The Boys Are Back In Town

Submission 27,968

About

"The Boys Are Back In Town" is a classic rock song by the Irish rock band Thin Lizzy off their 1976 album, Jailbreak.^[1] The song is extremely popular and well-received, having made Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and Q Magazine's list of best guitar tracks. It gained traction as a meme when its title lyric was placed over popular Advice Animals and image macros, and later it resurged as an ironic reference on Weird Twitter.

Origin

The single was released on April 17th, 1976 and reached number 12, number 8, and number 1 on the US, UK, and Irish charts, respectively. Initially it was not going to appear on Jailbreak, but management convinced the band it would be a hit.^[2]

Spread

In Pop Culture

The song has been used in commercials for Wrangler jeans and extensively covered. A cover by the band Everclear appeared on the soundtrack for the 2001 film A Knight's Tale. The song was referenced in the 2010 episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, "Dennis Gets Divorced," (shown below) and has been referenced in other episodes of the show.

An episode of The Powerpuff Girls featuring the title characters male counterparts, The Rowdyruff Boys, took the song's title as its name.^[3] Other notable television series to use the song include Entourage, Cougartown, Gladiators, and more.^[4] It was also used to introduce Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan to the stage at the 2012 Republican National Convention to the displeasure of the family of Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott.

Online Use

"The Boys Are Back In Town" first saw use in memes as captions to Advice Animals like Brace Yourself (below, left), Matrix Morpheus (below, center), Success Kid (below, right), and many more.

A single-serving Twitter account, @intownagain,^[9] devoted to posting lyrics from "The Boys Are Back In Town" joined Twitter in September 2009. On March 23rd, 2015, Vice^[5] published an article titled "I Played 'The Boys Are Back in Town' on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out," in which the writer does what the title implies, which set the precedent for an ironic resurgence of references on Weird Twitter. On November 29th, 2015, Dril ^[6] published a tweet that referenced "The Boys are Back In Town" (shown below).

About a week later, Tumblr user Bromurra^[7] posted a text post that read:

Good end: the boys are back in town
Bad End: the boys are not back in town
True End: the boys never left town. the town they were looking for was inside of them all along

The post was reblogged by Meme Archives on February 9th, 2016, and has gained over 5,900 notes as of October 4th, 2016. In the following months, "The Boys Are Back In Town" would become a popular reference on Weird Twitter, causing one user, @SocMalpractice,^[8] to tweet a scenario where he describes Twitter to his mother as "it's a website where we disagree about everything except that referencing 'the boys are back in town' is funny."