The Los Angeles area was home to one of the most fertile new wave proving grounds in the United States. What’s remarkable is the variety. Where New York specialized in art-punk like Talking Heads and downtown irony and Minneapolis infused a bit of Prince’s funk. LA’s new wave was as sonically diverse as the area itself. For example, the Go-Gos delivered spunky optimism, the Bangles glossiness, and Romeo Void urban grit and rebellion. Let’s focus on three other bands: Wall of Voodoo, Berlin and the Motels. Besides delivering dynamic new wave songs, they offer distinct slices of the Los Angeles pie.
Wall of Voodoo captured the LA-area zeitgest, but at a different angle than their local contemporaries. Their frontman Stan Ridgway hailed from the desert town of Barstow, and he sprinkles this imagery throughout his work. He also had an immediate edge in being the go-to songwriter for regional angst thanks to his strong drawl (the Southwestern counterpoint to Queens' Cyndi Lauper). After moving to Los Angeles, Ridgway formed Wall of Voodoo, desert in pocket. While most don’t know them beyond Mexican Radio, they spun vivid tales of the underbelly of exurban LA (now the Inland Empire).
In my work and labor article I discussed Factory, which tells of the danger and monotony of working class jobs. Lost Weekend is the flip side, with a vignette of a hardscrabble couple who out of desperation blow their weekends away gambling and applying for game shows. The husband laments that he should’ve applied himself at school, a regret trope in rock music. But in biting social commentary, the wife forgives him as saying he would have had a dead-end business cleaning swimming pools for his efforts. These aren’t people rebelling against the system, but rather they’re running out of options inside it. It captures the downward mobility prevalent in working-class towns east of LA. Like New York City, this is made more glaring by the proximity to vast wealth. But LA takes it a step further because of the Hollywood gloss and the “putting on airs” facade that comes with it. This makes wealth visible and tempting, but ultimately unattainable for them, thus the chasing of game shows and lottery winnings. Ridgway nails this in Lost Weekend, other Voodoo songs, and later his solo offerings.
Like Factory, Lost Weekend is also hypnotic. But instead of a factory-esque drone, Lost accomplishes this through melancholy, western-twanged synths that go on and on, just like the couples’ boring repetitive lives. Counter to much of new wave, Wall of Voodoo doesn’t rebel. Instead they document what it feels like to live inside the machine - long after its shininess wears off.
In Los Angeles, isolation wasn’t a side effect of success - it was built into the city itself. Geography plays a role with its sprawling, auto-centric layout, as well as the hidden loneliness of Hollywood glamor. The local Motels baked this into a lot of their songs. For instance, Suddenly Last Summer was a great tale of lost love.
Now on the surface, Only the Lonely sounds like the narrator looking back at a failing relationship. But dig deeper and its a morose tale about the loneliness of fame and the fakeries attached to that. In fact, Martha Davis was inspired to write this because of their own rise to fame as the Motels became well-known. Touring, while great, also meant more lonely hotel rooms. Meetings with the press and nurturing industry relationships meant more time with strangers or acquaintances with high expectations (and less with friends) didn’t help either. The Motels didn’t sound lonely because of breakups. They sounded lonely because LA is a city designed for people to keep moving - even when they have nowhere to go. The line “We lived without each other thinking” refers to contrived optics and conversations that go with fame and by extension Hollywood. Martha sells this well with weary vocals that trail a bit at the end. The melody subtly supports this with a slightly melancholy tone.
The lyrics, vocals, and melody combined suggest physical exhaustion, but also the burnout of looking back and around and believing you have nothing to show for all your efforts. The characters they embody (and the band itself) are not kids nor lazy. They’re doing everything right but still feel hollow. And while the Go-Go’s air of joy and camaraderie and the Bangles’ persona of polish and professionalism make for great music and deserve a place, the dark side of this also should be expressed, and fellow Angelenos the Motels deliver this in spades.
The Los Angeles lifestyle has long carried a reputation for façades that mask vulnerability - a dynamic Berlin personified better than almost any of their peers. Their lyrics often cover emotional control in the context of social survival. This is in contrast to the Motels more-defensive posture. And while vocalist Terri Nunn can take your breath away, her real power lies in restraint - rebellion, but delivered with a layer of ice.
While Berlin’s song Sex has raunchy lyrics, it’s much more than the surface-level sex romp that the title and the sleazy synth intro suggests. Nunn is name-dropping stereotypical female roles (e.g. “Geisha”, “bitch”) specifically to mock their societal reduction to labels (through exaggeration and vocal venom). This ties into the Angeleno ethos that archetypes are more valuable than interiority. The synth hooks are solid but restrained, allowing Nunn’s vocals to pierce through. While Berlin lays bare this phenomenon, they don’t actively rail against it. A deft move, as their approach fits with well with their cool-as-ice motif; injecting venom a la Romeo Void into this song would be inconsistent and jarring.
In clubs, casting rooms and industry-adjacent spaces, how you looked and carried yourself often mattered as much as what you actually did. With LA’s emphasis on roles and its wealth disparity, it was easy to group people in neat boxes, such as:
There’s pressure to stay in the box - stray and it may hurt your long-term prospects. Stray and you survive.
What’s the cost of all this? Emotional numbness and burnout illustrated in their song No More Words. This song is framed as a girlfriend calling out her boyfriend for not following up on promises. But it’s really Nunn saying she’s had enough of the facades around her. Over time, that restraint stops being situational and becomes reflexive. In a city that rewards composure and legibility, emotional control isn’t just learned - it’s internalized.
Los Angeles didn’t produce a single new wave sound - it produced conditions. Wall of Voodoo documented the machinery, the Motels captured the emotional fallout, and Berlin showed how people learned to survive inside it. Together, they reveal a city where opportunity was visible, identity was performative, and emotional, economic, and geographic distance was built into daily life. New wave didn’t just soundtrack Los Angeles. It explained it.
