Words are inadequate

<3

In case you're a) not kidding and b) curious: The Velvet Underground are the band about which Brian Eno said "they only sold about 5000 copies of their first record, but everyone who bought one went on to start their own band." Sort of the epitome of "commercial failure but highly influential." Lou Reed, lead vocalist and songwriter for the Velvets, went on to some amount of fame and radio play; you've probably heard his "Walk on the Wild Side".

The band started out as a collaboration between Reed and John Cale, a classically-trained Welsh violist who moved to New York in the early sixties and got involved in some deeply experimental music with the intellectual heirs of John "4'33" Cage. The band got more or less adopted by Andy Warhol and became his house band. Reed fired Warhol as their producer/manager after their first album, and then fired Cale after their second.

There's no particular reason you should have heard of John Cale. He went on to produce a bunch of rock albums and record a bunch of his own, but never really had any kind of mainstream success.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a graffiti artist and later painter in NYC in the eighties; died of a heroin overdose shortly after Warhol's death. There was a movie about him, which, again, is probably not actually good but which had a disproportionate impact on young Tucker.

"What's a Velvet Underground?" he said.
"You wouldn't like it," said Crowley.
"Oh," said the angel dismissively. "Be-bop."
"Do you know, Aziraphale, that probably if a million human beings were asked to describe modern music, they wouldn't use the term 'bebop'?'" said Crowley.
--Good Omens, Gaiman & Pratchett