Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - A Deal with the TV God Part 1
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
For decades, British alt-pop goddess Kate Bush had never had a Top 10 hit in America. Now, in 2022, she finds herself in the Hot 100’s Top Five—and television got her there. Her classic “Running Up That Hill” is featured prominently in the latest season of Netflix’s hit ’80s horror fantasy show Stranger Things.
This puts Bush in a long lineage of hits spawned or made bigger by TV, dating all the way back to Davy Crockett and Peter Gunn, through Hawaii Five-O and Happy Days, and peaking in the ’80s with Miami Vice and Family Ties.
Join host Chris Molanphy as he walks through more than six decades of hits from the so-called boob tube and reveals why—thanks to our streaming age—Kate Bush’s hit might be the biggest TV tune of all.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening AdFree on Amazon Music. |
| 0:04.3 | Hey there, hit parade listeners. |
| 0:07.0 | What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. |
| 0:11.2 | Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. |
| 0:15.1 | Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? |
| 0:19.3 | Sign up for Slate Plus. |
| 0:20.8 | It supports not only this show, |
| 0:23.3 | but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com slash hitparade plus. |
| 0:30.9 | You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus hit parade |
| 0:37.1 | the bridge are bonus episodes, with guest |
| 0:40.5 | interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and Popchart Trivia. Once again, to join |
| 0:47.2 | that's slate.com slash hitparade plus. Thanks. And now, please enjoy part one of this Hit Parade episode. |
| 1:05.3 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 1:13.6 | I'm Chris Malanphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 1:18.6 | One series? On today's show, 37 years ago, in the summer of 1985, British art rock goddess, |
| 1:31.0 | Kate Bush, issued the first single from what would become her best-selling studio album, Hounds of Love. The song, a cross between an intimate |
| 1:38.2 | meditation and a thunderous anthem, was called Running Up That Hill. |
| 1:53.4 | In a career that had already generated a string of hit singles and albums in her U.K. homeland since the late 70s, Bush had, as of 85, yet to score a major pop hit in America. |
| 2:01.9 | This song, whose full title was, |
| 2:05.0 | Running Up That Hill, parentheses, a Deal with God, |
| 2:09.6 | would finally change that. |
| 2:11.9 | By the fall of that year, |
... |
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