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Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.

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 started the celebration

of hit parade's fifth birthday

with a recap of some core principles

of our show

and a spin through some of your

favorite artists

and musical factoids.

Now, it's time for the moment of truth,

the official countdown

of your favorite episodes.

A few words about our survey.

We are not Billboard magazine, or Nielsen, or MRC, or Luminate, or any of the other data collectors throughout chart history.

Our tally was not all that rigorous. Some of you gave us a solid top five episodes list,

exactly what we asked for. Some provided, generously, a top ten, more than we asked for.

Many of you forced yourself to limit your lists to just five episodes, but then you included a handful of

honorable mentions. I like to think of these as the bubbling under votes of our survey.

Kind of like that Gary Newman hit after Cars in 1980 that bubbled under the Hot 100 at number 105.

Basically, when it came to the voting, we counted it all.

I played with the math to accommodate everything and every one. We were more interested in including every vote you gave us somehow than limiting voters to a strict top five. If you only

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