Dance This Mess Around. The B-52’s. 1979. Warner Bros.

 In a music industry rife with under appreciation, one of the most sorely overlooked talents is B-52’s vocalist Cindy Wilson. She is the Southern Gothic voice of heartbreak at its most intense, sometimes going so far into a song’s emotional core that she soars. From their debut, eponymously titled record, Dance This Mess Around begins with a two minute introduction—about half of the song’s total running time—that seems to last only seconds; Wilson seductively engages with her backing band—specifically brother Rick’s lead guitar licks—for a sinuous dance of memory and breakup fury sung with such fiercely expressed emotion you find yourself at the center of what essentially becomes a girl group exorcism of personal anguish. The B-52’s genius was to have found inspiration in the over abundance of American kitsch without giving themselves over to it. The ubiquity of trash upon the surface of American life is what gives the B-52’s—particularly early in its career—the capacity to shock and thrill, to hold our attention as it made explicit the tensions that run through popular culture, producing both excitement and mystery. At Dance This Mess Around’s halfway point, as the band—spurred by Wilson’s absurdist self-realizing avowal, “Just a Limburger!”—accumulates peak momentum, vocalist Fred Schneider ritualistically intones the song title like some possessed Pentecostal mystic summoning the power of juju. So begins a cataloging of those remarkable, atavistic dances whose physicality metabolizes heartbreak: the Shugaloo, the Camel Walk. The Escalator. Like the Ramones and the Cramps, the B-52’s raised American kitsch into an art form, a riotous, combustible aesthetic that mirrored America’s unmanageable chemical imbalance, practiced with a freakishly inspired acumen. And a toy piano.

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