“Groundbreaking”: Michael Stipe on the most overlooked album of the 1970s
Any discussion of the music scene in Athens, Georgia, is legally required to begin with R.E.M., the band that arguably invented college rock during their days in this sleepy antebellum college town. There was a time, though, when the guys in R.E.M. were merely students—not just at the University of Georgia, but in the local club scene, where they were learning the ropes from a fertile crop of experimental punk bands and visual artists. And nobody loomed larger in both of those categories than one particular group of colourful weirdos known as the B-52’s.
It’s not an uncommon occurrence in pop music that an artist’s breakthrough into the zeitgeist winds up undermining their earlier artistic achievements a bit. David Johansen of the New York Dolls—another big influence on Michael Stipe and R.E.M.—scored his biggest hit with a cover of the novelty soca dance number ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ in 1987 (performing as his alter-ego Buster Poindexter). Two years later, the B-52’s went from ten years of cult status to massive worldwide fame with their 1989 album Cosmic Thing, which included the all-time party anthem ‘Love Shack.’
To a whole new audience of admirers, the B-52’s were purveyors of a kitsch schtick that was played mainly for comedy and good fun. It was rarely seen as serious “art,” let alone something rebellious or punk. To long-time fans like Michael Stipe, though, the B-52’s still represented something very different: a fierce and liberated combination of songwriting and style that had helped put Athens on the map.
“When all the punks in New York were still putting safety pins in their cheeks,” Stipe told Pitchfork in 2021, “the B-52’s were like, ‘Well, that’s what you do, and this is what we do and this is how we do it.’ It was just fucking scorched earth.”
Long before Cosmic Thing, the B-52’s had announced their arrival back in 1979 with their self-titled debut album, a New Wave classic that took some of the sonic elements of the Talking Heads, Television, and Patti Smith (three more Stipe favourites) and sent them through a retro 1950s food processor, creating a completely original type of moonbase party music. The record was critically well received and even scored a hit with ‘Rock Lobster’, another all-timer that still fills the floor at a wedding.
Over time, though, the impact of the first B-52’s record was overshadowed, sometimes simply by the band’s outfits and hairdos, other times by heavier issues, such as the loss of guitarist Ricky Wilson to AIDS in 1985. After the success of ‘Love Shack’, there was also a renewed emphasis on the band’s kitsch style and role as celebrated icons of the LGBTQ community, with less reverence paid to its equal influence on countless bands—both silly and serious—across the musical spectrum.
That includes R.E.M., whose members regularly saw the B-52’s at Athens clubs like the 40 Watt well before ‘Rock Lobster’ scuttled on to the radio. When Michael Stipe first moved to Athens in 1978, he thought it was “just this very small college town full of hippies and granola. Everything was beige. It must’ve been the most boring place on Earth for an 18-year-old punk rocker like me. But as it turns out, Athens was the home of the B-52’s and this whole underground scene.
“That first B-52’s album,” Stipe added, “still hasn’t gotten the recognition that it deserves as one of the most groundbreaking and influential records of all time—most certainly on me and everyone around the Athens scene.”
Years later, after R.E.M. had found their own considerable success, Stipe was able to collaborate with B-52’s singer Kate Pierson on several tracks for 1991’s Out of Time album, including ‘Shiny Happy People’, ‘Me In Honey’, and a great, lesser known track from those sessions, ‘Fretless.’
