Pete Crighton gets off to a good start when he identifies the B-52s circa their debut as "a study in contradictions on that cover: They looked retro, but futuristic. They looked campy, but cool. They looked silly, but sexy." Alas, he then proceeds to spend most of the rest of the book way over to one side of the slider on another binary: I certainly wouldn't have wanted to read even a slim volume entirely predicated on the hand being a bit of a laff, but it turns out it's also pretty wearing to read a thoroughly earnest account of a group where I'd never have thought that an applicable adjective, except maybe in the Oscar Wilde sense. And that's Crighton's angle here, the band as joyously queer lodestars while he was growing up a closeted baby gay in Canada. So he roots for them, and his own younger self, struggling through rushed albums, the eighties climate of homophobia, the AIDS epidemic which robbed the band of music's only good Ricky Wilson, then cheers as they come back stronger with Love Shack, their biggest album, and proper fame, all after being written off. Not unfairly,he takes this as a parable of gay resistance in dark times, but in doing so he often loses track of the 33 1/3 series' supposed brief to concentrate on a single album; hell, at times he even provides track by track rundowns of other LPs entirely. Which have their moments (on 52 Girls: "When I listen to it today, I love to imagine it as a list of an alpha lesbian's weekend conquests"), but even then are deviating from the mission. And too often I simply found his breathless style getting my back up – we never actually get a "You go, girl!", but it often felt like one was lurking, and there's an exhausting preponderance of exclamation marks! Worst of all are the times he pushes through this and comes back around to being quite entertaining ("Dirty Back Road is a sexy slow-jam compared to the opener but it still sizzles. It's dangerous. It's sexy. It's southern. And it's almost undoubtedly about getting fucked. In the butt.") only to immediately blow it (the unnecessary topper "It's not too hard to use one's imagination to think about what the dirty back road is exactly."). I don't disagree with his broader thesis, or mostly even with his assessment of the highs and lows of the band's career, but his manner of saying it was not for me.

(Netgalley ARC)