Hit Parade: The Deadbeat Club Edition, Part One
b'The B-52\\u2019s and R.E.M. don\\u2019t sound all that much like each other. One group were avatars of kitsch, fusing punk, girl-group and garage rock\\u2014even Yoko Ono\\u2014into a retro-nuevo style all their own. The other group were mysterious, elliptical, often indecipherable, but they reinvented jangly guitar and classic-rock influences to make a new kind of New Wave. Together, this pair of distinctive bands helped make Athens, Georgia the epicenter of alternative cool in the \\u201980s and \\u201990s. In part one of this two-part episode of Hit Parade, we present the story of how the B-52\\u2019s and R.E.M. created a scene out of a college town\\u2014and became the most prominent queer-friendly, gender-fluid bands of their era.\\xa0\\nEmail: hitparade@slate.com\\xa0\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'