Mesopotamia: The B-52's Classification: New Wave Subclassification: None1 Release: Mesopotamia, 1982 The B-52's hold a special place in my heart. I think that is one of the many things about me that does not make me unique. Uniqueness is overrated. It's early days yet on this blog, but it would appear that we are on a direction that appears to be a retrospective of the hipster. Dirk's Gently has a driving strategy that I often apply to my life. "I follow," I'm paraphrasing here, "I follow someone who looks like they know where they are going. Then, I often ended up where I needed to be, even if where I needed to be wasn't where I sat out to go." I like that philosophy. It meshes with one of the notions of collage as literature. As the author, I am in the same boat as the reader - I have no idea how this will end. This shared nonknowledge is so liberating, isn't it? To be unique is not a bad thing, per se. It is the obsession with uniqueness that is unpalatable. To be unique for the sake of uniqueness is a disease - it kills the soul. There is a word that I have grown to loathe over the years. It isn't the word's fault, per se. It is the obsession with the word that is unpalatable. Words have power - but, like our democracy those words are fragile. When they are overused or misused to the point of nausea their power morphs into something awful - it kills the soul, just to hear it. With that rambling caveat, the desire to be unique for the sake of uniqueness is a toxic trait of hipsterdom. Like all toxicities, the obsession with uniqueness kills the obsessed, content to only maim those in the orbit of the aforementioned obsessed. I refused to listen to The Shins for ten years after watching Garden State. After my decade long feud with Zach Braff (he had no idea about the feud) I realized that I was only hurting myself. Besides, New Slang and I had those three years before that movie came out and ruined everything. Forgive me, readers. Forgive me, Zach Braff. To be unique for the sake of being unique is to choose isolation, to choose alienation. We are nearer to the dread than we have ever been. It is OK to get lost in staring at the abyss. It is OK to break down to tears, to revolt with no hope of winning the revolution. It is OK to laugh at the absurd (this is my preferred strategy, though I am not dogmatic and like to mix in a whole bunch of corollaries to even out the stuffing in my strawman). Go Churchill on the meaningless of it all, fight it on the beaches, on the streets, in the sheets - never, never surrender to whatever this evil this metaphorical paragraph warns against. Now you may be asking yourself something at this very moment. I know this because I am asking myself something at this very moment. This very moment (the moment you are reading and I am writing) is unique because it is shared extradimensionally. Our moment together exists outside of spacetime - it is eternal. You are asking yourself as I am asking myself - both of these questions must be either rhetorical or some kind of metaphysical chess game by mail. I'm asking myself rhetorically, but I am sure that if you are not then I will at some point sense it and we shall share another moment where your question will be answered. What does any of this have to do with the B-52's Mesopotamia? Nothing. We must be OK with that. That's the joke that helps us transcend the absurd. Lifted up, we are rarefied. We transcend unto absolute eternity, together. Victorious over the absurdity of the meaninglessness that we walk through - alone in our every allotted day. Those days will come and go; but our victory over the alienation is forever, eternal. Eternally linked to the unique sounds of the B-52's Mesopotamia. What a unique experience we have just shared, down by the third pyramid. 1. It will sound odd and inconsistent with my confessed obsession with categorization and classifications that such a large portion of my record collection will fall under the rather mundane sounding "New Wave" without any sub-classifications or categories. It sounds odd because it is odd. I would venture that about 40-50% of my records are in this genre of music. While my current focus is on expanding my jazz collection I do not see this figure dipping to below 35% of my overall collection. There just always seems to be an album that I come across while digging through sales crates that catches my eye that is a new wave, post-punk type album. Why then would I choose not sub classify this pivotal section? There are two reasons, one spiritual and one practical. The spiritual reason is obviously more lofty, more embellished and more curated. That does not imply that it is less valid or less weightier in my estimation. In fact, the opposite is true. I think the spiritual reason is more valid, more weightier in my estimation. I will have to really do some soul searching to find out if I live by these words. I fear I do not. The spiritual reason is that I think the modern world is so hopelessly fractured that we will never be able to overcome the prison of isolationism that we have purchased for ourselves from the various corporations. True or not, this late 70's through 80's genre of "Alternative Rock" in its many guises of punk, post-punk, new wave, sound wave, pop art, art rock, college rock, experimental rock, indie pop (not 21st century indie pop, which would rightly be called neo-indie pop or indie pop revival, but that's unimportant), synthwave, electronic wave, dark wave, French cold wave, noise pop, progressive rock (2nd or 3rd generation), pub rock, etc., etc., and so on, forever and ever, this decade give or take a little on the edges represents to me the last time that we, collectively, were able to produce something and have it grow without being subservient to some corporation. It was not the last time that bespoke existed, but the last time that bespoke was affordable. That's a strange thing to come to grips with in the Internet Age. That is the spiritual reason. The practical reason is that I could so subclassify this genre in so many different ways that I would (given my obsessiveness on this sorting issue) find that I have no time for anything else. I would just be constantly shuffling records around, creating spreadsheets on excel to track my many different ways of sorting. That doesn't sound very fun, does it?