Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Smells Like Christmas Spirit, Part 2
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4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hit Parade is back for non-Slate Plus listeners! Upcoming episodes will be 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 into our subjects. slate.com/hitparadeplus.
In Part 2 of this episode of Hit Parade, we continue the story of how Nirvana’s Nevermind ousted Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the Billboard album chart, Chris Molanphy examines the chart dynamics that not only ushered in the grunge era but also invented a new music sales strategy, the post-Christmas album, and how that trend has been shaped and changed by the rise of rap, and the surprise album drop.
Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:07.2 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits |
| 0:14.1 | from coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's |
| 0:19.6 | Why Is This Song Number One series? |
| 0:22.1 | On our last episode, I explained the concept of the data lag on the charts, |
| 0:28.6 | how the gap between when Billboard collects data and the date on its charts means your |
| 0:34.5 | birthday song might not be your real life birthday song. |
| 0:38.6 | And that's an important concept to understand what happened in December 1991 and January |
| 0:45.0 | 1992 when Nirvana took on Michael Jackson in a now legendary battle on the Billboard album chart. |
| 0:53.4 | Music now legendary battle on the Billboard album chart. In November 1991, just before Thanksgiving, pop superstar Michael Jackson emerged with his first new album of the 90s, |
| 1:14.2 | the follow-up to his 1987 blockbuster, Bad. |
| 1:18.3 | The new disc was called Dangerous, and it was greeted with a level of hype more akin to the Olympics than a pop album. |
| 1:27.1 | Jackson's label, Epic, insisted the media refer to him for the first time ever as the |
| 1:34.2 | king of pop, and most journalists and fans dutifully obliged. |
| 1:40.3 | And the whole dangerous campaign kicked off two weeks before the album drop with the first single, |
| 1:47.3 | and one very expensive video. |
| 1:50.8 | So get on up. |
| 1:51.7 | Here it is the world premiere of Michael Jackson, Black or White. |
| 1:58.0 | Black or White wasn't just a video. It was an event. In America, it premiered simultaneously on MTV, VH1, BET, and Fox, as well as the BBC's Top of the Pops in the UK. |
| 2:14.5 | The global audience for black or white across 27 countries was estimated at 500 million |
| 2:21.5 | viewers. The clip featured cameos by McCauley Culkin, George Went from NBC's Cheers, and |
| 2:28.6 | supermodel Tyra Banks in a face-swapping CGI sequence featuring the then-novel technology called Morphing. |
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