Feet on the Ground, Reaching for the Stars Edition Part 2
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 100th episode of Hit Parade has put host Chris Molanphy in a reflective mood. So in Part 2, he unfurls the story of the late, great American Top 40 host Casey Kasem—a perennial inspiration for this podcast and the chart king that Chris calls “the original poptimist.”
Enjoy this long-distance dedication, as Chris pays tribute to a radio hero with a preternatural understanding of the power of pop to unify.
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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. |
| 0:23.5 | I'm Chris Mulanphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 0:28.7 | One series on our last episode. We celebrated the 100th episode of Hit Parade by telling my story, |
| 0:37.4 | how I became a chart nerd, all the songs I heard |
| 0:41.0 | counted down on the radio, and how reading Billboard informed my music fandom. |
| 0:46.1 | For part two of this special Century episode of HP, I'm going to tell the story of one of my |
| 0:53.1 | radio heroes and a perennial inspiration for this podcast, |
| 0:58.4 | the late, great American Top 40 host, Casey Kasem. Back in 2014, when Casey Kasem passed away, |
| 1:07.9 | I wrote a tribute slash eulogy about him for Slate, and I tried to capture what made him so |
| 1:15.3 | special to chart lovers like me. Quote, if the top 40 is our sport, Casey Kasem was our Howard |
| 1:23.0 | Kosell and Bob Costas rolled into one, like Kose, intoning about the thrill of victory or the agony |
| 1:31.2 | of defeat, Kaysim could make a pithy epigram for how the charts work sound momentous. And, |
| 1:38.2 | like Costas, he seemed eternally unflappable, his voice rock-steady and unmistakable. |
| 1:45.2 | Hello again and welcome to American Top 40. My name's Casey Kasem and I'm all set to |
| 1:50.5 | countdown the most popular songs in the USA. These are the records you're buying and radio |
| 1:55.1 | stations are playing all over America. And how do I know? Because Billboard magazine says |
| 1:59.8 | so. |
| 2:00.8 | I even called Kasem the original pop-tomist, who believed that a full range of popular music |
| 2:07.1 | can be as important and worthy of appreciation as rock. A bit grand? Perhaps, but for us |
| 2:15.2 | chart nerds, he really was a totemic figure. |
| 2:18.9 | Let me make one more analogy to another famed broadcaster, |
| 2:23.6 | the late Jeopardy TV host Alex Trebek. |
... |
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