Everything I know, I learned at the Love Shack
I just got back from seeing the B-52s at the 930 Club here in DC... amazingly enough, I'd never seen them live before. They're pretty firmly a nostalgia act at this point (double the normal ticket price, half the show length, oldest, rudest crowd I've ever seen) but still SO FUCKING AWESOME. Hell YEAH I'll meet you by the third pyramid!
And I never really thought about it before tonight, but the B-52s are one of the most-- if not THE most-- influential bands in my life, even if I don't listen to their music a whole lot these days. Cosmic Thing, their big commercial record, hit like a thunderbolt in the summer of 1990, when I was an impressionable 15 and watching MTV all day long hoping "Roam" would come on (the banana and the bagel! Hee!).
They were my first true exposure to camp, to fabulous gay men, to weird shit that didn't come from inside my own head (or the heads of artnouveauho, fatbuttsheep and minniethemoocha). Not to mention my original and eternal girl crush: Kate Pierson. I wanted to be her when I was 15 and I still feel the same way now. And I realized that pretty much every signature style I've rocked for the past twenty years has been something I ripped off from her: dyed red hair, corsetry, big wigs and a fondness for high harmony (see, and you thought it was just a Ginger Spice fetish. HELLS no. WAY cooler than that). I dragged my mom all over Melrose that summer of 1990, looking for a fringed bustier like the one I'd seen Kate wearing-- we never found one, but I did eventually find one that sported sequined fruit (which was later, memorably, pressed into service as a Rocky Horror costume).
And if I can't be Kate Pierson then I wanna be the hot chick bassist from the Love Shack video.
And I never really thought about it before tonight, but the B-52s are one of the most-- if not THE most-- influential bands in my life, even if I don't listen to their music a whole lot these days. Cosmic Thing, their big commercial record, hit like a thunderbolt in the summer of 1990, when I was an impressionable 15 and watching MTV all day long hoping "Roam" would come on (the banana and the bagel! Hee!).
They were my first true exposure to camp, to fabulous gay men, to weird shit that didn't come from inside my own head (or the heads of artnouveauho, fatbuttsheep and minniethemoocha). Not to mention my original and eternal girl crush: Kate Pierson. I wanted to be her when I was 15 and I still feel the same way now. And I realized that pretty much every signature style I've rocked for the past twenty years has been something I ripped off from her: dyed red hair, corsetry, big wigs and a fondness for high harmony (see, and you thought it was just a Ginger Spice fetish. HELLS no. WAY cooler than that). I dragged my mom all over Melrose that summer of 1990, looking for a fringed bustier like the one I'd seen Kate wearing-- we never found one, but I did eventually find one that sported sequined fruit (which was later, memorably, pressed into service as a Rocky Horror costume).
And if I can't be Kate Pierson then I wanna be the hot chick bassist from the Love Shack video.