For the past five years or so, Brooklyn-based rich kids hipsters and indie rockers are two sides of the same coin, or at least that’s the public perception or cultural…
Brian Boone
126 Articles
Brian Boone writes about music, pop culture, and other nonsense. He does more of this kind of thing on Twitter and wrote this swell book called "‪Rock Lists For Obsessive Music Connoisseurs, Zealots, and Junkies‬," which you totally want.
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Brian Boone
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You can be a T man, or an A man. You can’t be both, Sir Mix-A-Lot.
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Brian Boone
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“Holiday Road” was the theme song of National Lampoon’s Vacation, an insanely popular movie, the kind of ’80s comedy classic that gets run on cable and local stations with a…
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Brian Boone
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OMD’s dark electronic sounds were right in step with New Order and Depeche Mode, and yet “Electricity” couldn’t find an audience on either side of the pond over three releases.
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Brian Boone
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Fred Schneider of the B-52’s followed up the success of ”Love Shack” with a re-release of a 1984 solo album featuring the synth pop treasure ”Monster.” Despite the band’s newfound cultural relevance, the song was too weird or too dated to hit big.
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Brian Boone
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The sad tale of one more Canadian rock classic unjustly ignored in America.
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Brian Boone
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Certain songs are so well-known that we assume they were hits, but their popularity is actually retroactive. “I Want Candy,” by Bow Wow Wow, for example, is a definitive ’80s…
Brian Boone
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When pop stars turn 40, the palm flower crystal embedded in their hand turns black, indicating its time for them to go away forever. By and large, there’s little market…
Brian Boone
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In 1994, after more than 30 years largely intact and as one of the world’s best, most famous, popular, and hardworking bands, the Rolling Stones experienced a major shift. That…
Brian Boone
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Under its actual, original, Spanish-language title of “Asereje,” “The Ketchup Song” is one of the biggest pop hits everywhere in the world except America ever. It’s like the soccer of…
Brian Boone
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Despite the cool, vaguely exotic euro-discoy name, Meco was really a kind of nerdy dude from Pennsylvania (real name: Domenico Monardo). As such, Meco loved only two things in life:…
Brian Boone
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Grunge rock came out of the punk tradition, sidestepping the decade and a half of corporate rock that came in between punk’s prime of 1977 and grunge’s rise in 1991….
Brian Boone
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MTV started airing 20-year-old reruns of The Monkees in 1986, a perfect fit for the fledgling network—quick cuts, youth culture, wild and crazy attitude—such were the things MTV aimed to…
Brian Boone
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In one of the strangest and blandest fads of all time, Aussiemania hit hard in the 1980s. In that super-conservative decade, Australians were suddenly seen as exotic, but not too…
Brian Boone
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In 1992-93, while you were listening to Soundgarden, Spin Doctors, and SWV and wearing your clothes backwards like a damn fool, the guy absolutely dominating the music industry in terms…
Brian Boone
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Back in the 1990s, there were these things called non-sequel movies, and the people that made these movies promoted them with youth-marketed soundtrack albums, shiny round objects containing primarily filler…
Brian Boone
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I haven’t seen that much of True Blood, mainly because I am an adult male. Looking past the screaming camp, broad stereotypes, fetishized gore, and staggeringly terrible acting of Anna…
Brian Boone
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Certain musical acts come along that are so original, so different, so forward leaning that their arrival brings irrevocable change to the fabric of pop music…even if chart placements and…
Brian Boone
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Rap shifted out of the gangsta and East Coast/West Coast stuff in about 2000 and into a more rounded world where different styles had a shot at the mainstream. Outkast,…
Brian Boone
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Not that it’s a bad thing at all, but Graham Parker sounds almost exactly like Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, the Jam, and Marshall Crenshaw. Parker had been toiling…
Brian Boone
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“We” is a personal introduction by the Roches, about the Roches, from their first album, The Roches. After saying that they don’t give out their ages or their phone numbers,…
Brian Boone
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Before 2000, OutKast wasn’t known much outside of the rap world, as it was a southern-fried, alien-obsessed duo successfully reconciling gangsta swagga and innovative weirdness. Two breakthrough hits in 2001…
Brian Boone
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Every music movement or sea change has that one person that influenced the thing in the first place, but never quite got to cash in when the people were finally…
Brian Boone
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In the post-Nirvana, post-grunge rock landscape, dominance by a new genre was totally up for grabs. Would it be power pop, a la Matthew Sweet? Lite grunge, or “mallternative”? Britpop? Mallternative…
Brian Boone
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In the spring of 1995, I had a brief but odd obsession with The Brady Bunch Movie. It’s probably because it collided my first pop culture object of whimsy with…
Brian Boone
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In failing to make this a hit song, the Revolting Cocks (or RevCo, if you like) could have done two things better. 1) They should have released this song about…
Brian Boone
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Michael Jackson died in June 2009, and with that, the Michael Jackson Memorial Celebration began, an outpouring of grief not matched in magnitude or lengthiness since Lincoln’s corpse toured the…
Brian Boone
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It used to be that all Madonna songs were hits. It was just the way things were. From 1984 until 1995, she’d had more than 30 consecutive top 40 hits….
Brian Boone
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A look at songs that aren’t necessarily good or bad, merely ones that, because of the climate of the music world during their release, somehow, someway, were not the massive…
Brian Boone
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This column usually presents semi-obscure or forgotten songs that should have been hits. ”Walking on Thin Ice” is different, because if you’re the kind of person with an obsessive enough…