Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Rock ’n Soul, Part 1
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2022
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
Daryl Hall and John Oates: Their songs were earworms, their videos cheap and goofy. John Oates’s mustache and Daryl Hall’s mullet are relics of their time. And…for about five years, their crazy streak on the pop charts was comparable to Elvis, the Beatles and the Bee Gees.
They were also more cutting-edge than you may realize, essentially inventing their own form of cross-racial new wave after spending the ’70s trying everything: rock, R&B, folk, funk, even disco. At their Imperial peak in the early ’80s, Hall and Oates commanded the pop, soul and dance charts while still getting played on rock stations. And decades later, when the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ignored them, it was Black artists—rappers and soul fans—who pushed them in.
Join Chris Molanphy for a dissection of the Philly duo who invented “rock ’n soul” and made their dreams come true.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.3 | Hey there, hit parade listeners. |
| 0:05.9 | What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. |
| 0:09.8 | Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. |
| 0:13.8 | Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? |
| 0:17.8 | Sign up for Slate Plus. |
| 0:19.5 | You can try it for a month for just one dollar, and it supports |
| 0:23.6 | not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com |
| 0:31.0 | slash hit parade plus. You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus, hit parade the bridge, |
| 0:40.0 | our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart |
| 0:46.2 | trivia. Once again, to join, that's slate.com slash hit parade plus. Thanks, and now, please |
| 0:54.0 | enjoy part one of this hit parade episode. |
| 1:01.7 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 1:14.1 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 1:19.3 | One series on today's show. 40 years ago this week, in January of 1982, America had a new number one song. Built out of a cutting-edge |
| 1:31.8 | digital rhythm track, it sounded both frigid and fiery with icy, fluttery keyboards and a sizzling |
| 1:39.8 | baseline. It was chilled out, but club-ready, a perfect pop song to liven the dead of winter. |
| 1:51.6 | The same week it topped Billboard's Hot 100 pop chart, the song also rose to number one on Billboard's hot soul singles chart, which was pretty remarkable, |
| 2:04.2 | because at a time when the R&B chart was at a peak of bespoke blackness, commanded by the likes |
| 2:11.6 | of the Gap Band, Teddy Pendergrass, and Cool in the Gang, the two men who performed this number one R&B hit were white. |
| 2:20.3 | With the song, I can't Go for that. |
| 2:36.4 | Darrell Hall and John Oates had, after a decade of recording together, finally achieved a dream. |
... |
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