Little Richard would prop one leg up on the piano and bang chords with his foot. Jerry Lee Lewis would stand on the piano and stomp the keys. Pete Townshend would smash his guitar to bits. Jimi Hendrix would play guitar behind his head and pretend to have sex with it and then light it on fire. James Brown would pretend to faint then miraculously revive himself. Michael Jackson moonwalked. David Lee Roth did the splits in the air. Freddie Mercury wielded the top half of a microphone stand. Prince would flip the microphone stand up off the stage with his feet, in heels. Elton John wore sequined tuxedos. Deadmau5 wore a giant foam mouse head. Matty Healy ate raw meat. Ozzy Osbourne ate a bat. GG Allin ate his own shit. Benson Boone does backflips.
To be a real showman takes charisma, magnetism, or what they used to call moxie in this business. I’d say it’s a lost art, except the art of the showman is the lingua franca of the online generation. Scroll down any social media feed far enough and witness the new Vaudevillian theatre, an endless line of people auditioning just for you, stealing your attention through some feat, stunt, bit, dance, or trick. Here is the family of oafs who rates Costco food, a cringe dad and his sons who learn all the TikTok dances, the crew who goes dødsing off a dam, the jock trick shot brothers, the DJ on four decks spamming hot cues, the 12-year-old guitarist, the six-year-old drummer, the baby with a noise side project, the guy who walks around New York making songs on a mobile production rig, or the guy who is one of only a few people in the world who learned to do a standing double backflip.
This makes the classic showman—much less the utterly jejune single-backflipping showman—rather conventional. And still, Boone has boinged himself into the global consciousness through his enormous 2024 hit “Beautiful Things.” I’m not one to argue in bad faith, so let me just say that Boone is not just regular talented but rather talented. More talented than me, that’s for sure. I can’t backflip; I can’t sing like he can; I’ve never dropped out of two separate institutions—Brigham Young University and American Idol—to pursue my childhood dream of being a pop star. To admire Boone is like drunkenly admiring an Olympian, in that you’re like, I could probably do this, but you almost certainly cannot.
It’s also important to note that Boone has the drop on us critics here. He’s aware that, following his show-stopping Grammys performance earlier this year, he might be pegged as a one-trick pony forever trying to top the two-billion streaming hit that brought him here. The music video for the lively “Mr Electric Blue,” a dim highlight from his mercifully brief second album, American Heart, begins with a sketch of Boone being summoned into the office of his slimy agent, played by his real-life producer and songwriting partner, Jack LaFrantz. Boone is, indeed, wearing a shirt that says “One Hit Wonder.”
“We need something new,” the agent says, weary of all the backflipping. “We need a new gimmick. Maybe good songwriting!” At this, Boone drops his head, looks him square in the eye and says: “You know I can’t do that.”
Ahh goddammit that’s pretty funny. Fair play, Boone! You got me! Unfortunately, I know a lot about good songwriting. So here we are at this stalemate where I have to break one of the chief rules of criticism: faulting an artist for not doing something they didn’t attempt—in this case, faulting Boone for not writing good songs. While I consider that, luckily, there are myriad other issues to address with American Heart, starting with its cover, which looks like the movie poster for Zack Snyder’s lost Bruce Springsteen biopic. For a guy who told Rolling Stone he doesn’t “want to rely on my physical form to be the primary driver of my shows,” it’s interesting that he’s here on the cover, abs chiseled from marble, seemingly having just rescued the American flag from a big fire at the symbolism factory.
Looking at the cover art and title, you’d think maybe one idea about America—good or bad—might factor into American Heart in some way, especially because Boone referenced Springsteen as a touchpoint for this album. But these songs are American insofar as they do not evoke a specific time or place and have nothing really to say, so they are just hegemonically American by default. It’s not even cloying in the way that Beyoncé waving a flag on her album feels a little cloying, or Post Malone carpetbagging into country music feels a little cloying. When Boone sings on the title track—a song about a near-death experience in a car crash when he was a teenager—repeatedly about his “American heart,” there’s none of the ironic distance of “Born in the U.S.A.” or even the national pride of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Boone is just a 22-year-old from Monroe, Washington, and, thus, American, who has a heart.
I’m not going into Boone’s album looking for the next Bob Dylan, though there is a song here called “Man in Me,” which bears no relation to the Dylan song of the same name, because this is the song where Boone sings, “You really made me bleed blood on these ivory keys,” a line in desperate need of some workshopping. If anything, Boone struggles to sound like anyone other than Harry Styles, a more charismatic showman from across the pond whose preexistence calls into question the whole Benson Boone project in the first place. Both singers trade in this kind of fake-retro Los Angeles pop-rock sound, which is a commercialization of the indie psychedelic-soul backbeat Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker minted about a decade ago. I wonder if Parker is haunted by the bouncy bassline of Boone’s “Mystical Magical,” not unlike how J. Robert Oppenheimer is haunted by his actions.
Most of Boone’s album makes me appreciate the relatively cool and confident pop music of his peers. Each song on American Heart is just an empty lunchbox with a few crumbs left by his betters. His “I Wanna Be the One You Call” is a swipe at Styles’ “As It Was,” only performed by someone dripping with flop sweat. At least the Sabrina Carpenter experience comes with a legible persona and bawdy wit—Boone’s attempt at a poolside summer jam with “Mystical Magical” feels best suited to middle school sleepovers.
Instead of a musical or narrative point of view, Boone relies on speaking his truth, a songwriting axiom that doesn’t take into account whether someone’s truth is fundamentally boring or has been rendered in pop music countless times before. So you get Boone, clearly someone cramming a big personality into a tight-fitting jumpsuit, singing mawkish tunes about how much he loves his mom and admires his dad.
Boone’s music is an invasive species in the garden of good taste, but it’s important to understand that it is a thriving, native species in the world of Netflix’s Love Is Blind. The reality dating show, where conventionally attractive sales and marketing people try to fall in love with each other sight unseen, famously uses the kind of anonymous schlock pop that sync houses sell to the show for pennies on the dollar. Yes, there are several songs here that sound like Kirkland-brand Killers songs, but it’s Boone’s music that thrives in the common, normal world where love is banality, cliches, and the performance of how one ought to show love on a massively popular reality dating show. It’s a step removed from the genuine article: music for people who like how music sounds, but not for people who like music.
So I don’t fault the wholesome pop star son of Mormon parents for not writing songs about the rot at the heart of America, or for not biting the heads off bats on stage. But it’s really hard to consider a teetotaling showman with a voice straight out of The Voice and not think: What makes any of this actually special? Sure, he can sing, but there’s very little flair, camp, sass, or insouciance to his voice to give it dimension and character. Boone’s words come out in one impressively earnest register, like his forefather Ed Sheeran, and the long line of buskers before him. There’s nothing here that says Boone is ready to enter the pantheon of the real showmen, no more than the thousands of other guys singing, dancing, and backflipping for you on Instagram Reels.
