29 September 1995
There were a few mid-’90s number ones from jeans commercials which, instead of classic rock and possibly as a flex of Big Trousers’ marketing muscle, used new tracks by new artists. Trouble was, the snippets used in the ads were often unrepresentative of the whole track: the thundering rock riff of Stiltskin’s ‘Inside’, not a number one in Ireland but a chart-topper in the UK, mis-sold the dreary, subdued song attached to it. In a chart-year’s time we’ll see the most egregious of these at number one.
No such breach of the Consumer Protection Act with Shaggy’s ‘Boombastic’: his “mister lover lover” and “mister boombastic” in the ad are really all you get in the song too. The perfunctory verses have some suspiciously flimsy toasting: call me cynical but, rather than from any searing lyrical insight, I suspect he is the cheese and you are the peas purely for the expediency of rhyme. Shaggy’s previous appearance here with ‘Oh Carolina’ at least had the substance of style: a cover of a solid dancehall classic with some personality added. What’s really going on in ‘Boombastic’ is that once again the mainstream record industry is serving up music of Black origin in an infantile and cartoonish form as mere bantz-fodder for white audiences. The ad this came from was a clay animation, featuring a white man as the Mister Lover Lover saving a white damsel in distress, so there was at least one office-ful of people who may have thought this way.
