Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The White and Nerdy Edition
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2020
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sped-up voices. Wacky instruments. Songs about cavemen, bathtubs, bikinis and mothers-in-law. From the very birth of rock-and-roll, novelty songs were essential elements of the hit parade. Right through the ’70s—the age of streaking, CB radios, disco and King Tut—novelty songs could be chart-topping hits. But by the corporate ’80s, it was harder for goofballs to score round-the-clock hits on regimented radio playlists.
Until one perm-headed, mustachioed, accordion-playing parodist who called himself “Weird” rebooted novelty hits for the new millennium. A video jokester before YouTube, he just might have ushered in the age of the meme. So join Hit Parade this month as we walk through the history of novelty hits on the charts—most especially if M.C. Escher is your favorite M.C.
Podcast production by Justin D. Wright.
Follow @cmolanphy on Twitter
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:08.8 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from |
| 0:15.0 | coast to coast. |
| 0:16.3 | I'm Chris Malanfitt, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 0:21.5 | One series? On today's show, last month in our December 2019 episode of hip parade, I talked |
| 0:29.9 | about the improbable smash that was sitting on top of Billboard's Hot 100, Mariah Carey's |
| 0:35.4 | holiday classic, All I Want for Christmas is You. The first Christmas song to top Billboard's Hot 100. Mariah Carey's holiday classic, All I Want for Christmas is You. The first |
| 0:39.3 | Christmas song to top Billboard's Hot 100 in 61 years. That compelled us to play you the prior |
| 0:46.8 | Christmas song to hit number one, which reached the top all the way back in 1958. |
| 1:05.1 | As I noted, David Seville's The Chipmunk Song is less a Christmas song than a novelty record. |
| 1:15.7 | It was still on the Hot 100 for weeks into 1959, long after the holidays were over. And in a way, this wasn't surprising, because in the early rock era, novelty records were chart dominators. This was the golden |
| 1:27.1 | era for goofy hits, a time when comical records would not only make the Hot 100 regularly, but quite frequently top the chart. |
| 1:38.8 | A time when live comics and veterans stand-ups won Grammys, |
| 1:50.1 | sold piles of albums, and even got on the radio. |
| 1:54.7 | Hello mutter, hello fodder. |
| 1:58.3 | And while the so-called golden age of novelty songs was the 1950s and 60s, |
| 2:04.6 | right through the 70s, novelty and comedy songs did serious chart business. |
| 2:14.6 | The thing about novelty records, though, what distinguishes them from Christmas songs, |
| 2:22.7 | is they are a hard way to sustain a career. Sure, some novelty hits are holiday-related, |
| 2:29.9 | which does make them perennials. |
| 2:36.9 | But most of the which does make them perennials. Now the monster man, the monster match, and it's a graveyard smash. |
| 2:43.0 | But most novelty hits, by their very nature, are flashes in the pan, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.