The Story Of The Greatest Lobster Themed Pop Single Of All Time
Words by Susan Elizabeth Shepard
The Lobster has clawed out a broad space in popular culture. There’s The Lobster, ‘Consider the Lobster’, and lobsters as metaphor for Ross and Rachel on Friends.
But the single most famous pop lobster there is? That’s ‘Rock Lobster’, the wildly creative, innovative 1978 debut single from Georgia iconoclasts the B-52s that to this day remains a party staple.
Just like actual lobster, which can be a common coastal food or a pricey white-tablecloth dish, ‘Rock Lobster’ combines the low and the high. It’s a great dumb party hit with avant-garde inspiration. There are not a lot of songs as musically experimental and influential that also reliably pack a dance floor at a wedding reception. Much like the B-52s themselves, ‘Rock Lobster’ is a subversive genius dressed like the life of the party. How does it so finely ride the line between those two worlds? Let’s travel through the song. It starts with that inimitable riff, the one guitarist Ricky Wilson called the stupidest one he’d ever come up with. It echoes the Peter Gunn theme in its surfy simplicity. Drummer Keith Strickland hits a cymbal and immediately, the cowbell, the hardest partier in percussion, chimes in. Then vocalists Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson start with off-kilter girl group vocalizations before Fred Schneider’s signature nasal speak-singing begins telling the story of this beach party gone wrong. It all starts when something grabs a partier in the waves: It was a rock lobster!
Pierson’s sci-fi soundtrack organ builds tension until it’s time for that incredible riff again. The song proceeds as if it were going to resolve itself the way normal pop songs do, with just a few weird elements like that odd singer and the weird imagery in his lyrics. He paints a picture of calamity at the beach. The song’s characters barrel through beach mayhem while the band plays a rockin’ dance floor beat. At the center of it is the “down! down! Down!” refrain that’s so perfectly suited for making a group on a dancefloor instinctively do the same thing at the same time: twisting down to the floor as low as they can go. Just after everyone would jump back up, Wilson’s riff kicks in again. The song takes a sharp left turn. The agent of chaos, the rock lobster, becomes one of a litany of sea creatures that Schneider sings about. He spits out “twistin’ round the fire / havin’ fun!” like a threat.
Pierson and Wilson start making what they’ve said were supposed to be those animals’ marine noises: guttural ululations inspired by Yoko Ono’s primal screams, culminating in a shriek and a brief coda of “rock lobster”s. Then the whole thing stops on a dime just under seven minutes after it started. That’s prog-rock length! I highly recommend looking up the band’s 1980 Saturday Night Live performance of the song. They’re completely deadpan throughout the entire thing and look so very serious (they’d later say in interviews that they were terrified during the show). That performance and their recorded output would later inspire artists including Kurt Cobain and members of Sleater-Kinney. And most famously, it got John Lennon to return to the studio. When he heard its Yoko-esque vocals, Lennon thought that pop music had finally caught up with his partner’s work, and he decided the time was right for them to record. Ono, bringing things full circle, has performed the song’s signature
screams as a guest on stage. Although I’ve listened to and obsessed over the B-52s since I was an actual child, it didn’t occur to me until just now to look up what a rock lobster was. I guess for all I know, Fred Schneider could have invented it. Turns out that a rock lobster is a spiny lobster, which is a lot weirder looking than a “true” lobster. Rock lobsters lack claws and have llong antennae and legs that make them resemble big alien bugs. And they’re caught off the coast of the B-52s’ origin state of Georgia, out in deeper waters. No reports of a rock lobster ever grabbing a beach partier, though. It’s been over 40 years since ‘Rock Lobster’ upended punk and New Wave and kickstarted an entire region of American indie music as part of the deal. Crowds go wild for it at the band’s stillfrequent live shows, more so than even ‘Love Shack’, their hit that had the benefit of coming out during the peak years of MTV. That’s a lot of work for a song often thought of as a novelty hit. Which means it was novel, but not a novelty at all.
