1979: The B-52’s, The B-52’s
By Sydney Bernthold
The first time I heard “Rock Lobster” by The B-52’s, I was 16 years old, and I was embarking on a fantastic odyssey. I was going to listen to every song sampled in a song that I liked. At that point in my life, I was sure everything made absolute sense, if I studied it enough. I was taking biology classes at Ohio State between an engineering internship and studying for an oncoming barrage of acronyms (ACTs, SATs, OAAs, etc.), and there was nothing my spreadsheets and I couldn’t handle. I imagined chains of song samples like research citations, researchable and organized. I wanted to understand music; I thought I could do it the same way I came to understand mitosis and muscular anatomy, by standing on the shoulders of giants.
So, via a middling Panic! at the Disco song, I found “Rock Lobster.” I had heard of The B-52’s the same way everyone has heard of The B-52’s, listening to drunk uncles sing “Love Shack” at wedding receptions, so I had never listened to The B-52’s. After listening to “Rock Lobster”, I listened to it again, and then abandoned my sample-seeking quest entirely. I had never been so interested in something that made no sense before.
“Planet Claire,” the opening track on The B-52’s, begins with two and a half minutes of UFO-sounding synth and guitar, before any vocals are heard. When lyrics finally arrive, describing an alien (from Planet Claire) with short and simple rhymes, there is an immediate sense that you’ve gotten yourself into something indescribable— the musical equivalent of an alien abduction. “Dance This Mess Around” is a simple song with a female vocalist (Cindy Wilson) shrieking all around— a love letter to shrillness. (For me, a shrill and demanding individual, there is some catharsis in a vocalist embracing it in a song.) “There’s a Moon in The Sky (Called The Moon)” takes the listener through a sci-fi space-age lyric collage, with names of planets in perfect harmonies, and a dry joke for a title/chorus. “6060-842” is about calling a number on a bathroom wall “for a nice time”, it predates the now ubiquitous “Jenny (867-5309)” by two years. “Rock Lobster” is my definite favorite.
If the great blind poet Homer lived today, I would make him listen to “Rock Lobster.” It is evocative of an older kind of storytelling— the epic myth poems of antiquity. I can imagine a performance of The Odyssey or The Iliad sounding similar, a charismatic rhapsode shouting in meter with a harmonizing chorus behind him. Each line of the song carries little relation to the last, riffing on the idea of undersea adventuring, yet the whole song builds to a climax of listed sea creatures, real and imagined, and interpretive noises. I won’t make an attempt at transcription, (Go listen to the song, dear reader!) but the noises for “jellyfish,” “narwhal”, and “manta ray” are truly inspired. The instrumentation is equally unintelligible, synthetic and natural sounds playing with and against each other. The lead vocalist (Fred Schnieder) isn’t afraid to reach for a camp falsetto, or dive into an artificial baritone. In places, it feels reminiscent of an improv game, a song saying “yes, and,” to itself. It’s nonsense, but it is remarkably fun nonsense.
In school, I learned that The Odyssey and other epics were explanatory, that the ancient Greeks looked to them as a reflection of their own lives and history, and that is why they are so compelling. We still learn about them a few millennia later. I’m not from Ancient Greece, but I’d like to give another explanation for the wide reach and influence of the epic poem— it is remarkably fun to hear someone make noises only in the hope that you will listen. I’m sure “Rock Lobster” would still be an enjoyable song if it “made sense” in a traditional way, if it told the story of a man making his journey home, or the battles of the Trojan War, but it’s nonsense is what bares this essence of poetry. There is no pretense of purpose beyond needing you to listen.
I never became a biologist, and rarely think today about my years of lab notes and dissections and spreadsheets. Those things made perfect sense; my professors described the role of each cell in the body, each bone in the skeleton, each animal in an ecosystem. But in the end, I never found them compelling. Facts need no audience, that’s what makes them factual. Cells will continue to divide and animals will continue to evolve, with or without my careful notes on their structure. They aren’t begging me to listen to them. Art, on the other hand, requires an audience. Nobody would remember Homer if his epics weren’t enjoyable, regardless of how much truth on human nature they contained.
I wish I could say that “The B-52’s” by The B-52’s cured me of my need to find sense in everything, but that would be too clean of an ending. It would make too much sense. (And if I were truly accepting of the beauty of nonsense, I wouldn’t feel compelled to write essays analyzing and ordering the beauty of nonsense, would I?) However, I can say that The B-52’s unashamed nonsense revealed something to me. Art needs to serve only one purpose: to find an audience. Anything else is nice, and certainly art can teach morals or incite feelings, but the essence of all art is shouting to get somebody else to listen. If you can be compelling and nonsensical, as The B-52’s are, then “making sense” isn’t required to be compelling. If making sense isn’t required to be compelling, why strive for it? Strive to be heard instead. Make up noises for every sea creature you can imagine, and then make up more.
In a perfect world, I would end this essay with some extravagant shouts and noises in the style of The B-52’s, but I’m limited by the written word. However, feel free to shout compelling nonsense on your own. People are dying to listen, if you’re willing to beg them to.
Sydney Bernthold (they/them) is an artist from Columbus, Ohio, and a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a B.A. in English. Sydney’s work can be found online at Neologism Poetry and Eunoia Review, and in print in Star*Line Poetry and Sinister Wisdom, and @SydneyBernthold on Twitter and Instagram.