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Twenty years and twenty million albums into a career that began as a low-rent lark in Athens, Georgia, the B-52's remain the most unlikely pop superstars ever. The first band to glorify pop culture with an almost Warholian sense of purpose, the B-52s purveyed their absurd B-movie style and off-kilter sound celebrating the weirdness lurking just beneath the surface of Americana not exactly a recipe for chart success but way ahead of its time, nonetheless. One listen through the new greatest hits disc Time Capsule: Songs For A Future Generation, however, and any mystery concerning their longevity and ongoing appeal is solved. From "Rock Lobster," "Planet Claire" and "Private Idaho" to "Channel Z," "Good Stuff" and the two new songs, "Hallucinating Pluto" and the single, "Debbie," the B-52's unforgettable dance-rock tunes start a party every time the music begins.
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About The B-52's
The B-52's early days are well documented. Formed on an October night in 1976 following drinks at a Chinese restaurant, the band played their first gig at a friend's house on Valentine's Day 1977. Naming themselves after Southern slang for exaggerated 'bouffant hairdos, the newly-christened B-52's
(Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson, Keith Strickland, Cindy Wilson and Ricky Wilson) began weekend road trips to and from New York City for pick-up gigs at CBGB's and a handful of other rundown venues. Before long, their thrift store aesthetic, beehive hairdos, toy instruments and genre-defying songs were the talk of the post-punk underground.
A record deal soon followed and their self-titled debut disc, produced by Chris Blackwell, sold more than 500,000 copies on the strength of their first singles, the garage rock party classics "Rock Lobster,” Planet Claire" and "52 Girls." With virtually no radio support, the B-52's began to attract fans far beyond the punk clubs of the Lower East Side galvanizing the pop world with their 'stream-of-consciousness' approach to songwriting and outrageous performance. The B-52's had clearly tapped into a growing audience for new music that was much larger than anyone could have anticipated. "We always appealed to people outside the mainstream, says Kate Pierson, "and I think more people feel they're outside the mainstream these days."
An unexpected commercial and critical success, the band inadvertently formed the core of the burgeoning early '80's New Wave 'movement' and, along with such contemporaries as Blondie and Talking Heads, continued the pop music revolution that punk began. With the release of their second studio effort, Wild Planet (1980), the B-52's, co-producing with Rhett Davies, proved that their success was no fluke, scoring hits with "Private Idaho," "Party Out Of Bounds" and "Strobelight." In just two albums, the B-52's had created a lexicon of songs, styles, phrases and images which would set the standard for the development of the 'alternative music scene' for the next decade.
