I wonder how I would have felt about the B52s in 1980 when I was 15 if I had known they were 4/5 gay.* I had a very ambivalent attitude to the gayness of others during my teens because of some odd episodes that I now realise were just part of life but no-one talked about things like that then. I always knew I wasn't gay but like a lot of other things I didn't realise that my desire for people to not discuss things that went outside a (my) very heteronormative (etc etc, elite) world view wasn't just a wish for people to be civilised and tasteful and logical but a wish for people to deny a core element of themselves for my peace of mind. Luckily, my opinion didn't matter and also, it had fully changed within a few years. To be clear, though I was terrified of being thought of as gay, I was never hostile to gayness, but I certainly didn't want to know about it.
The other side of the story is of course the B52s completely sidestepped from any discussion of - um - anything at all really, because they just went with this kitsch weirdness look, and a sound that at the time I thought of as retro but I now appreciate that was just me responding to visual stimulus - I mean, 'Planet Claire' off the first album was a step beyond Kraftwerk really, and there were quite a few other songs (I'm thinking for instance 'Dirty Back Road' on this album) which were just set and forget grooves which could have as easily been tape loops as a band playing (probably to a click - if they did that then - I think they did, otherwise how could they have done that party remix album). So that's kind of modern, and there is an extra disco oomph to a lot of the songs here which were possibly so common for the time no-one noticed. Then there was the other thing they did, which was often very Fred Schneider-directed, with his public-announcement voice half-singing, half calling a square dance. A propos of that, I'll just say that the song 'Private Idaho', which closes side one of Wild Planet, is the song that shows up how much of a progression (in terms of instrumentation) Wild Planet is from the first album, basically because it doesn't fit on Wild Planet and it would have easily fit on The B52s. 'Private Idaho' is not a terrible song I guess but it already felt old hat in 1980 whereas 'Give Me Back My Man' was a very fetching new hat. I'll get this out of the way now: that 'I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy' is fucking ridiculous and someone should have had the hard talk with the 52s back in 80 about the wisdom of ruining your chorus with something that embarrassing: 'do you want to be singing that for another forty years?' (Ricky: 'wouldn't mind').
So, let's look at the side as a whole: it starts with 'Party Out of Bounds' wherein the gang crash a gathering and bully the attendees. Best bit: the really awful trumpet noise half way through - or the fucked up walkie-talkie grind noise at the end. But I love the way it's partly a recipe for social success, partly for social suicide. It has a slightly threatening vibe which I have to deal with every time.
'Dirty Back Road' is this album's '52 Girls' and it's got all the same ingredients: Cindy and Kate in unison sing a vocal melody which seems to come from nowhere - certainly not from the fairly pedestrian instrumental track created to be featureless to let them do their stuff - and which fits perfectly.
'Running Around' is the 'Dance This Mess Around' of the album, and while it's very energetic, it's probably not as good though the interplay between Fred on the one hand and K&C on the other is very engaging.
'Give Me Back My Man' is everything that's good about pop music, including that execrable fish-candy chorus line. They get to it almost immediately. It's Cindy singing solo and her voice (I wonder if this would have hit me at the time?) has a certain edge to it that wasn't common to female pop singers then. The way John heard traces of Yoko in the B52s says more about how glibly sanitised pop music was in 1979-80 than it does about Yoko's influence on them I suspect but it's still a thing.** A voice like that not only cut through in terms of sound but also, while you never for a moment thought that anything the B52s sang about was important to them in and of itself or had resonance for them or genuine feeling (at least, not on the first couple of albums), there was something more genuinely expressive about it (kind of 'help! I'm trapped in a fucking pop song'). Along with the evocations of Lesley Gore, etc, which added to the overall.
I never really got this forty years ago but subsequent reading has made it clear to me that the first two B52s albums are really testament to the wayward (?) genius of Ricky Wilson, a guitar player who apparently devised his own unique tunings and came at the material intuitively. If you just listen to the guitar on side one of Wild Planet you hear things you wouldn't get from any other record I can think of, although there are probably traces of for instance Television in there.***
I have always wanted to own Wild Planet but I never did until Saturday and while other records are presently also clamouring for my attention, this is top stuff. I expect to turn it over some time later in the week. I also want to see One Trick Pony again.
*I went on a wikipedia search on all their lives and it would seem that not all of them knew it then so it would have been testament to my gaydar if I had.
** Hilarious moment at the end of John and Yoko: A Love Story when John calls Yoko to tell her about 'new wave' and how it's what she was doing ten years before. Was he listening to the B-52s on the radio when he made that call? Probs.
*** After writing this I read that the only non-B52s recording RW did was when he played on a song on a Tom Verlaine album. So I'm right.
Boston Globe 22 August 1980
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