Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - I’d Like to Teach the World to Buy Edition Part 2
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2024
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
That damned jingle! In that infernal commercial trying to sell you cars, sneakers, soda, gum! Can’t get it out of your head? Well, what if we made it longer, had a famous singer perform it, and put it on the radio? How would you like it then?
A surprising number of hits across chart history got their start in advertisements: the Carpenters song that was originally a promo for a California bank. The ’70s country-pop smash by a character who didn’t exist, and was selling you sliced bread. The Sting song that began as a Japanese beer jingle. The Chris Brown song that sneaked a chewing-gum slogan into the chorus.
And that’s beyond all the songs and artists whose trajectories were changed by an ad placement—whether it was the R&B classics licensed to sell you Levi’s jeans or the indie-rock songs anointed by Apple to make iPod-wearing silhouettes bop.
Join Chris Molanphy as he explains how Madison Avenue finds its way into the Hot 100’s penthouse. We may think we don’t want the hard sell—but an army of Don Drapers are working day and night to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Adobe Express makes it quick and easy to create everything I need for my business. |
| 0:05.0 | From social posts, TikToks and flyers, all in just a few clicks. |
| 0:09.0 | Get Adobe Express for free. |
| 0:11.0 | Search for Adobe Express to find out more. Welcome back to hit parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:36.9 | I'm Chris Melanthe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's wise About the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, |
| 0:39.1 | pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last episode, |
| 0:45.3 | we talked about the history of advertising and the charts, how certain songs went from |
| 0:51.8 | jingles to full-length radio hits, from Coca-Cola's I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, |
| 0:58.5 | to a bread commercial that led to C.W. McCall's novelty hit Convoy, to Miclow Beer Ads that |
| 1:06.6 | generated 80s hits for Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. |
| 1:11.2 | We are now approaching the 21st century, and while the media is debating the ethics of rock |
| 1:18.4 | veterans selling out to Madison Avenue, a jeans company, and later a computer company, |
| 1:25.3 | are about to supercharge how catchy ads can boost pop star careers. |
| 1:32.6 | One of the most interesting experiments in music forward advertising happened on the other side of the Atlantic. |
| 1:41.3 | Starting in the late 80s, Levi's Jeans began producing ads in England that licensed prominent pop |
| 1:49.8 | songs. |
| 1:50.7 | At first, the campaign leaned on old rock and R&B songs. |
| 1:56.5 | Don't know much about history. |
| 2:00.0 | Don't know much biology. Don't know much biology. |
| 2:04.2 | Don't know much about a science book. |
| 2:07.1 | Levi's kicked off the series with an ad featuring a cover of the Sam Cook classic Wonderful World, |
| 2:15.3 | playing over footage of a hunky, shirtless male model, |
... |
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