The B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster” brought John Lennon back to music (2020)
ultimateclassicrock.com
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The CBGB-era B-52s were pretty great, and I haven't listened to any Ono/Lennon stuff, so now I'm pretty interested.
Honestly I wish they'd record another, but they're probably happier touring.
The first two suffer from bad choices of first track. Up is weird because it takes absolutely ages to get into it but I contend it's a surprisingly fine album that was extremely badly received.
I'm not gonna try to defend Reveal and Around The Sun. Even REM seem to hate Around The Sun in particular.
(For post-Cosmic thing gems, try "Revolution Earth", "Juliet of the Spirits" or "Pump" (not on YouTube, though, boy there's some lousy sound quality there...)
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/post-monster-r-e-m/pl.u-...
My all time favourite B-52s song is Private Idaho though.
> but they're probably happier touring.
I saw them way way back, probably 1990 or 91 in Sydney, and again ~5 years back when they toured with Simple Minds. (And I had tickets to see them last July, but fuck you Covid...)
They are great fun live. I highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance - if anything, they're better at it now than they were back when they were younger and still charting. They seem to be having more fun on stage than any band I've ever seen.
The weird thing with Love Shack is that the B-52s are misremembered as being one-hit wonders.
Some years later I bought him the Cowboy Junkies "200 More miles" on CD as another birthday present - he hated that too.
Haven't bought him any music since.
I don't know - I don't think he listens to music much these days. We don't discuss it when we meet.
My own tastes have changed from ProgRock in my teens to North American music in my mid and old age, preferably with female vocalists, such as Emmylou Harris. Yesterday, I found myself listening to "The Marble Index" (Nico) which I first bought as a cut-out on vinyl in Woolworths in 1970, and which I think I still have (somewhere, don't know where).
I have always harboured a deep loathing for Jethro Tull, and particularly for Ian Anderson!
https://youtu.be/n4QSYx4wVQg?t=295
And equated it with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgZiPO9V_aQ
What he didn't get was that "kookiness" by itself doesn't make good music which can be reflected in the stark differences in the careers of the B52s and Yoko Ono outside of her work with John Lennon.
Haute Couture works great on the runway but it's not meant to be worn on the street. John and Yoko's art for art's sake was never going to work outside of the art circuit.
I came to the comments to find something that further challenged my preconceptions of Ono, as the article did, and then I see the usual cartoonish example carted out when criticizing her, which everyone has already seen before. A better example is elsewhere in the comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlY4oxfma_Y
I get it. It's the stuff that only music nerds would be interested in. But I'm not sure why Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart aren't anywhere near as maligned as Yoko is, but celebrated as mavericks. And even still, experimental artists like these push the artform as a whole forward, to the point that their original innovation becomes co-opted into the mainstream sound and forgotten.
I think that's the crux of it. What I find particularly confounding, is that these explanations remove the agency from John Lennon. To say that he was tricked by Yoko into bad ideas, is to cast doubts on his artistic merit. Whatever creative chops he had that shaped the Beatles into being more than just some long forgotten cover band, are the same that led him to seek new creative directions. If you listen to punk and post-punk bands in the wake of their collaborations, it seems like he and Yoko were on the right track. I'm certain that if John was alive, there'd be decades more interesting stuff in his back catalogue... definitely better than a cover of "Got My Mind Set On You"
You're saying that John Lennon thought kookiness made good music? That seems pretty simplistic for one of the world's leading songwriters and musicians, and doesn't seem to match his oeuvre.
When he was done with the Beatles he tried to do more avant guarde work with Yoko Ono. To him that was the future. But the result was commercial and critical failure. His Plastic Ono Band album did OK but Yoko's received universal disdain. A few records later and a few more failed attempts to get people to like Yoko's music and John Lennon essentially retired. He didn't want to make albums by himself.
Now, keep in mind that "retired" is relative. The Beatles released 21 albums in 10 years. Not recording an album in a couple of years was an eternity for John.
The linked article talks about how John thought that Rock Lobster by the B52s was similar to Yoko's Why. He thought that society had finally caught up and was ready for the music that he wanted to make with Yoko Ono.
The result was Double Fantasy which received bad initial reviews. Sales of the album skyrocketed but only after John was murdered. And to this day when people listen to the album they listen to John's more conventional songs but skip Yoko's more "kooky" music.
That's the crux of my comment. John assumed that people didn't like their "kooky" music not because it was bad but because people weren't ready for it in 1970. And he thought that people would be ready for it in 1980. And he was wrong. People didn't mind "kooky" music as evidenced by the success of bands like the B52s. They just didn't like his.
No one remembers John Lennon for the "kooky" music that he made with Yoko Ono. They remember John Lennon for Come Together and Imagine.
Many people see little relationship between the popularity of music and its 'quality', whatever that means, including me. The more sophisticated my understanding becomes in anything, the more I diverge from the public norm: in any domain, the public is unsophisticated because most people are unsophisticated - i.e., that includes me; you can't be sophisticated in more than a few things. We might expect Lennon had much different taste than others. I'd sure love to learn to see it from Lennon's perspective.
I'd love recommendations for similarly fun bands.
Not comparable in style but maybe in crazy topics are They Might Be Giants and Aquabats.
Older stuff, I'd say the White Album is up that alley, if not all Beatles music. Maybe The Zombies?
Other recent stuff to throw on the pile... maybe Scissor Sisters? Might be too dark to fit the request, though.
Quite a lot of it's in Welsh, too.
When I first heard Yoshimi I treated it like a whimsical story but then one day I heard it as an escapist fantasy of a child in distress talking about their savior and I got weepy. Is that how you're supposed to interpret the song? It doesn't matter. It hits you how it hits you.
Wayne Coyne's voice is awful. He has a terrible singing voice. And yet you don't care because it makes some devastatingly beautiful songs like Do You Realize.
I can't listen to The Flaming Lips for more than a few days at a time. Prolonged exposure makes me tired and heavy. But then, after a few months have gone by, I am drawn back to it like a moth to the light.
How about some Shonen Knife?
They've been around for decades and have changed multiple times to match what currently defines "pop".
https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/john-lennon-the-last-in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXfkG7q_0s
The sound quality isn't the best, but in terms of atmosphere and essence…
Arctic Siberia, Olena
I bet had he lived one more decade, he would have loved the Pixies.
To this day, playing side 1 of the first album starting with "Planet Claire" late at night just puts me in a mood that is hard to describe.
I feel that they lost their songwriting edge after Ricky Wilson passed away in the mid 1980s and Strickland moved from drums to guitar. The later stuff was very pop oriented and slickly produced and expanded their audience, but it was missing that experimentation and irreverence from their early years.
I only know of the B52s because of watching Love Shack on TV. Without it many like me would have never learned of the band and would have never listened to their previous albums.
I love the B-52s, but isn't all good music breaking the rules?
Kanye West broke the rules. Contemporary hip hop doesn’t exist without him; it’s unimaginable what we’d have.
I wouldn’t say Vince Staples did, but he’s an excellent musician.
Amy Winehouse, Leon Bridges, Lee Fields and the Expressions are examples of great artists who went “back” to more established rules.
I discovered these about twenty years ago when going a Paradise Garage fascination, especially records Larry Levan played that weren't the `obvious' disco / post-disco records (such as some B-52s). Before that, only knew them for Love Shack and Kate Pierson on R.E.M.'s Shiny Happy People.
Bill Burr has a funny bit related to this: https://youtu.be/9SGV3ctLlu4
Open in a different browser, and more than half the page is covered in flashy junk.
Good story though.
But yes, good story, and made me think B-52s inadvertently led to his death? :(
I played “Rock Lobster” when I spun the whole self-titled for my kids the other week. They weren’t sure about some of the songs, but that one they understood and had fun dancing to.
> How the B-52’s’ ‘Rock Lobster’ Brought John Lennon Back to Music
> Martin Kielty Published: April 3, 2020
> In the mid-to-late '70s, John Lennon wasn’t playing music. He wasn’t thinking much about music. He was trying to be a good father to son Sean. He’d lost interest in trying to persuade people to listen to the work he’d done with wife Yoko Ono, and his last release had been in 1974.
> Around five years later, he exploded back into action in a matter of moments.
> “I was at a dance club one night in Bermuda,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in an interview recorded three days before his death in 1980. “Upstairs, they were playing disco, and downstairs I suddenly heard ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52’s for the first time. Do you know it? It sounds just like Yoko’s music.”
> In particular, Cindy Wilson’s scream toward the end of the song was reminiscent of Ono’s approach. “I said to meself, ‘It’s time to get out the old ax and wake the wife up!’” Lennon said.
> Almost immediately he and Ono started working. He’d write a song and sing it to her on the phone; in New York, she’d come up with a song of her own as a reply. The result was Double Fantasy, the last full album Lennon ever worked on before his death in December 1980.
> It’s a story that circulated for some time, but B-52's' guitarist and original drummer Keith Strickland said in 2012 he eventually had to uncover some solid evidence. He found it in the form of an audio interview on YouTube.
> While it’s not clear if it’s the same interview used by Rolling Stone, one recording includes Lennon saying people tried to turn him onto contemporary music of the late ‘70s, but only the “kooky” stuff really appealed to him.
> “Aha, they’ve finally caught up to what we were trying to do all the time, which is another form of expression!” he said, name-checking “Rock Lobster.” “And we thought, ‘This time, surely, they’re gonna understand it!’” He asked fans to listen to something current and compare it to his output with Ono: “See if we weren’t on the right track in 1969.”
> "I just wanted to hear it with my own ears," Strickland said. “That was really something. I've always been a huge Beatles fan. ... Yoko was such an inspiration for us in the early days. That's definitely an homage to Yoko when Cindy does that scream at the end” of "Rock Lobster."
> Strickland called the "she broke up the Beatles" argument "bullshit," and noted "there was this whole generation of kids that just loved her. We just thought she was fantastic, so it felt good that we were kind of able to give back and say, ‘Look, we love what you did.’ And they heard that. Then, in turn, it inspired John to continue writing.”
> Ono told Songfacts that the stories were most definitely true. “Listening to the B-52's, John said he realized that my time had come,” she explained. “So he could record an album by making me an equal partner and we won't get flack like we used to up to then.”
> In 2002 Ono made a surprise appearance with the band. “The audience didn't know, and we started doing ‘Rock Lobster,’ and then she comes out and does the scream," Strickland recalled. “It was so exciting. It was one of the highlights of our career for me.”
> “Constipated for five years, and then diarrhea for three weeks!” Lennon laughed during his last interview, discussing how quickly he completed his writing tasks. He recited an old story once told to him by Ono about a king who commissions a painting from an artist, pays in advance and then runs out patience after 10 years.
> "A messenger comes back and tells him, ‘The king’s waiting for his painting,’ and the painter says, ‘Oh, hold on,’ and whips it off right in front of him and says, ‘Here,'" Lennon said. "And the messenger says, ‘What’s this? The king paid you 20,000 bucks for this shit, and you knock it off in five minutes?’ And the painter replies, ‘Yeah, but I spent 10 years thinking about it.’ And there’s no way I could have written the Double Fantasy songs without those five years.”
If that is the case, I'm not really sure why you would expect developers to control for the situation where the user agent doesn't actually download the resources that the page requests.