8 March 1990
Firstly and most importantly, I’m relieved to see that, as per their official website, this band have finally dropped the grammatically-incorrect possessive apostrophe from their name. If the outlaw glamour of sticking it to the punctuation police is how you roll, you can still savour their original name styling on the ‘Love Shack’ single sleeve above. Otherwise, they’re now The B-52s.
With the apostrophe gone and the band possibly now on a Marie Kondo decluttering buzz, have The B-52s ever considered also dropping their annoying male vocalist, Fred Schneider? As much as I like many of this band’s singles, his voice has no appeal to me. My favourite B-52s track, ‘Roam’, which is on the same fine Cosmic Thing album as ‘Love Shack’, features only Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson on vox, and is genuinely thrilling. Other B-52s songs confine him to a chorus here, a response line there; I enjoy those ones too. Not so with ‘Love Shack’, where, like the housemate who drinks your milk but Post-its their cheese, he has more of this than seems right or fair. Die-hard Fred stans may demur, but The B-52s could have been ‘Roam’-great all the time, if only.
For all its sparky pop kitsch and catchiness, I suspect the pestilent wind of “novelty record” in its sails helped send ‘Love Shack’ so far up the mainstream charts. Our pal Fred sounds like ‘Love Power’ from The Producers, which even if intentional is not good. It’s hard to completely dislike the energy and colour of ‘Love Shack’, but it gets wearying fast. On which point, there are two Fred Schneider solo albums, which I believe are the piped music in the busy Saturday-afternoon supermarkets of Hell.
