I just saw the documentary “The Sparks Brothers”[0], and this story really reminded me of their story. Sparks are a band who have perpetually been ahead of the curve and are generally rewarded in the same way that Lennon and Ono were (ie. no reward), but instead of packing it in, they have pressed on for 50 years.
If you read to the end of the interview, it seems clear that the B-52s were heavily influenced by Plastic Ono in the first place, so this all kind of makes sense.
The CBGB-era B-52s were pretty great, and I haven't listened to any Ono/Lennon stuff, so now I'm pretty interested.
There's fine stuff in pretty much every era of the B-52s. Bouncing of the Satellites is probably their weakest moment but even that has Girl From Ipanema Goes To Greenland. Cosmic Thing is a damn fine album even if Love Shack is overplayed. Good Stuff is cracking despite them being down to three and Funplex is actually... kind of amazing.
Honestly I wish they'd record another, but they're probably happier touring.
I'm 100% OK with Love Shack being "overplayed". It's such a happy silly infectious song.
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.
Channel Z is an OK song on an otherwise kind of dreadful album, and that's where I get off the B-52s train. It's OK for bands to stop being good! Try to make a whole album worth of good post-Monster REM songs!
I mean, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up and Accelerate are right there...
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...)
They're right there, but the problem with them is that they're bad. There isn't an album worth of listenable songs between them. I tried working this out on Twitter and this playlist was all I could come up with:
Using the best available R.E.M. expertise available on Twitter, I've qualified the following post-Monster songs as "listenable": Supernatural Superserious and Living Well Is The Best Revenge off Accelerate, Imitation of Life, Hope and Daysleeper off Up, and Leave and Electrolite off New Adventures.
I first heard planet Claire at age 12 or so. The Peter Gunn like baseline was stuck in my head for the next few days. I still remember my mom asking what song I was imitating- at like 1am on a school night with my mouth loud enough she came to check on me…
Does he still hate them? I ask because musical tastes change with time, particularly when transitioning from the 20s to the 40s and beyond. Suffice to say that in my 20s I hated Genesis, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.
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!
Huh. I really like the B52s. Though I've never been a Yoko Ono fan. Never would have put the influence together. To me Yoko was always a bit out there, even in terms of timing and tone. What I hear in Rock Lobster has way better timing and tuning, more melodic and less jarring than Yoko for me.
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:
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.
Because normies generally aren’t aware of Zappa, Beefheart, et al., whereas Yoko’s improbable connection to what was probably the most popular musical group in the world for much of the 20th Century out her squarely on their radar. Also, honestly, there’s probably a little misogyny at play.
I was just pointing out how irrational it is that people are upset with her and John for making experimental music, because, you know, that's what they wanted to do as artists. I didn't mention anything about sexism, but it is telling that the dominant narrative is that John Lennon is some kind of simp. Yoko didn't so much ruin The Beatles, as much as John had an affinity for her take on things and already had his own creative differences with the rest of the band.
I suspect there are at least a couple of reasons unrelated to her music (which I admittedly don't know much about myself) why she gets particularly disliked - the fact that Lennon had been part of one of the, if not the, greatest bands of all time, and her influence is blamed for Lennon going off in the musical directions he did, plus I imagine a bit of racism (conscious or unconscious) also comes into play for some people, especially decades ago when she was most relevant.
> Lennon had been part of one of the, if not the, greatest bands of all time
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"
Instances like that second link I think might be why people struggle with Yoko. Here is a 'give the people what they want' entertainment moment, a fairly straight forward presentation of popular music, and here comes Yoko out of no where. I think I had the same reaction O_O.
> What he didn't get was that "kookiness" by itself doesn't make good music ...
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.
You have to put things into historical context to make sense of them. How we see the legacy of John Lennon in 2021 is not necessarily how he saw his work in the 70s. Do a search for Beatles songs that John didn't like and you'll find a long list of fan favorites that he couldn't stand.
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.
Maybe Lennon just liked the music with Yoko, possibly had opinions about it (arguably sophisticated ones, being a brilliant, immensely successful professional musician and songwriter), and didn't care if it was popular. We can't read Lennon's mind; any comments on someone else's thinking are BS without direct evidence from the person themself.
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.
showing my age but the 80s B-52s are one of my favorite bands. The songs are so playful and about different topics. Song about cleaning the house. Song about wearing a wig. Song about Mesopotamia. Song about sex under a strobe light.
I'd love recommendations for similarly fun bands.
Not comparable in style but maybe in crazy topics are They Might Be Giants and Aquabats.
Flaming lips. Their music has gotten a bit too ridiculous lately, but songs like "she don't use jelly" and "yoshimi battles the pink robots", and many others from earlier in their catalog are both silly and heartfelt.
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.
Super Furry Animals. Mullet haircuts, pushy parents vicariously living out their dreams through their children, sleep deprivation, Che Guevara's asthma, golden retrievers, the 1992 military coup in Sierra Leone, El Niño...
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci was another one that was a great Welsh band, psychedelic folk sort of thing, some similarly absurd/surreal lyrics, and the later material some very emotive folk with a unique Brythonic feel. Loved their song writing.
Sparks. Every single one of their songs starts off as a meticulously crafted piece of pop perfection, then goes severely off the rails at least once. Often more.
They've been around for decades and have changed multiple times to match what currently defines "pop".
Deerhoof popped right into my head on reading that post, too. Kate Bush and Talking Heads, from other posts, are others I'd personally second, for the requested qualities.
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.
Fascinating. Double Fantasy was a staple at our house as a kid. Makes a lovely bridge between my parent's generation and mine, thanks. Always thought the Rock Lobster vocalist was doing a dolphin impression. Full interview looks good as well, gonna read it:
My mind was blow when I first heard Rock Lobster and Planet Claire in 1980. I appreciate some of Yoko's stuff and her influence on the B-52's, but some of it is hard to listen to, like the siberian indigenous music that was an influence. It's interesting though.
Baader–Meinhof in full force. Yesterday I felt like watching some rick and morty. https://www.adultswim.com/streams/rick-and-morty I clicked the LAST STREAM ON THE LEFT during the intermission and this was the exact clip playing :o
I'm not sure what you are saying but I'm going to assume you are saying I see a connection between Siberian indigenous music and the music of Yoko Ono that doesn't exist. If you are correct that we shouldn't make unproven connections, then the music writing business of describing influences and pointing out derivatives is a sham.
Im saying adultswim runs their material for free on their website, and yesterday just randomly this exact Olena clip you linked was being streamed on the "LAST STREAM ON THE LEFT" show.
One of my favorite songs of all time. The guitar playing is so good, and apparently the guitarist, Ricky Wilson, only played with 4 strings (D and G strings removed on the guitar). The last third of the song, when it gets really frenetic, always gets me dancing.
B-52s first two albums are absolutely brilliant. They were just breaking the rules with their instruments, vocals, songwriting, and recording, and (importantly) making great music.
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.
Yes, came here to mention Planet Claire and Private Idaho and Mesopotamia as my favourites.
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.
I'd say there's good music that doesn't try to break rules. A lot of country music is like that to me, incredible skill, solid songwriting but usually within a very traditional frame.
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.
“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.”
As one caught in all of these generations, I'd have to frame it as: John Lennon being inspired by Yoko-like squealing noises in a theatrical B52 song is about as relevant as David Bowie being inspired by Arcade Fire. I mean, for sure the 52s and Arcade were inspired by these greatest masters of the Boomer generation, but the other way around is stuff for tabloids...as in, Bowie was writing songs for "Sponge Bob Square Pants, The Musical" (https://youtu.be/Q1PuF6pJHjM) just before cancer took him. (Isn't it likely that if Arcade thought they inspired Bowie to do that, they would all dress in purple and drink Kool-Aide?) Lennon OTOH didn't live long enough to start writing "show tunes for cartoons", not that there is anything particularly wrong with having fun in your later years (just ask one of my generation's greatest masters, Danny Elfman... https://youtu.be/4LQVEN2kZQA /ducks /runs) McCartney did "Rupert and the Frog" (https://youtu.be/i_TFHzxGv0s), what Yoko-esq B52-inspired cartoon show tune do we think John Lennon would most likely have gone on to write?
I'm now a crack shot at hitting the "Reader mode" button after an article loads, but before the no-adblock script wheezes into life & tries to pull it away from me.
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
It breaks reader mode, too. I only got the title, main image and a random paragraph from the article.
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.
For anyone else not wanting to disable adblock or whatever it requires to read:
> 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.”
I suspect you're running ublock origin or similar. I get the black page with it, but it renders correctly when I temporarily disable it.
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.
