Songfacts®:

• This song is about a fictional radio station which is "all static, all day." It's an upbeat song, but the message is serious: mass media glosses over important news by blanketing our consciousness with distraction. And this was before the Internet!
• This was the first single released from the Cosmic Thing album. "Love Shack" was the most obvious hit, but "Channel Z" was more in line with their previous material, which did very well on college radio and among fans of New Wave.
  
  "Channel Z" got very little mainstream airplay and was relegated to the Buzz Bin on MTV, but it topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart and sent a signal to their fans that the B-52s were back - their future was uncertain following the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson in 1985. When "Love Shack" was released as the next single, it became a huge pop hit, earning the group a legion of new fans.
• Fred Schneider's lines deal mainly with degradation of the environment, a topic dear to him. He warns of ozone holes, waste dumps and toxic fog.
• Don Was produced this track. He and Nile Rodgers each produced about half of the album.
• By the late 1980s, the B-52s had moved away from their early purely party-themed material such as "Rock Lobster" and " Party Out Of Bounds" toward more politically and socially aware commentary with songs like "Channel Z."
  
  "In interviews we'd always talk about politics; I mean, I'm not gonna talk clothing and hair in interviews," Fred Schneider reflected to Uncut magazine. "I could talk about music all day, but I'll rather talk about what was going on. But they thought of the B-52s as mindless camp, and it's like, 'What are you talking about? You don't even know what camp means. It's not us.'"