The B-52s: What song kept ‘Love Shack’ off the top of the charts?
A cruel and unfeeling place, capable of elevating a plethora of vapid guff to the dizzying heights of cultural importance while ambitious and genuinely innovative anthems tend to languish towards the lower end of the top 40, the pop charts have witnessed their fair share of tragedies and injustices over the years, and The B-52’s were subject to one of the biggest.
That opening might paint a rather bitter view of the pop charts; sure, not every number-one single is as deserving as the others, but since the advent of the singles charts over half a century ago, some of the greatest songs of all time have risen to the top of the rankings. While that is certainly true, and without those charts, we might never have encountered some true masterpieces, the injustice which runs rampant throughout the charts on a weekly basis is a difficult thing to ignore.
Inevitably, those injustices are the fault of the great British music-buying public, rather than the charts themselves. These are the cultural consumers who made Bryan Adams’ Robin Hood-based ballad ‘Everything I Do (I Do It For You)’ the longest-running number-one of all time, handed countless number-ones to Cliff Richard, and sent a Stockport-based school choir to the top spot in 1980, rather than the recently murdered John Lennon. In other words, the music-buying public can almost always be trusted to make the wrong decision.
Back in 1990, the pop charts witnessed a particularly egregious injustice when The B-52’s defining anthem, ‘Love Shack’, refused to move any higher than number two. Georgia’s new wave heroes were never really out to create chart hits, admittedly. From the beginning of their fantastically kitsch musical journey, the group existed in an otherwise unoccupied space somewhere between new wave, punk rock, and art pop experimentalism – the kind of otherworldly blend that doesn’t often lead to great chart success.
Up until ‘Love Shack’ hit the airwaves in 1990, in fact, The B-52’s only had two UK Top 40 entries to their name: their 1979 masterstroke ‘Rock Lobster’, and the 1986 reissue of that very same track. To say that ‘Love Shack’ came out of left field, therefore, would be a gross understatement. It was far more pop-centric than the band’s previous work, easily capable of making it onto the party mixtapes of trendies, while simultaneously retaining the group’s endearingly off-kilter atmosphere.
With that infectious pop sound, the single immediately commanded high numbers in the charts, topping the Alternative Airplay charts in its native USA. On this side of the Atlantic, the song did even better, but it didn’t quite do well enough to reach that coveted number-one spot, trailing behind the strange emerging landscape of Eurodance.
On its first week at number two, ‘Love Shack’ fell behind Fatboy Slim’s Beats International and their finest hour, ‘Dub Be Good To Me’, which was a pretty adept encapsulation of the dance scene of the early 1990s. However, the following week saw its position deposed by German Eurodance wonders Snap! and their one-hit wonder ‘The Power’.
That annoyingly infectious Eurodance earworm might have only lasted two weeks at the top spot, but it was enough to seal the fate of ‘Love Shack’. By week three, when Madonna burst into number one with ‘Vogue’, the Athens, Georgia, outfit had slipped down to number six, with little hope of climbing any higher. The single might have lost the chart battle, but it certainly won the war of longevity – when was the last time you heard ‘The Power’ on a night out?
