The Best Of The B-52's - Dance This Mess Around

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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 guitar, 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’, after the ridiculou, precariou, 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 i, <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. .

via Apple Music

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