The B-52s' Cosmic Thing
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The B-52s were always queer, though not overtly, and this book dissects the coded queer messaging in their music, using 1989's Cosmic Thing as a focal point.
Alongside the author's own queer awakening, Crighton investigates the band's history and recorded work to date, providing cultural context along the way, and proves what was obvious all along – the B-52s aren't just pop culture icons, they are queer history.
Cosmic Thing took the world by storm in 1989 in the wake of the band's single greatest tragedy: losing guitarist Ricky Wilson to complications from AIDS in 1985. Cosmic Thing is a celebration of queer joy in the face of that seismic setback. Not only did the B-52s have to fight through their pain and grief to make their fifth full length record, the band was also up against a conservative government under Reagan (then Bush), a misunderstood virus still ravaging the queer community and an indifferent public after years out of the spotlight. Watching the band enjoy their greatest success in the face of adversity was part of what made Cosmic Thing such a marvel to behold - as miraculous as the B-52s' entire career.
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"Rock Lobster" hit music writer Crighton (The Vinyl Diaries) "like an electric jolt" when he first heard it at age 10, in 1979, leading to a lifelong love for the B-52's "cool" and "campy" music, and culminating in this breathless paean to the band. The author speeds through the B-52's early output before focusing on their fifth full-length album, Cosmic Thing, released in 1989 after "everyone had pretty much forgotten" about them (the band's output between 1981 and 1988 garnered little attention, and they'd shrunk to four members after Ricky Wilson's 1985 death). Despite this, Cosmic Thing was their most commercially successful album, and, Crighton argues, can be read as a celebration of "queer joy" amid the ongoing AIDS crisis, thanks to its utopic references to a "better place, a place where change is possible"—not to mention its innuendos and mentions of "glitter on the mattress." Crighton movingly describes how the band served as the "soundtrack to my coming out.... Their music and their outrageousness helped me understand the... kind of gay man I wanted to be" and makes an affectionate case for the lyrics' queer coding while encouraging readers to find their own ways to resist establishments that marginalize them. The result is a nostalgic love letter to the band and its influence well beyond the world of music.
