Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Insert Lyrics Here Edition Part 2

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🗓️ 29 September 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

If an instrumental tops the charts, it’s probably an earworm: “Tequila.” “Wipeout.” “Dueling Banjos.” “The Hustle.” “Feels So Good.” “Chariots of Fire.” “Axel F.” You can probably whistle or hum several of those from memory. But do you remember the artists? All were one-hit wonders. By and large, instrumental hits throughout chart history were flukes.

But there were exceptions: a trumpet player from Los Angeles who pretended to be Latin, made up a fake mariachi band, put sexy models on his album covers and topped the charts almost as much as the Beatles. Or, a try-hard, perm-headed soprano saxophone player from Seattle, who turned holding his breath while playing dizzying runs of notes into an athletic feat.

How do songs without words become hits? Why were Herb Alpert and Kenny G so good at it? Why did instrumentals fall off the charts after the ’80s—and who is bringing them back? (Hint: think oontz-oontz-oontz.) Join Chris Molanphy as he throws away the lyric sheet and explains how a catchy melody can be worth a thousand words.

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.
0:14.6	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.
0:22.9	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number
0:28.0	One series? On our last episode, we walked through the history of the instrumental through the
0:34.7	early years of the rock era, from syrupy orchestras and fierce electric
0:40.3	guitarists to Herb Alpert and disco grooves. We're now moving into the 80s when the instrumental is
0:48.6	diminishing as a pop force, and yet one smooth instrumentalist is going to outsell every player who came before him.
0:59.7	Though disco fell off commercially at the start of the 1980s, it continued to produce random hits,
1:08.0	including the bizarre vocal medley of Beatles covers by Dutch group
1:13.4	The Stars on 45 that we talked about in our Without the Beatles episode of hit parade.
1:22.6	He's a real nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land. Stars on 45 is obviously not an episode, the stars on 45's
1:32.3	is obviously not an instrumental. However, as we discussed in that episode, the Stars
1:39.4	on 45's unexpected rise to number one in 1981 prompted a roughly 18-month medley craze that saw a range of random acts compiling familiar tunes into a danceable mashup.
1:56.0	Music Among the most successful, Improbably, was London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,
2:12.2	who smashed together snippets of such well-known classical pieces as Flight of the Bumblebee, Rhapsody
2:20.0	in Blue, and the Marriage of Figaro, on top of a relentless Stars on 45-like clap beat.
2:28.7	The RPO's Hooked-on Classics reached number 10 on the Hot 100 in early 1982.
2:46.2	Hooked on Classics had more to do with a fleeting fad than anything to do with the instrumental
2:53.3	as an enduring pop form. For the first half of the 80s, the surest route to instrumental chart
3:01.0	success continued to be TV and the movies. TV theme song King Mike Post, for example, who had already gone top 10
3:11.9	in 1975 with his theme to The Rockford Files, returned to the top 10 in 1981 with his piano-centric
3:21.9	theme to Hill Street Blues.
	...

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