Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Deadbeat Club Edition, Part One
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2018
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The B-52’s and R.E.M. don’t sound all that much like each other. One group were avatars of kitsch, fusing punk, girl-group and garage rock—even Yoko Ono—into a retro-nuevo style all their own. The other group were mysterious, elliptical, often indecipherable, but they reinvented jangly guitar and classic-rock influences to make a new kind of New Wave. Together, this pair of distinctive bands helped make Athens, Georgia the epicenter of alternative cool in the ’80s and ’90s. In part one of this two-part episode of Hit Parade, we present the story of how the B-52’s and R.E.M. created a scene out of a college town—and became the most prominent queer-friendly, gender-fluid bands of their era.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:09.0 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:16.3 | I'm Chris Melanthe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:22.8 | On today's show, in early 1980, a single materialized on the charts that was so unusual, it would inspire a former beetle. |
| 0:41.0 | More on that former Beatle in a moment. |
| 0:47.3 | As for the song, which dated back to 1978, it was called Rock Lobster. |
| 0:53.7 | And it was by a five-person band who named themselves after a collection of letters and numbers, |
| 0:59.0 | designating both a 1950s military bomber and, more to the point, |
| 1:03.7 | a 1960s buffont hairdo, the B-52s. |
| 1:10.6 | On first listen, the B-52's Rock Lobster was a cavalcade of kitsch, but it also had the edge of punk, and its quirky surf guitar and primitive keyboards connected it to early rock and roll. |
| 1:20.1 | It was old and new at the same time, the leading edge of Rock's new wave. |
| 1:37.3 | Rock Swster peaked on Billboard's Hot 100, |
| 1:42.9 | well shy of the top 40, another band that emerged |
| 1:46.6 | in the aftermath of punk made its Hot 100 debut. By now, New Wave Pop was all over the charts, |
| 1:53.9 | but nothing on the radio in 1983 sounded much like this band either. |
| 2:20.2 | It was by four men who also named themselves with a string of letters, the abbreviation for rapid eye movement, the dream phase of a deep night's sleep, R-E-M. Radio Free Europe, REM's first pop hit, peaked even |
| 2:29.1 | lower on the charts than rock lobster had, but its rustic, chiming sound would influence a generation of rock bands. |
| 2:46.8 | What did the B-52s and REM have in common other than ban names that resembled codes and hits |
| 2:55.1 | that weren't setting the charts on fire, at least not yet? They both hailed from a college town |
| 3:02.3 | about 60 miles from Atlanta, the city and county of Athens, Georgia. And both groups were pivotal to the development |
| 3:11.1 | of what would later be called alternative rock. |
| 3:16.7 | Go and living in Europe Private Idaho |
... |
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