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Last week The B-52’s released Funplex, their first album in sixteen years. After three decades together, they haven’t lost it. We’ll discuss Funplex further at a later date, but right now we’re gonna go back a couple of records (and nearly 20 years).
It’s springtime, which means as the weather gets warmer the more often I reach for the B-52s 1989 comeback/crossover album Cosmic Thing. At some point or another, I’ve written about most everything in the B’s late ’70s / early ’80s catalog; collections from a band that defy genre, albums that seem as fresh, and fish-out-of-water, as they did upon their initial release. While The B-52’s have always done things their own way, Cosmic Thing is its own animal, and for a multitude of reasons.
The B-52’s most “commercial” album to date, Cosmic Thing employed not one, but two producers: Don Was and Nile Rodgers. While both men have their own distinctive style, the tracks seemingly solidified into a cohesive whole (see both production examples in the MP3s below). After the death of founding member, and guitarist, Ricky Wilson, in 1985, the future of the band was unknown. Cosmic Thing is the sound of a band shedding its former skin - re-born. The was the album that would finally break through to the masses.
A mainstream hit with three singles, the album proved, if only for little awhile, that a flamboyantly gay lead singer, flanked by two women in beehive hairdos, could be both kitsch and commercially viable (as an aside, RuPaul’s first national exposure was in the video for “Love Shack”). Looking back two decades later, it’s odd no one in mainstream music is presently doing anything even remotely as interesting as this — an album forged at the end of the conservative, post-Reagan, ’80s. Wha’ happened?
Below: If you havent seen it in a while, watch the video for the B-52’s “Deabeat Club,” appropriately filmed in various locations in their old stomping ground of Athens, GA. Oh, and don’t forget to play “can you spot Michael Stipe.”
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Download:
MP3: The B-52s :: Deadbeat Club
MP3: The B-52s :: Bushfire
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Amazon: The B-52s - Cosmic Thing
+ Download DRM free music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
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