Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Rolling in God’s Royal Uptown Road Edition.
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2019
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All decades of pop music swing between trends and fads—but the 2010s was swingier than most. From the maximalist EDM of the early ’10s to the downbeat hip-hop of the late ’10s, the pop pendulum oscillated more widely than you may remember. The same decade that gave us Adele’s stately balladry, Katy Perry’s electro-froth and Taylor Swift’s country-to-pop crossover also gave us the Weeknd’s bleary indie-R&B and Drake’s moody rap. And Bieber—so. Much. Bieber.
With just weeks to go before the end of 2019, Hit Parade walks through the last decade of the Hot 100, year by year, and asks: What was that? Arguably, what drove pop in the ’10s wasn’t just the production sounds of dance music or hip-hop but the technologies we used to consume music, as the shift from downloads to streams changed the contours of chart success. And in the end, one multigenre queen navigated these shifts better than most, finding pop love in a hopeless place.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:06.0 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:13.9 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series. |
| 0:21.2 | On today's show, the end of 2019 is just weeks away, |
| 0:27.0 | which means the end of another decade we don't quite know what to call. |
| 0:32.1 | The teens, the tens, I'm going with the tens. |
| 0:36.9 | No matter what you call it it or where you reside along the |
| 0:40.7 | cultural, political, or musical divide, I think we can all agree. This has been a pretty |
| 0:47.1 | fluky decade, particularly on the pop charts. |
| 1:02.6 | In movies, the tens will be remembered, for better and worse, as the decade of the Marvel cinematic universe. On television, we will remember the tens as a golden age of peak TV, |
| 1:09.5 | from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones. |
| 1:13.0 | But music? |
| 1:14.8 | Will this decade of popular song be remembered for anything at all? |
| 1:23.2 | Some of this confusion is due to the difficulty we critics have summarizing an art form as ever-evolving as popular music, |
| 1:33.0 | which has always moved through phases faster than movies or TV. |
| 1:38.0 | And some of it is just the typical declineist narrative we see at the end of any decade. |
| 1:46.7 | The idea that the period we just experienced was the worst ever. |
| 1:49.4 | It's like the every other decade period, you know? |
| 1:51.9 | The 50s were boring. |
| 1:53.5 | The 60s rocked. |
| 1:55.6 | The 70s. |
| 1:56.4 | Oh, my God. |
... |
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