No wave was an avant-garde music and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was coined as a rejection of commercial new wave music. No wave musicians took rock instrumentation and experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic worldview, originally pioneered by New York artists Suicide and Jack Ruby.