I was living in Hong Kong when Cosmic Thing was released on these shores, June 27, 1989, to be exact. I bought a lot of CDs there (and laserdiscs, if anyone still remembers those), but lacked guidance. Britpop was the local flavor of the former Crown Colony’s few critics, and reviews weren’t easy to access from abroad back then, as U.S. magazines like Rolling Stone took two months to cross the Pacific and cost a pretty penny to obtain. I had an undisciplined collection. Thanks to my friends I caught the XTC bug, hard; that was the foundation of my taste for my expat years. Left to my own devices, though, I floundered. Did I really buy Aretha Franklin’s Through the Storm? Yes.

So I was untutored in Cosmic Thing. The B-52’s I knew from “Rock Lobster,” which, if you were of a certain age, you drank warm beer to, then maybe broke out with feebly spasmodic, avant-garde-ish “dance” moves at college as it went on. I didn’t hear the rapture that greeted their fifth album’s release, as I sifted through unsold piles of Millie Jackson’s Back to the Shit and Pia Zadora’s Pia Z. at the maze-like CD and knockoff computer emporium near my office. (Nor, for that matter, did I hear the noise surrounding that month’s Hollywood blockbuster, Batman. It didn’t open in Hong Kong till Chinese New Year, eight months later. But of course I bought the Prince songtrack right away—you know, the one the guys in Shaun of the Dead throw at a zombie to pierce its skull, after rejecting other, better Prince albums as projectiles.) (more…)