Album Anniversaries: How The B-52’s Redefined Punk Rock Cool
What’s cooler than five southerners, four of whom were LGBTQ, dancing around with beehive hair styles and singing about crustaceans to the most innovative new wave of the era? Such is the duality of The B-52’s.
In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.
Written by Carys Anderson
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
The B-52’s are probably best known for “Love Shack,” the 1989 single that displays pop music in full force. But 10 years before their tin roof rusted, the Athens, Georgia band — singer Fred Schneider, guitarist Ricky Wilson, singer and percussionist Cindy Wilson, singer and keyboardist Kate Pierson, and drummer Keith Strickland — fused the danciness of new wave with the riffs and carefree attitude of punk rock. To this day, nothing sounds like their self-titled debut.
From the spy-crawl chugging and spacey keyboards in “Planet Claire” (note Pierson singing along to the keyboards, cementing herself as one of the great voices in rock) to the harmonies of Wilson and Pierson in “52 Girls,” The B-52’s is a mission statement for a band who knows no limits.
In “Dance This Mess Around,” to the tune of dissonant organ beeps, Wilson jumps from breathy reminiscing (“remember when you were my man?”) to strained, clenched teeth, back-of-the-throat anger (“Why don’t you dance with me? I’m not no limburger!”). It also exemplifies The B-52’s’ ability to fit three voices together in both surreal, disjointed dialogue and in careful harmonies. From Pierson’s “hippy hippy forward” chanting to the “What’d you say?” “I’m just askin’!” back and forth between the three, it’s a perfect storm of chaos. Schneider’s nasally “Huh?” makes you laugh, but Ricky Wilson’s minimalist strumming keeps you dancing, as the song’s title implores.
Ricky’s guitar playing defined the early sound of The B-52’s. When he wrote the now-iconic riff to “Rock Lobster,” the album’s standout, he told his bandmates, “I just came up with the most stupid guitar line you’ve ever heard.” Pierson remembers it herself as “stupid genius” — that surf guitar is the type of riff so perfect, now so ubiquitous, that hearing it for the first time is an “a-ha” moment: of course this exists. It just sounds right.
Photo courtesy of Lynn Goldsmith
“Rock Lobster” is seven minutes of delightful nonsense. Schneider’s deadpan delivery (“We were at the beach / Everybody had matching towels”) bleeds into Pierson’s quavering keyboard, all over the women’s vocalizations — “ske do de dop,” “ew,” “ah” — there are a million things happening at once, building up and then starting over again. Its last two minutes are a whole other story. John Lennon famously told Rolling Stone that those fish noises Cindy Wilson and Pierson made inspired him to return to music with his wife, Yoko Ono, because he saw the world had caught up to her musical style.
“Rock Lobster” is arguably one of The B-52’s’ most influential songs. Both Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain, as preteens, saw the band perform it on Saturday Night Live in 1980, jumping around the stage and dropping to the ground. Grohl has revered them since then for opening him up to the world of the weird. Sleater-Kinney has covered the song live, with their friend Fred Armisen providing the vocals. Hayley Williams sported a “Rock Lobster” t-shirt on stage during Paramore’s most recent tour, in support of their own new-wave album, After Laughter. Their influence has spanned decades.
The band’s silly demeanor and identification as the “world’s greatest party band” has maybe masked their sheer talent. Pierson and Wilson harmonized while playing keyboard and tambourine, respectively, or they’d jump to guitar and bongos. Schneider would shake a tambourine himself, or bring out a cowbell, toy piano, or xylophone. Ricky Wilson’s style came from playing guitars with only four strings: the bottom two tuned for strumming, the top two tuned for leads. This allowed him to write a riff as dirty as the one in “Lava,” the band’s most straight-ahead rock song. With two fewer strings, Wilson managed to sound like two different guitar players.
The band moved toward more goofy pop numbers as their career progressed, especially after the tragic death of Ricky Wilson from AIDS-related illness in 1985. But their aloofness in their early days is perhaps their biggest display of punk rock ethos. Their everything-goes style yielded some of the catchiest, inimitable music of their era, without all the pretentiousness of other innovators. The B-52’s proved you don’t have to sit around brooding to be talented — if there’s a problem, just do all 16 dances, and you’ll feel a whole lot better.