Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - A Little Love and Some Tenderness Edition Part 2
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the most improbable blockbuster successes of the ’90s was Hootie and the Blowfish: a South Carolina bar band fronted by a Black lead singer that played jangly alt-pop. That singer, Darius Rucker, built a career that’s one of a kind. Rucker’s tastes growing up were eclectic, as were the influences on his young bandmates. Their Cracked Rear View album took a year to catch on, but then it dominated the charts.
The story gets more interesting after Hootie fell off: Darius Rucker’s career is a prime example of how chart success is a product of musical trend. First, Rucker tried to become a neo-soul star. Then he tried his hand at country music, even though Nashville had not produced a major Black solo star since Charley Pride.
Join Chris Molanphy as he traces this improbable journey—the role Rucker’s band played in mainstreaming alt-rock, Rucker’s effort to find a genre to call home, and how he finally became a chart-conqueror again..
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:11.7 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from |
| 0:19.4 | coast to coast. |
| 0:20.7 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate Magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, |
| 0:23.1 | pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series. On our last episode, |
| 0:29.3 | we talked about the South Carolina band Hootie and the Blowfish and their exceptional lead |
| 0:36.4 | singer Darius Rucker. His potent baritone was key to the |
| 0:41.7 | band's sound, and their arrival as the top-selling band of 1995, at a moment when Alternative Rock |
| 0:50.7 | was turning into jangly pop. After selling more than 12 million copies of their |
| 0:57.3 | debut album, Cracked Rear View, Hootie now had the awesome challenge of following it up. |
| 1:06.4 | Just how big were Hootie and the Blowfish in the closing months of 1995? |
| 1:12.6 | How about a whole episode of the top new sitcom on television revolving around them? |
| 1:19.6 | The thing was we were going to go see Hooty and the Blowfish. |
| 1:22.6 | Houdi and the... I can catch them on the radio. |
| 1:26.6 | In its second season, NBC's Friends, already one of the three biggest shows on TV, |
| 1:35.1 | devoted large stretches of the plot of The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant, |
| 1:42.0 | to three of the friends yearning to see Hootie in concert and what |
| 1:48.0 | happened when they went backstage. |
| 1:54.1 | That was amazing. You guys want to meet the group? |
| 2:00.4 | Yeah, we know. Come on. Is that to meet the group? Yeah, we do. |
| 2:01.6 | Come on. |
| 2:02.6 | Is that a hickie? |
... |
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