Who's Simon Defending Now?: The B-52s

The B-52s deserve a better fate then Johnny Rockets and karaoke clubs. Go to either of those places and your chances of hearing “Love Shack” increase by about 400%. Of course, this makes sense, as the B-52s have become culturally synonymous with the “80s party vibe”, with silly hair and brightly colored clothes. Their 1989 Cosmic Thing album (home of “Love Shack”, “Roam”, “Channel Z” and plenty of other hits) is definitely one non-stop party from the word go. However, the path the B-52s took to get to that point is fascinating and features plenty of unexpectedly edgy music. This month, I want to take a look at the beginnings of the B-52s and the music that paved the way for countless karaoke Fred Schneider impressions.

Athens, GA, must be a very odd place, since both R.E.M. and the B-52s hail from this southern college town. However, instead of trying to be cool, hip underground rockers, the B-52s embraced two very unusual musical influences: disco and surf music. While most late-70s college bands were desperately trying to fight off the insidious charms of disco and the saccharine escapism of the Californian surf sound, the B-52s welcomed both with open arms and played music with recognizable elements of both. However, something got lost in translation along the way and the end result was a long way from the Beach Boys.

One of the most striking things about early B-52s songs is the sinister darkness lurking on the edges. The quintessential example of this is their debut single, “Rock Lobster”. This is a song most people know and love/hate, but when was the last time you really sat down and, dare I say it, listened to “Rock Lobster”? Beneath all the “ooo-ahh” silliness and Fred Schneider’s speak-singing nonsense, the song is actually some sort of surreal, aquatic-creature-oriented nightmare. It’s a song about a beach party that gets overrun by an entire sea menagerie. Not too bad for a 1979 dance song, if you ask me.

The defining element of early B-52s is, without a doubt, Ricky Wilson and his magical guitar playing. Although he is rarely championed as a guitar hero, Wilson’s style is nothing short of fantastic. Taking surf guitar and wrapping it around itself until everything starts warping, his guitar is instantly identifiable. Wilson utilized a variety of alternate tunings, often tuning the guitar strings down to get the low, grinding guitar riffs that songs like “Rock Lobster” and “Lava” are built on. While he was never a flashy guitarist, Ricky Wilson and his twangy, skeletal evisceration of the surf style was the lynchpin to the B-52s music.

Not that the singers should be ignored, especially since the band featured three of them. Between the slightly hysterical girl-group vocals of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson and the flat, nasal yelling from Fred Schneider, the voices in the B-52s were certainly unique. However, this back-and-forth, “girls vs. boys” style proved to be great at escalating the energy and tension within the songs. Plus, the weirder the lyrics got, the more excited all the singers seemed to become (see the frantic scream “Why won’t you dance with me?! I’m not no Limburger!” during “Dance This Mess Around”). Add in some songs about mysterious planets where no one has a head and odes to poodles named Quiche Lorraine and it’s clear that the B-52s were a bit more than just a silly dance band.

This amazing unique vision lasted through two fantastic albums and the wacky Mesopotamia EP (recorded with David Byrne manning the production board), before the band started to scrape the bottom of the well. A couple of mediocre albums were all the band released between 1983 and 1985. However, ’85 would end in tragedy when Ricky Wilson, the architect of so much of the band’s sound, died from AIDS-related illness. The band members (especially Ricky’s sister Cindy) sank into depression and it seemed the B-52s were finished.

However, after several years of silence, the B-52s decided to try their hand at writing songs one more time. With drummer-turned-guitarist Keith Strickland taking over the reins of songwriting, the band stumbled upon Cosmic Thing, the album that would finally see them break through into major mainstream success. The B-52s had survived the loss of one of their most important members and returned, stronger and more popular than ever.

Since then, the band seems to have become content with being an enjoyable, campy party band. After a sixteen-year-long silence, they even recorded a new album in 2008, appropriately titled Funplex. However, despite the cultural saturation of songs like “Love Shack” and the band’s “happy-party-funtime” vibe, I feel it’s important to acknowledge the strange, innovative music that started the B-52s' career and got them to that point. The B-52s were (and still are) weirder than even the 80s gave them credit for and that’s saying something.