A quirky quartet best known for the pop mainstay "Love Shack" and cameos in oddball TV shows and films (Kate Pierson as a blind millionaire in The Adventures of Pete and Pete comes to mind), one could argue that the 'retro' craze finally caught up with the B-52s and their goofy exhortations to "bring your jukebox money" to their acid sock hop.
But if you listen to the seminal B-52s song "Rock Lobster," released 10 years before "Shack," it reveals a band that began as unrepentantly weird New Wavers, detailing a bizarre surf party with a lengthy breakdown of animal noises (my favorite is the narwhal that sounds like a British police siren).
It comes as a shock that the outsider-artists behind "Lobster" and the squealing rave-up "Private Idaho" ("underground like a wild potato/don't go onto the patio") could ever notch such a huge corporate crossover smash. The AIDS-related death of B-52 guitarist Ricky Wilson in 1985 could be pointed to as the beginning of a creative schism and a dampening of the band's original go-go spirit. But that seems like an overreach for the sake of causality. If anything, "Shack" and "Roam" - the two radio hits from 1989's Cosmic Thing - are a kind of tribute to Wilson and re-ignited the band, finally affording them the clout to spread their wild, barely-substantiative kitsch to the masses.
Chief amongst these kitschy delights is the sprechgesang of Fred Schnieder, who perpetually sounds like a square's fevered impression of Mick Jagger. It translates well to parody and has become an indelible piece of the pop culture fabric - my favorite example is an improvisational comedy exercise called "Hey Fred Schnieder, What Are You Doing?" where each player attempts to concoct a wacky non-sequitur in the unmistakable tone and cadence of Schnieder's singing voice.
Twin cannons Pierson and Cindy Wilson aren't slouches either, shining bright on "Roam" - the B-52s' biggest single after "Love Shack."
The Babys - "Back on My Feet Again"
A power-popish band featuring future solo and Bad English hitsmith John Waite and, by the release of "Back on My Feet Again" on 1979's Union Jacks, the future Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain. As a window into the thought process of the guys who would write "Missing You" and "Faithfully," respectively, it ain't much. If anything, it's more revealing of the house style of the Chrysalis label to which the Babys remained signed for their entire 1977-1981 run (and later the home of Huey Lewis and Pat Benetar): punchy, middle-of-the-road, and disturbingly infectious.
Bachman-Turner Overdrive
There is perhaps no greater embodiment of the ironic relationship between the "classic" guitar rock bands of the 1970s and 80s and the modern corporate jingle than Bachman-Turner Overdrive. After starting out as working class rockers from Winnepeg, they were something like standard-bearers for guitar-based pop in the early 1970s, just heavy enough to warrant a sweet logo but not too heavy as to preclude their songs from Top 40 airplay.
Prostrated at the feet of album rock innovators Led Zeppelin and the Who, BTO was nonetheless a singles band. "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" is an obvious Who ripoff, somewhat lackadaisical in its abrupt verse-chorus transitions and haphazard drumming. It was also a Billboard number one. Its laid back vibe hooks you like a drug; if there's a Heaven, this is the song that plays on the escalator in the lobby.
Though today the kids might know it best as "the Office Depot song," there's actually an anti-corporate message in "Takin' Care of Business" (BTO was not fond of fully enunciating its gerunds). It has a clear message about throwing off the shackles of the workaday world and embracing your true passions, no matter how little they pay. Since this is an easy idea to get behind, most people don't notice that BTO is essentially taunting them by confirming that they have achieved this most honored status. They are rich rock musicians and you are not.
To continue the 'Canada's version of the Who' analogy, here's Keith Moon introducing a live version of "Business":
Backstreet Boys
Ah, the Backstreet Boys, the evergreen companions of my weekday afternoons watching the Carson Daly-hosted Total Request Live. I can still name them all...Brian, Nick, Joey, Harpo, Alf, the Fonz, and the mustache guy - Kevin, I think.
Though I jest, I also realize it could have been much worse. I went through the boy band era with an older sister and thus my exposure to the likes of Limp Bizkit and KoRn was minimal. Better to turn out an oversensitive vanity plate than an entitled, surly misogynist.
"As Long As You Love Me" is a ballad of the ferocious desperation and neediness that is BSB's calling card. The clumsy body-morphing video (immortalizing Nick Carter's mushroom head) doesn't improve anything and the entire premise of the song is creepy to me. People who don't care who you are or where you're from or what...you...did when they're trying to hit on you probably have some pretty big skeletons of their own. Just suspicious, is all.
Music Videos by VideoCure
If life was fair, "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" would have taken the piss out of BSB like any other egregiously self-aggrandizing song from a debauched rapper or rock star. Here they are, trumpeting their self-described originality and sexuality and ruining the classic Universal horror movies by doing a ripoff of the "Thriller" dance in the house from Casper, and we let them off the goddamn hook.
Due to some quirky publishing decisions, their self-titled U.S. debut was a compilation of their first two international LPs, and thus you had the group introducing themselves by proclaiming that they were "back." I remember a special on MTV, airing around the premiere of the video for "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," where the Backstreet Boys counted down their favorite 100 or 50 or something music videos...guess which one was #1? In conclusion, everything about this song is horseshit.
I guess that leaves "I Want It That Way" as the most tolerable BSB song. It is classic pop schmaltz, with a stellar buildup, quotably dumb lyrics ("you are my fire"), and the all-important key change. It is, by its co-writer's own admission, a slick piece of utter nonsense and an unabashed tribute to the boy band songwriting template.
A stellar explication of said template:
Bad Company
A busted Led Zeppelin knockoff, right down to their look. At least they have an excuse - they were managed by Led Zep promoter Peter Grant, whose personal story is a lot more interesting than anything I could write about Bad Company. For a while in high school I was obsessed with sifting for gold among the playlists of classic rock format radio stations. The plodding, interminable "Feel Like Makin' Love" and "Rock 'n Roll Fantasy" are like thick, dried-out clods at the bottom of the pan.
Bad Religion
I first heard Bad Religion through the soundtrack to the video game Crazy Taxi; it was punk only in the sense that owning a Sega Dreamcast in 2000 kind of made you an edgy misfit (note: not really). I don't know a lot about these California hardcore lifers but what I do know, I like.
"Hear It" just dazzles me with its opening riff, which is irrelevant to the rest of the song (this was on the character selection screen...my favorite was Gus). "Ten in 2010" and "Them and Us" are high-energy shots of thrash. I'd like to think that hearing them over and over improved my sense of justice by osmosis. To truly understand, though, requires a lot of further study as they have built a world unto their own in the past 30-plus years. Thus the question: when do punk rock bands start playing the hotel-casino circuit?
Badfinger
No pressure here: only one of the first bands handpicked to be on the Beatles' Apple Records imprint, debuting with a song - "Come and Get It" - written by some nobody named Paul McCartney.
"Will you walk away from a fool and his money?" was a sadly prescient lyric, as creative struggles and financial mismanagement left the band broke after six years. Personal demons eventually decimated Badfinger, as guitarist Pete Ham and bassist/guitarist Tom Evans both committed suicide, unable to bear the stress of the group's seemingly-unending downward spiral. The entire story is chronicled in an exceptional edition of Behind the Music.
As with most power-pop bands, time has been kind to Badfinger's music, especially the oft-covered "Without You" and the bouncy "No Matter What." They weren't the last or the most enduring band to bear the "next Beatles" albatross, but they might have been the most influential in their own right.
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