Pop Thruster is the home of obscenely ambitious projects like the best 1,000 albums ever, ranking every Key & Peele sketch, and coverage of TV, movies, and music with weirdly obsessive passion.
In short:
Pop Thruster is an indie pop culture shop built around absurdly ambitious projects, pop culture-meets-memoir, and coverage borne from decades of marinating in the pop cultural stew.
Why bother checking out yet another rando pop culture website, you ask?
Because you get stuff here you won’t find anywhere else. From the best 100 TV shows ever to why Carlito’s Way is a Mount Rushmore New York City movie to the best albums from 1982 (that’ll blow out your Walkman headphones), Pop Thruster goes deeper, harder, and weirder on pop culture than anywhere else in the digital galacticals.
Pop Thruster is less rando, more Marlon Brando is what we’re saying here.
Or something. We’ll workshop it.
The best 1,000 albums ever project
If you want to understand what “weirdly obsessive passion” means, start with the best 1,000 albums ever project, which represents a five-year journey to tell my life story through the prism of 1,000 articles – one for each album that shaped me.
It’s the culmination of a lifetime of being obsessed with music and pop culture, and of trying to catalog the world around me (often without realizing I was doing it).
If you love stories, rabbit holes, and discovering music you’ll connect with for life, this project is for you.
Here are a few good spots to dive into the project:
#1: Nirvana – Nevermind
My musical origin myth: all roads and doorways lead here.
#13: A Tribe Called Quest – Midnight Marauders
A jazz and hip-hop drenched love letter to NYC.
#65: Being Dead – Eels
Reignited my belief in 2020s new music, making me geek out with the giddiness.
And maybe the craziest thing of all is that now that the best 1,000 albums ever is complete, Pop Thruster is only getting started. Afterburners fired up, ready to roar through the digital ecosystems.
The publisher
I’m Eric Berlin, a terminally online writer and pop culture nerd from Long Island, now living in Seattle with my wife and our dog, Jack.
I produce digital products across media and tech by day, and Pop Thruster is where I get to unleash the madcap projects that take over my brain. The five-year effort to compile and publish the best 1,000 albums ever is but one example.
There’s lots more Pop Thruster coming.
No paywall. No corporate publishing overlords. This is independent media nerding out hardcore on TV, movies, and music, and we invite you to join us.
Let me know what you think
We want to hear from you: eric-AT-popthruster-DOT-com.
If you’re an editor/journalist and want a press blurb or images, you are also wildly welcome to get in touch.