The Gen-X of the South

In the small-town South, music like the B52s was the gateway North

The first week of school started with a long drive from San Marcos to San Antonio. We’ve been jetting back and forth between home and here, and these last few weeks have meant miles and miles on the road. Somewhere between there and here the college radio station in SA flips over to Spanish language/Tejano music, and on this last jaunt it was a battle between Roam and Me Retiro. In the end, the B52s won, and I ended up down the rabbit hole, mining the well of my musical memories back to the tenth grade.

While their self named breakout album from 1977 is most famous for the forever hit Rock Lobster, it is the first cut that holds the most memories for me. In my sophomore year of high school, my sister and I dated two best friends, Richard and Mike. Her boyfriend, Richard, drove a Ford Galaxy 500, and after school and on the weekends, all four of us would pile in, roll down the windows, and drive.

One of the first times we went driving, before Mike and I were officially a couple, we listened to that B52s cassette, but mainly its opener, Planet Claire, on rewind/repeat. Mike was my first everything, so that backseat was filled with angst and excitement and young love and a new-found freedom that only exists at the edge of what’s to come. The wind whipped our hair as we heard the first blips of morse code and then Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn riff. To say we felt cool would be an understatement.

It was like flying.

I spent all my formative years in small towns in South Carolina and Virginia where the alt-new wave-postpunk lifestyle of the early 80s basically began and ended with me, my sisters, and our friends. My older sisters led the way, but at the youngest of three I was always along for the ride. Unlike so much of the other music we loved during that time that was either maudlin, intellectual, hard edge, or experimental, the B52s were the epitome of fun. They were wild and full of energy, and best of all, they were one of us.

Southern.

I have friends who were in the scene in Georgia when they were coming up, and the late 70s below the Mason Dixon line was an amazing time and place in American music history. The first Gen Xers were beginning to come of age and—like generations before them—took music on as a rallying call and coat of arms. In the small-town South, music was the gateway North. North out of stagnant places with racist politics. North away from the Bible Belt and backwards thinking. My sisters brought that music back with them from boarding schools in the North in the mid-80s. My oldest sister was the first girl with a half shaved head (dyed bright orange) and tattoo in our little seaside town in South Carolina, and I remember, early on being embarrassed to go to the grocery store with her. My other sister would spend hours putting gelatin in her hair to make it stand on end. Songs by X and the Vandals and the Talking Heads and the Smiths and the Sex Pistols and the Clash would blare from the stereos in their bedrooms, and eventually the little sister got over her humiliation and joined in.

While the members of the B52s are technically boomers, they were singing for us, not our parents. Even in their highest moments of commercial success, they were singing for the weirdos, the gays, the others. All the kids like us—the artists and the bullied and the misunderstood—suffocating in the South. Ten years after their first album came out, they were still inspiring us, driving country roads and feeling cool as shit.

So, this weekend on that roll down I-35, I put on the album from beginning to end, Planet Claire closely followed by my all-time favorite 52 Girls and the never-ending anthem of Rock Lobster to the finish with its wonderfully corny cover of Petula Clark’s Downtown. All joy and jubilation wrapped in a bow of 50s nostalgia and atomic age. And damn if listening to those songs and remembering those feelings of rebellion and blooming ideals didn’t make me feel so proud of all of us.

Gen-X has been getting a bit of a pity party of late in the media, but hell, we absorbed the generational trauma of two world wars, Vietnam, and Korea, yet were never made to fight a war against our will. We are the last analog generation. The last true creatives. We still know how to make things and fix things with our hands. People can say we’ve been left behind and passed over, but that’s bullshit. We literally grew up during the golden age of America, and we’ll probably be around to see its end.

That kind of perspective has to mean something.

So here’s to those of who escaped the South for places more open minded like New York, LA, and Boston. To those of us who stayed to fight for change and make a life among the norms. And to those of us who gave in and gave up because sometimes raging against everything makes life too hard. Here’s to those of us who survived, and here’s to those of us who didn’t.

This one’s for you.