Hit Parade | Material Girl in an Imperial World Edition Part 2

Slate Culture

Slate Podcasts

Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 1980s, the English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys dominated the U.K. pop charts and staged an invasion of the American charts. Years later, founding member Neil Tennant dubbed this streak of creative and commercial supremacy the group’s “imperial phase”—a term that eventually caught on among music critics and pop fans. So, what does it take for an artist to achieve imperial dominance? Why might Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s or The Weeknd in the 2010s qualify, while Cher or Lizzo don’t quite fit the bill? Are there rules for imperial phases? Hit Parade’s Chris Molanphy says yes—he’s got chart rules for determining when an artist is at peak imperiality. And he says Madonna’s late ’80s streak of hits might be the ultimate imperial phase. Join Chris as he dissects the most regal artists across the decades, defining what makes them imperial—and he walks hit by hit through Madonna’s biggest phase, which may remain unmatched. Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:22.0	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.
1:31.0	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series on our last episode. We broke down the concept of the Imperial Phase, a 21st century name for a phenomenon that dates back to the beginning of popular music fandom.
1:43.0	It describes the moment when an artist seems to have
1:46.4	the secret of pop, and can score a hit with seemingly anything. I offered 10 chart rules for how
1:55.7	you can identify an imperial phase, from streaks of number one or top ten hits to improbable hits,
2:05.0	to how the phase ends. Having broken down the concept, I'm now going to walk through one of my
2:12.0	favorite imperial phases, an unprecedented, mayberepeatable chart streak by Madonna.
2:21.4	This is not the first hit parade episode to focus on the chart history of the woman-born
2:28.7	Madonna Louise Chaconne in 1958 in Bay City, Michigan. Seven years ago, in our Veronica Electronica edition of
2:40.5	Hit Parade, we dove deep on Madonna's 90s music, particularly her pivot to what was then called
2:49.1	Electronica, culminating in her triumphant 1998 album, Ray of Light.
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