The B-52s

Released last year, Live! 8-24-1979 is definitive proof that whichever parallel-reality America the B-52s swooped in from is clearly the superior one. Eisenhower-era cheese — beehive haridos, tiki and hot-rod cutlure, etc. — was reappropriated and weaponized by punks who watched at least as many beach-party movies as biker-gang flicks (“Rock Lobster”) and shook their moneymakers doing the “Aqua Velva” and the “Hypocrite” (“Dance This Mess Around”). There, the disco vs. punk dichotomy must be nonexistent: Gay icon Fred Schneider gamely offering to “kiss your pineapple” on the dancefloor deserves the same kind of guitar squawl Roger Daltry growling “I hope I die before I get old” once merited (“Strobe Light”). Between their self-titled debut and 2008’s comeback Funplex, the B-52s have given us four decades of alternate American history with which to embellish and improve our own. See it onstage while you still can, before they fly their positivity-powered convertible back to “Mesopotamia,” “Planet Claire,” “Hallucinating Pluto” or whatever it is they call the kitsch-kissed wonderland that loaned them to us.