Carly Simon’s song from Working Girl was the first Oscar-winning song in a decade not to be a smash hit, and also it was by the iconic Carly Simon. What gives?
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56 Articles
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
Beavis and Butt-head had their cultural moment in 1993. All of 1993. Their cartoon was the #1 show on MTV (even after they couldn’t say “fire” anymore because some kid…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
This is one of those songs that wasn’t a hit that I’m surprised wasn’t a hit. Even today, you hear it all the time, predominantly in commercials for things like…
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Brian Boone
2 Min Read
Being influenced by and being extremely similar to are two different things, separated by a thin line. The biggest musical success of the last few years has been Lady Gaga….
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
When duos split up, there’s usually only one breakout star who goes on to any semblance of a successful solo career, with the public casting its vote with its dollars…
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Brian Boone
2 Min Read
In 1996, after a decade and a half of high but rapidly diminishing record sales and influence, Van Halen was suddenly a hot band again, and it was because of,…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
Peter Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks” is the most indie rock indie rock song of all time. They’ve got all the checklist items covered: odd band name, maudlin lyrics about…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
The Beatles are kind of always in the not-distant background, as they are the goddamn Beatles. But every five years or so, there’s a major resurgence in Beatles interest, popularity,…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
The Slits’ cover of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” should have been that one song from the weird, still-breaking genre of punk that got some radio play and introduced…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
An unlikely song hit #1 on the U.S. in 1962: “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. It’s the only song in Japanese to top the charts in America, and that’s especially surprising…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
Daft Punk is a household name for music nerds now, and all the kids on the playground wear helmets and robot suits and speak French. Their sophomore album Discovery was…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
“Friday” is the Song of the Year for 2011. Over the course of about two weeks, this thing went from pseudo-professional amateur project to hipster YouTube sensation to cultural phenomenon…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
Teen rock acts bridged the teen pop and Avril Lavigne eras. Despite a large corporate push, all-girl Canadian band Lillix failed to catch on.
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
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…
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
The sad tale of one more Canadian rock classic unjustly ignored in America.
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Brian Boone
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
2 Min Read
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
1 Min Read
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
2 Min Read
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…
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