The B-52’s Cosmic Thing

“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. (Sept.)