All Apologies Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The story of Nevermind, Nirvana’s genre-defining breakthrough, is a familiar one. Less well known is the saga of Billboard’s Modern Rock chart—and how college-rock staples of the 1980s like R.E.M. and The Cure gave way to heavier, more commercially dominant groups of the ‘90s like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and The Smashing Pumpkins. What sparked the grungification of the charts? How did Modern Rock become the new Top 40? And how did the Seattle sound pave the way for post-grunge bands like Sublime, Third Eye Blind, and even Creed? Join Chris Molanphy as he explores alternative rock’s evolution from the cutting edge to the middle of the road. Podcast production by Olivia Briley and Kevin Bendis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to hit parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.
0:19.9	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic,
0:23.1	and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last episode, we walked through
0:29.5	the birth of alternative rock and the start of the grunge era, from the breakthroughs of
0:35.8	Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam, to the explosion
0:40.5	by Nirvana that turned grunge into mainstream rock. We are now in 1994. Nirvana frontman
0:48.9	Kurt Cobain has passed into the afterlife, and a wave of post-grunge is about to take over Billboard's
0:57.6	modern rock chart and the radio, as Alt Rock becomes America's parallel universe top 40.
1:08.3	Even before Kurt Cobain passed, alternative rock was diversifying and getting quirkier.
1:15.6	Some modern rock chart-toppers that showed how far alternative nation had expanded included
1:23.4	blind melons, sweet, jam-band-esque Reverie, No Rain,
1:28.8	whose video starring The Bee Girl made the song a smash,
1:34.0	top 20 on the Hot 100, and number one at Modern Rock in late 1993.
1:41.3	And I don't understand why I sleep all day, and I start to complain that there's no
1:51.4	a game.
1:53.0	Beck's impossible to categorize, loser, an accidental generational anthem, whose lyrics were packed with injokes and touches of folk,
2:04.9	Americana, grunge, and hip-hop.
2:07.9	It topped the modern rock chart near the start of 1994 and even went pop, cracking the top 10 on the Hot 100.
2:29.1	So I don't get it. went pop, cracking the top 10 on the Hot 100. And perhaps, quirkiest of all, the Canadian band Crash Test Dummies,
2:35.6	fronted by bass baritone vocalist Brad Roberts.
2:40.0	Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm, their ballad containing weird stories of misunderstood children
2:46.9	was an improbable blockbuster.
	...

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