The B-52's

About

Most listeners probably think of The B-52’s as the band responsible for good-time 1980s party hits like “Love Shack” and “Roam”—and they’re not wrong. But the band’s commercial success only accounts for part of their story. It’s not even like they changed that much: Go back and listen to “52 Girls” or “Rock Lobster” from the group’s self-titled 1979 debut, and you can hear the same stuff that made the band so big a little later on: the surf guitars, the kitschy sense of humor, the way they flipped the innocence of 1950s pop culture into something trashy and a little weird. Even the band’s name—The B-52’s, after the ridiculous, precarious, over-feminized beehive haircuts worn by Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, but also after the conical noses of the bomber planes the haircuts resembled—felt subversive, or at least a little pokey; a connection between the insane cheerfulness of postwar pop and the almost monolithic violence of the American state. Getting lumped in with punk rock wasn’t totally wrong: As fun as it is, <i>The B-52’s</i> is shiny plastic music that makes you think about the rot underneath. And if that sounds highfalutin, just listen to how ugly they scream on “Dance This Mess Around” or Petula Clark’s “Downtown”—this isn’t a sock hop, sport. Alongside albums like the Talking Heads’ <i>More Songs About Buildings and Food</i> and Devo’s <i>Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!</i>, this album defined the sound and feel of American New Wave: arty, direct, nerdy and questioning and a little irreverent but friendly, too—at least compared to the Romantic destruction of punk. And as current as the music probably sounded in the late 1970s, <i>The B-52’s</i> also predicted the playfulness of junk and retro culture that became a fixture of pop from the 1990s on, in which the present was basically a weirdly stitched-together Frankenstein of a bunch of disposable pasts. That Fred Schneider and Ricky Wilson—who died of AIDS in 1985—were two of the more identifiable gay pop artists of the time only made the band seem more novel and urgent. You know what they say: One man’s trash is another group of visionary weirdos’ treasure.

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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