Hero Worship: How The B-52's Southern New Wave and Dial-Up Internet Saved My Life

In 1991, my world changed. I’d been spending absent days in my suburban Pennsylvania middle school hiding in bathrooms with two friends who felt interim while the popular girls danced to Color Me Badd at in-school dances. Then we got Prodigy, an early internet service. This was a year or two before America Online started spamming the mailboxes (the real kind, with flags and hinges) of everyone I knew.

Prodigy’s stand-out feature was its message boards organized alphabetically by interest, and I went straight to the music section. I still wonder what would have happened had they chosen a name further down the alphabet. Instead, there it was, near the top of the list: salvation in blocky VGA font. “B-52s fans.”

I had Cosmic Thing; everyone had Cosmic Thing, that hit album featuring the ubiquitous “Love Shack.” But the cheeky, affectionate messages zipping around this group of self-proclaimed weirdos hinted at something more countercultural. For a day or two, I held back. Today, this would be called “lurking,” but that term connotes a self-awareness that I did not possess as a socially unconfident 13-year-old. When I opened a new board message and typed my question, I hesitated just briefly before hitting Enter. What album should I buy next? I asked. No question, responded someone: Wild Planet.

My first listen—boom box, bedroom floor—was completely disorienting. This sounded nothing like “Love Shack.” Instead of iridescent, polished production, here was jangly guitar. Instead of tidy kitsch, the wigs donned by Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson on this album cover seemed deliberately strange, even ugly. The song “Running Around,” with its growling guitar and banshee yelling, felt almost scary to me. And irresistible.

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I had zero grounding in camp or anything even vaguely queer. My upbringing had immersed me in classical music and Pink Floyd. My rust-belt hometown worshiped classic rock’s serious male swagger; I had just emerged the year before from a long Billy Joel phase. But this band, they weren’t even trying to be polished musicians; they were just having fun. As Fred Schneider put it before every live song on cassette tapes I was about to start trading, “This next song is a dance tune.” They were surrealist; they were hilarious; they were exactly the way I realized I wanted to be the moment I heard them. “I’ll give you fish/I’ll give you candy,” what?! The cotton candy hair, the 1960s thrift store dresses, the irresistible dance beat, Cindy Wilson’s Southern drawl—I was slain by it all.

In short order, I saved my allowance and bought the B-52’s’ first, self-titled album, listened, rejoiced, and waited some more while I saved up for the new-wave classic Whammy! I joined a fan club run by a woman in Rochester who mailed out monthly newsletters, some featuring song lyrics with hand-drawn illustrations. By the time Christmas rolled around and I received a VHS tape featuring a live performance of the B-52’s from 1979, I was all in, creeping downstairs in the night to stand as close as possible to the TV so that I didn’t wake my parents while I danced with abandon to “Rock Lobster.” I imagined I was wild, and maybe even…drunk? high? (whatever that was like) in a bygone version of Athens, GA, every cell in my body pining. I hung an early poster of the B-52’s over my dresser. I still recall one night marked by that fanatical, drifty insomnia in which all you can think of is the object of your obsession. I had fallen asleep with Party Out Of Bounds, a book about the ‘70s Athens music scene, next to me in bed, and now dreamed I was there, I was there!, repeatedly waking to look up at that poster, my body and spirit distilled to 100% longing.

At school, I became a shade, my head down, doodling (ridiculous/lifesaving somehow) song lyrics in my spiralbound notebooks as waves of kids in yellow-ribboned Gulf War t-shirts ebbed and flowed around me. Once the bell rang, I’d pull out my Walkman for the bus ride home, where, later that night, I would dial into Prodigy for my sanctioned hour of phone-line interruption.

If my real life and the music I’d been taught to appreciate up till now were all about trying really hard—to be the best, coolest, most competent version of oneself—with mixed personal results, then this was its opposite. Instead of prodigious talent and practice and mastery, the B-52s were all about just leaping in and doing the thing, and What if we wore these hats onstage? and who cares about the judgment of a bunch of squares? It was a welcome relief. No one in my new online coterie of I-think-mostly teenagers wore middle school’s de rigueur mantle of studied nonchalance. Instead, we exchanged earnest messages about how important this music was for getting through the uninspired conventionality of our “real” lives. (Yeah, I think we were mostly teens.)

In that early internet era, anonymity was the default, and reinvention seemed entirely possible. On the message boards, I wasn’t some not-particularly-popular-or-memorable good student. I was “Kt,” everyone’s friend, who wrote messages in our common parlance: a bubbly sort of Valley-Girl patois. We exchanged letters and birthday mix tapes, held occasional awkward long-distance phone calls, and I snail-mailed out fan fiction I’d written, thinking I’d invented the genre. (In the story, we were all deposited on a desert island with our pop culture crushes. Mine was Christian Slater; a friend’s was Paul Simon.)

I don’t remember the dissolution or the end. High school rolled around, and I formed better real-world friendships. Puberty continued its advance, and grunge culture and hormones adjusted my emotional appetite from one satisfied by cheeky fun to one that demanded some combination of cynicism and angst. PJ Harvey and Nirvana crashed into this new sonic void as music that understood some heretofore secret portion of my insides. In high school and college, I referred jokingly to “my B-52’s phase,” in which I’d had “these friends over the computer.” I did not keep in touch with any of them.

But nothing is really ever just a phase (hello, social media friends-over-the-computer), and life is more complex than cycles of complete rejection of what came before and total immersion in the new. After all, there is only so much “new” out there, and our hearts are stickier and more flexible than we often care to admit.

That posse of supportive strangers and the band we all briefly worshipped together birthed new possibilities that entered my psyche as a sassy, Southern “Screw you” wrapped in a confectionary dance beat and never left. In this way, “Dirty Back Road,” “Mesopotamia,” and in-jokes with my early internet friends lit the way to important friendships and cultural relationships later. Le Tigre. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Pete and Pete. Kids in the Hall. Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat series. The comics of Lynda Barry. When I saw and heard these things, it was like I already knew them, or knew they had something important to say to me and through me. The B’52’s knew what any child knows: that serious creative endeavor is a kind of play and that play is serious. Even when my own work wasn’t particularly light or marked by the absurd, it existed in a world where the absurd was possible. Where, even with nary a bouffant wig or surf guitar in sight, the next song? Just might be a dance tune.

Kate Sweeney is a writer and radio/podcast producer whose book American Afterlife (University of Georgia Press) won a Georgia Author of the Year Award. She’s also a Pisces who loves computers and hot tamales.

Listen to an exclusive recording of The B-52’s at Roseland Ballroom in 1982:

Hero Worship: How The B-52’s Southern New Wave and Dial-Up Internet Saved My Life