Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Say My Name, Say My Name, Part 1

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🗓️ 18 June 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Let’s be clear: Rap has always been musical. But back in the day, rappers generally, well, rapped: talked in cadence over a beat. Fans judged MCs primarily by their rhymes and rhythms, not their melodies.

Now? Rappers are mostly singers: MCs from Drake to DaBaby slip seamlessly in and out of melody. Some hits that appear on Billboard’s Rap charts feature literally no rapping. When did this change?

In this episode of Hit Parade, Chris Molanphy walks through the history of hip-hop—from Gil Scott-Heron to Lil Nas X—to trace the evolving role of melody in rap’s conquest of the charts. The broadening of rap to include more female MCs, from Queen Latifah to Lauryn Hill, had a lot to do with it. But all roads lead through rap-and-B’s power couple, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. The pivot point may have been when Queen Bey realized she could sing with triple-time flow like the baddest MC.

Podcast production by Asha Saluja.

Hit Parade episodes are now split into two parts, released two weeks apart. For the full episode right now, sign up for Slate Plus and you'll also get The Bridge, our Trivia show and bonus deep dive. Click here for more info.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:03.4	Hey there, hit parade listeners.
0:06.1	What you're about to hear is part one of this episode.
0:10.3	Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month.
0:14.7	Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops?
0:19.1	Sign up for Slate Plus. You can try it for a month for just
0:23.6	$1, and it supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts.
0:31.3	Just go to slate.com slash hit parade plus. You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives,
0:40.1	plus hit parade the bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our
0:46.8	episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again, to join, that's slate.com slash hitparade plus. Thanks. And now, please enjoy part one of this
0:59.1	hit parade episode. This episode contains explicit language.
1:20.4	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.
1:28.5	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is this song number one series on today's show.
1:37.7	31 years ago, in June of 1990, the clown prince of hip-hop, Biz Marquis, was spending his 22nd and final week on the Hot 100 with his one and only pop hit, Just a Friend, a song in which Biz serves as his own
1:47.9	featured act, delivering both the wrapped verse and a sung chorus, one that millions of people
1:55.5	are still drunkenly singing along with to this day.
1:59.0	But you say he's just a friend. So I took Blah Blah's work for it to this day.
2:28.4	Just a Friend was a number 9 pop number 37 R&B single, the only Hot 100 hit or major R&B hit of any kind for The Biz, making him a one-hit wonder.
2:37.7	But 12 years after Biz Marquis one hit, teen singer Mario Barrett, who went by the mononym Mario,
2:41.6	brought Just a Friend back to both charts.
2:55.8	Except in Mario's version, titled Just a Friend 2002, he was singing everything, a completely different verse with an all-new tale of unrequited love, and a chorus nearly identical to
3:03.0	Bismarquies, but far less comical.
	...

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