Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - These Are the Good Times, Part 1
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
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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.
How can you tell disco didn’t really die at the start of the 1980s? Because half of ’80s pop owed its sound to one of disco’s most seminal acts. Chic—cofounded by guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards—would be legendary if all they’d done was record the’70s disco smashes “Le Freak,” “I Want Your Love” and “Good Times.” Indeed, the “Good Times” bassline spawned a slew of copycats, from “Rapper’s Delight” to “Another One Bites the Dust” to “Rapture.”
As if that wasn’t enough, over the next decade, the Chic masterminds became the secret sauce for a range of cutting-edge pop acts, producing and writing for everyone from Diana Ross and David Bowie to Madonna, Duran Duran and the B-52’s. Nile Rodgers even scored a hit in the 2010s with a pair of French robots who “got lucky” with another take on the Chic groove.
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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. |
| 0:05.9 | What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. |
| 0:10.1 | Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. |
| 0:14.0 | Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? |
| 0:18.9 | Sign up for Slate Plus. It's just $35 for the first year, and it supports |
| 0:25.0 | not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com |
| 0:33.2 | slash hit parade plus. You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. |
| 0:40.5 | 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 hitade plus. Thanks. And now, please enjoy part one of this |
| 0:59.2 | hit parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from |
| 1:14.2 | coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's |
| 1:19.3 | Why Is This Song Number One series? On today's show, 42 years ago this month, in January |
| 1:26.6 | 1979, there was unrest in Iran, gas prices reaching new highs, both U.S. unemployment and interest rates spiking. |
| 1:37.6 | And the number one song in America sounded like a hedonistic party that would never end. |
| 1:43.3 | Free go! sounded like a hedonistic party that would never end. |
| 1:57.0 | At first, this appears to be an instructional disco record, with lines like, |
| 1:59.6 | Have you heard about the new dance craze? |
| 2:02.1 | Allow us, we'll show you the way. |
| 2:05.4 | And find your spot out on the floor. |
| 2:09.7 | It invites you to freak out, and even name checks storied New York nightclub Studio 54. |
| 2:13.2 | But this hit, Le Freak by Sheik, |
... |
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