Rock Lobsters and other Cosmic Things
The band that changed my life
I don’t usually go for “favorites” - the world is too broad and rich to quantify your affections. But when pressed, I can usually come up with something. I suppose Wes Anderson is my “favorite” filmmaker. For much of my life, I’d venture that Kurt Vonnegut was my “favorite” author. And it wouldn’t take much arm-twisting to get me to admit that my “favorite” band is the B-52s.
I know plenty of people who love the B-52s, but not too many who would place them at the pinnacle of their pantheon. What draws me to them so? On the eve of flying out to catch the final performance of their “farewell” residency in Las Vegas1, I wanted to think that through.
Like most folks of my microgeneration, my first exposure to the B-52s was hearing “Love Shack” on the radio. I was in eighth grade, and I’ll be frank that I had no idea what to do with it. A “Chrysler as big as a whale”? I was attracted to the fact that it was coming from a different zone than the rest of the mainstream pop of those days, but I still felt like I was missing something - it seemed both too grown-up and somehow foreign to me.
A few months later, I was visiting a cousin who lived a few towns over, and she played me the Cosmic Thing cassette on her little bedroom tape player. Hearing the other songs on the album was like an epiphany, revealing the teeming life in the negative space around the hit single. I often wish I could go back and pinpoint the exact musical moment when I realized, “This is for me,” but the truth is I don’t know what it was. All I remember is that I borrow it, played it on repeat for two weeks straight, bought my own copy, and kept playing it on repeat for the next few months - through my first girlfriend, through the end of middle school, through a rocky adolescent summer and right up to the beginning of high school. From the hopped-up pastoral new wave of “Dry County” through the hallucinatory melodrama of “Bushfire” through the utopian shimmer of “Topaz” (which for years I would claim as my favorite song), there’s no album I’ve heard more, no songs I can conjure from beginning to end like the 10 tracks on that rainbow-colored album.
(Here’s one of their lesser-known singles from that album, “Channel Z,” which is a bit on the nose satirically speaking, but also not wrong?)
Without an internet to guide me, it took some time for it to sink in that the band might have a previous discography worth exploring. At some point during the first few weeks of high school, I decided to take my allowance money and track down some of their earlier music. One of the most fateful moments of my life was going to the local Strawberries and discovering a double-length cassette with the B-52s’ 1979 self-titled debut on one side and their 1980 follow-up Wild Planet on the other.
This binary burst of angular, day-glo, garage glam opened up an entirely new sonic world to me. Cosmic Thing had existed on a continuum with other music of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s - it was slickly produced and danceable and, despite its overt quirkiness, very FM-friendly. These albums were something else entirely - their weirdness was much deeper, their sounds unlike anything played on any radio station in central Connecticut. They were so serious about their lack of seriousness. Just look at this intense live performance of their biggest early hit, “Rock Lobster” (which John Lennon once claimed as his favorite song:
Ricky Wilson’s jauntily janky guitar tunings! Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s otherworldly harmonies! Fred Schneider’s unflagging commitment to the bit! (Speaking as someone who aspired to a performance career but can’t sing a note, Fred was - and remains - my performance idol.) It all adds up to a vortex of weird emotion translated into fabulous absurdity - the perfect sound for a dawning weirdo like me.
I spent the following months chronologically tracking down all of their other albums on cassette - Mesopotamia (1982) on a double cassette with Party Mix! (1981), Whammy! (1983), and Bouncing Off the Satellites (1986). These albums - later joined by Good Stuff (1992) - became the soundtrack to my high school years, and later, my life.2 Though I wouldn’t have been able to put it this way at the time, the band’s bone-deep queerness was a tremendous comfort and inspiration to me. It was a big-tent queerness, one that went way beyond sexual orientation to encompass anyone with an open heart and a sense of fun - even a cis-white-straight-male from the suburbs like me. Anyone with a taste for their brand of poignantly delirious glitter and glee was welcome to shimmy to the relentless beat.
And what’s more, they were funny. Not too many musical artists go for that, and those that do tend to aim either for the snobbishly clever (i.e., the Smiths) or the sophomorically low-brow (i.e., “Weird Al”). While I love both of these extremes, no one else has ever quite plied the histrionically goofy groove that the B-52s made their own. A major part of this is that their sense of humor was never at anyone’s expense - they created an alternate world of tiny green poodles and pineapple upside-down cakes and outrageous wigs3 that was distinctly their own. Their retro-punk kitsch paved the way for the likes of Pee-Wee Herman and RuPaul’s Drag Race. If ever a band had a freak flag to fly, it was them.
For a glimpse of how their antic madness cuts across boundaries of genre and taste, here’s a guest appearance they made on a 1982 episode of the long-running soap opera Guiding Light. Because why not! I love to imagine what the straight-laced midwestern housewives must have thought of this:
A part of me is nervous to go see the band again at the end of their careers. Hope and I caught them in Poughkeepsie back in 1998, and it was a great time - when they announced this final residency, I wasn’t sure I needed to do it again. The only original members onstage are the vocalists: Fred, Kate, and Cindy. Ricky Wilson died tragically young of AIDS in 1985 and never even got to enjoy the band’s commercial success; Keith Strickland, the original drummer who taught himself Ricky’s unique guitar style after his death, hasn’t performed live with the band in over 12 years. And I mean, Vegas is fun and all, but isn’t that where talent goes to die?
But then I told myself to shut up. “They’re so over the hill” is the least B-52s sentiment imaginable. Because from the beginning, their edginess wasn’t dependent upon youth. They were never exactly rebels, but they gloried in pillaging what’s old and awkward for the creation of something new and cool that embraces squareness rather than denigrating it. What they want - what they’ve always wanted - is for people to have FUN, and they’re entirely non-judgmental about how you want to do it (unless it involves putting anyone down, in which case, no thanks). It’s a spirit that makes just as much sense old as it does young. As a blueprint for a culture, you could hardly do better. And I guess that’s why they’ve always been my favorites - because I still wistfully believe that if everyone shared their courage, spirit, and humor, this would be a better world.
On that note, I’ll end with one of my favorite music videos of all time, for the only track that featured vocals from all five original band members, “Song for a Future Generation,” from 1983’s Whammy! Does anything more perfect even exist?
Actually, right after I wrote this they announced another “farewell” residency in November. This is probably covered by the scare quotes, but I love a good footnote.
The band also released a late-career album in 2008, Funplex - it’s a lot of fun, but I inevitably haven’t listened to it as much as the albums I’ve known for 16+ years longer.
FACT: The band is not named for the classic subsonic American strategic bomber planes, but for the ostentatious beehive hairdos named after said planes, which Kate and Cindy frequently sported during early performances.