Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon strikes again.
I didn't know their entire story then--I didn't know about how they were just jamming and having fun and how Ricky Wilson played on a Sears Silvertone and how they got swept into the New York scene and how they inspired John Lennon to get back into writing music and how Ricky, whose underrated guitar work was the backbone of the band, died of AIDS and how their popularity on the mainstream charts came after they lost his brillance or anything like that. If I had known those things, maybe I wouldn't have learned the prejudice that was hard to unwind that bands peak early and decline. Who knows what they would have been, after all, if Ricky had lived? But I did learn something that would fuck me up from then on--I related to the B-52s, which made me a weirdo and I would never, ever fit in.
They taught me about being weird, being yourself. They encouraged my ongoing love of female vocalists. They taught me that not everyone who deserves accolades will get them. They even taught me about how homophobia and sexism will marginalize some of the best musicians out there. They taught me that it's important to dig and not just accept what's spoonfed to you.
Here comes a bikini whale! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
For me it was the Clash, but I can relate.
The B-52s played Saturday Night Live my junior year of high school - Rock Lobster and Dance This Mess Around. I can still see Fred pounding on that toy piano on a stick. After that our class was divided into two camps - the minority of us who thought the B52s were cool, and the majority who thought they sucked (I think the actual word used was "queer", then as now a catchall term of derogation). The first B-52s album was the first record I ever taped on my first real stereo.
The Love Shack era Second Coming was a decade later and I was in grad school, and EVERYONE thought they were cool. But some of us had already known that for a long time.
Music
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