Culture Gabfest Presents: Hit Parade, The Great War Against the Single Edition

Slate Culture

Slate Podcasts

Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2017

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ever since the ’60s, the recording industry emphasized the album over the single. By the ’80s, they were milking as many hits as possible from an album to convince you to buy it—from Thriller to Hysteria. But in the ’90s, labels changed tactics and tried to kill retail singles—promoting hits to radio that you could only buy on full-length albums. Why? They wanted consumers to shell out for more profitable CDs. As a result, musicians ranging from MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, to Pearl Jam and Alanis Morissette, to Chumbawamba and Lou Bega became multiplatinum-selling artists. The industry’s ploy paid off, but it also created consumer resentment as people grew tired of paying nearly $20 to acquire one song. Here’s the story of how the recording industry toyed with consumers and chart fans, and how the internet struck back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate and Panoply, about the hits from
0:07.9	Coast to Coast.
0:08.9	I'm Chris Malanfe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series.
0:15.0	We're back from our late summer hiatus with an extra long episode.
0:20.0	And for the first time, hit Parade finally has its own feed.
0:25.0	Thanks to the many of you who asked us for a way to subscribe directly to our humble podcast.
0:30.0	It's now available both on the Slate Culture Gabfest Feed, where it has been from the start, and on our new hit parade feed.
0:39.0	Please do subscribe on your
0:42.8	friends and read and review us on Apple Podcasts and now as the late Casey Kacam used to say on with the countdown
0:54.0	on today's show, the history of hip-hop dates to the 1970s,
0:59.0	and rap began to emerge as a recorded medium at the turn of the 1980s, but it took another decade
1:05.8	for hip-hop to generate its first diamond-level pop blockbuster.
1:10.5	It happened in 1990, with this absurdly catchy recording.
1:15.4	You can't touch this.
1:16.7	You can't touch this.
1:20.3	You can't touch this. That obviously is you can't touch this. The first ever pop crossover hit for
1:28.5	Oakland California rapper MC Hammer. Underpinned by a very prominent sample of the 1981
1:35.0	Rick James R&B hit Super Freak, you can't touch this entered the jock jam and
1:40.9	party starter Pantheon virtually the instant it arrived in the spring of 1990.
1:47.3	It was schlockey, conceited, and undeniable.
1:50.9	Peaking on the charts in June, it was regarded by many as the song of the summer.
1:56.0	Except, you wouldn't necessarily have guessed that by looking at Billboard's Hot 100 at the time.
	...

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