Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Point of No Return Part 2
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2022
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
After the so-called-but-not-really “death” of disco, dance music in the 1980s moved to its own beat. There was synthpop, electro, hi-NRG and house. But the scrappy genre that seemed to pull it all together was called freestyle—a breakbeat-tempo, Latin-flavored genre fortified with dizzying, proudly synthetic beats. Freestyle grew out of the clubs and streets of New York and Miami and briefly dominated ’80s dance-pop.
Freestyle’s flagship artists were only medium-level stars: Shannon. Exposé. Lisa Lisa. Stevie B. Nu Shooz. Sweet Sensation. But these acts—most especially their yearning, floridly romantic, rhythmically hectic songs—punched above their weight on the charts and even affected the hits of superstars from Madonna to Duran Duran, Whitney Houston to Pet Shop Boys.
Join Chris Molanphy as he defines the byways of this bespoke dance genre and traces how it bridged the disco era into the hiphop era.
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. |
| 0:19.0 | Welcome back to Hit 3, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:27.6 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:34.0 | On our last episode, we broke down the history of post-disco dance music and the rise |
| 0:41.0 | of freestyle, a hybrid genre that blended rap-style breakbeats, hectic synthesizers, and florid |
| 0:49.1 | lyrics about romantic longing. By 1987, the music had gotten big enough that Billboard magazine created a so-called |
| 0:58.4 | crossover chart to capture the mix of dance, R&B, and pop, commanding significant portions of the |
| 1:06.2 | radio dial. Freestyle was the main ingredient in this new chart, but Freestyle was about to start |
| 1:13.7 | topping the big chart, The Hot 100, too. |
| 1:27.3 | Lisa Lisa and Culta |
| 1:29.3 | had already tasted mainstream pop success back in late 1986. |
| 1:36.8 | The third single from their self-titled debut album was a heartbroken piano ballad called |
| 1:43.4 | All Cried Out. |
| 1:45.8 | Producers, Full Force, amped up the song's melodrama |
| 1:50.0 | by turning it into a female-male duet between Lisa Lisa and Full Force members Paul Anthony |
| 1:58.7 | and Lucian Bow-Legged, George. All cried out, finally broke |
| 2:05.1 | Lisa Lisa into the top ten, peaking at number eight. |
| 2:09.5 | In and of itself, a dance act In and of itself, a dance act recording a ballad wasn't that unusual. |
| 2:26.3 | Dating to the disco era, acts like Rose Royce and Casey and the Sunshine Band had issued ballads as a tempo change-up, and of course, |
| 2:38.7 | as I noted earlier, so did Madonna in 1985 with Crazy for You. But all cried out bore little |
| 2:48.6 | resemblance to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's freestyle arrangements. |
| 2:54.4 | Other than some booming sin drums, the song was just a traditional pop ballad. |
... |
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