Atlantic and established Rap primarily as a medium for social comment.

The major record companies were initially reluctant to sign rap acts, which they saw as being too politically provocative to market to the mainstream music buyers. This left the field open to enterprising independent labels such as New York's Def Jam who hooked the biggest acts )LL Cool J, Run DMC, The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy) and scooped the lucrative white suburban sales.

Rap was initially perceived by the musical establishment as being as dangerous as punk had once been and so there were no rap acts on the bill at the Live Aid fund-raising concert spectacular in 1985 and none playlisted in the early years of MTV. However, rap absorbed into white pop to give a fashionable flavor to tracks by innumerable copycat "girl power" and manufactured "boy" bands. In response, black acts split into two camps, the more militant Gangsta rappers and the mellow retro-soul bands such as De La Soul.

SAMPLER
Samplers are potentially the most exciting creative tool to appear since the invention of the synthesizer. Although they are, in essence, tapeless digital recorders for recording and instantly replaying snippets of sound, if used imaginatively, they offer the aural equivalent of Virtual Reality to club DJs, record producers and remix maestros as well as musicians. Initially, in the early 1980s, they were used mainly by dance floor DJs and "underground" club acts as a basic record and playback devices to copy and "loop" riffs, phrases and hooks from other artist's records to spice up and add novelty to a dance track. But recent advances in technology now equip them to recycle sounds with the versatility of a top-flight synthesizer, so that the sound of a complete orchestra or a continuous percussion track, for example, can be triggered with the touch of a single key. Even when heard in isolation, it is almost impossible to determine whether a well-sampled sound is real or sampled, as the original sound sources are invariably real instruments digitally recorded to avoid any taint of artificiality.

The great thing about sampling is that the artists can do what he or she likes with the sample once it is in the computer. This cannot be done with a musician who comes in to record a part on a particular track, as the part will remain as it was played. But once a sample has been digitally stored, it can be turned back to front, repeated endlessly as if it was on a tape loop, and speed can be altered. The original sampled line may have been used only once, so it is to the sampler's credit if he or she sees the potential should be juxtaposed with another sound to create a unique element rather than being used bare and blatantly.

How It Works: The sampler's micro processing chip scans each waveform thousands of times per second, measuring and translating its peaks and troughs into digital information, so that it can be stored. Each individual measurement is a sample and together these thousands of separate numbers form a graph, or map, of a waveform. When they are fed back through a Digital to Analog Converted, they are faithfully translated back into audible sound without having been electronically corrupted or distorted in any way.