Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Twerking and Chatrouletting Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History,

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2018

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even before the launch of MTV, the music video has been making pop songs buzzworthy. And since the early ’80s, it has transformed also-rans into hitmakers—from the Buggles and Duran Duran to Peter Gabriel and a‑ha. But until the early 2010s, watching a video didn’t count on the Billboard charts. That all changed thanks to YouTube—and the biggest immediate beneficiary from the addition of video to the charts was a rising pop star, incubated on the Disney Channel, but looking to change her image. Miley Cyrus was born into hitmaking, line-dancing, multimedia royalty, and she used video titillation—and even the social site Chatroulette—to top the charts. But what did all that provocation mean for…y’know, the music? And how is video still making hits—including the song that’s No. 1 this very week in 2018? Chris Molanphy explains it all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening Ad Free on Amazon Music.
0:03.8	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.
0:14.5	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?
0:20.5	Hot night, wind was blowing. Where you think you're going, baby? pop critic and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?
0:42.2	On today's show, five years ago, in the late winter of 2013, Billboard made a pivotal change in how it formulates its charts.
0:53.1	They added YouTube data to the Hot 100, more than seven years after the launch of the online video service, and more than 30 years after the launch of MTV.
0:59.6	For the first time in its history, the flagship U.S. pop chart would count not only the songs Americans bought or heard on the radio, but the ones in their favorite music videos.
1:06.3	In MTV's heyday, video rotations on the music channel never counted toward the Hot 100,
1:12.7	but now playing a music video on YouTube, or the YouTube-affiliated all-music channel Vivo,
1:19.7	could help power a song up the charts.
1:22.7	As you can imagine, this meant that, more than ever, a hit record could be fueled by all sorts of things
1:28.9	besides the music. From explicit visuals, to songs that accompanied comical clips,
1:39.1	or even viral news.
1:52.3	But arguably, within the first year of the new YouTube-fueled Hot 100,
1:59.1	no artist benefited more from the new rules than a young Disney Channel incubated pop star looking to grow up her image in a hurry, Miley Cyrus.
2:28.4	Cyrus was popular music royalty and a former Disney Channel star who used visual imagery and viral video to reinvent herself.
2:36.6	Video play got her breakthrough adult pop hit, We Can't Stop, all the way to number two on Billboard's Hot 100.
2:53.8	And an even more eye-popping video got her all the way to the top of the chart. The week So hard in love All I want you was to break your walls.
2:56.5	All you ever did was wreck me.
2:59.4	Yeah, you, you wreck me.
3:02.9	I'm going to you.
3:05.5	That the operatic torch ballad, Recking Ball,
	...

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