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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

Melanphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?

On our last episode, we talked about the distinctive but parallel careers of R&B vocal

legends, Patty LaBelle, Dionne Warwick, and Roberta Flack,

how they continually made songs theirs and redefined the boundaries for black female artists.

Their boundary pushing helped soften the ground for a fourth R&B queen, Shaka Khan, to emerge as the star of the funk rock band

Rufus and a chart topper in her own right. We're now up to the late 70s when the moves these

ladies made would set up their careers for some big 80s breakthroughs.

Here was the thing about disco, a music at which black, gay, and especially female artists excelled.

It absolutely made the careers of legends like Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer.

It's not the way it should be in heaven. summer. But it was also sink or swim for a

new

who predated disco. Some adapted well, like, for example, Diana Ross, whose hits in this

era were intermittent, but were, by and large, classics. And on the other hand, sweet love you, sweet love, sweet love, sweet.

And, on the other hand, some legends, like the Queen of Soul herself, really face-planted

in this period.

Aretha Franklin's 1979, La Diva, her attempt at an all-disco album,

was eviscerated by critics

and, more important,

her lowest charting album

of the 60s, 70s,

...