Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - What a Fool Believes Edition

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music History,, Music

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2020

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Like many media organizations at the moment, Slate is getting hit pretty hard by what's going on with the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to continue doing our work, providing you with all our great podcasts, news and reporting, and we simply cannot do that without your support. So we're asking you to sign up for Slate Plus, our membership program. It's just $35 for the first year, and it goes a long way to supporting us in this crucial moment.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, a scene and a sound cropped up on the West Coast: polished, perfectionist studio musicians who generated sleek, jazzy, R&B-flavored music. About a quarter-century later, this sound was given a name: Yacht Rock. The inventors of the genre name weren’t thinking about boats…well, unless the song was Christopher Cross’s “Sailing.” Yacht Rock was meant to signify deluxe, yuppified, “smooth” music suitable for playing on luxury nautical craft.

Whatever you call it, this music really did command the charts at the turn of the ’80s: from Steely Dan to George Benson, Michael McDonald to Kenny Loggins, Toto to…Michael Jackson?! Believe it: even Thriller is partially a Yacht Rock album. This month, Hit Parade breaks down what Yacht Rock was and how it took over the charts four decades ago—from the perfectionism of “Peg,” to the bounce of “What a Fool Believes,” to the epic smoothness of “Africa.”

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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 a preview of our latest episode.
0:10.0	As we announced recently, Slate, like many media organizations, has been hit hard by the
0:16.9	economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
0:23.7	We need your help to continue producing this show and all the other work we do at Slate. So we're asking you to sign up for Slate Plus,
0:31.6	our membership program. It's just $35 for the first year, and it will go a long way toward supporting us at this crucial moment.
0:41.4	Sign up at slate.com slash hit parade plus, and you'll get to hear this and every episode of
0:49.2	Hit Parade in full. That's slate.com slash hit parade plus. Thanks. And now your episode preview.
0:58.6	This podcast contains explicit language. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from
1:19.5	coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's
1:25.2	Why is this song Number One series?
1:35.2	On today's show, 40 years ago, at the 1980 Grammy Awards, the night's big winners,
1:42.7	taking home four gramophones, were a band originally formed 10 years earlier in San Jose,
1:47.7	California, that had transformed themselves into pop stars.
1:53.6	Their name, Doobie Brothers, was taken from the slang word for marijuana.
2:00.9	But by 1980, their music sounded more like a chilled rosé.
2:25.0	That week in late February 1980 that the Dubies swept the Grammys billboards hot 100 was awash in similarly sleek jazzy ultra smooth music from duby's friend Kenny Loggins
2:30.8	you think that maybe it's over only if you want Kenny Loggins. To the equally smooth band of session players Toto. 99 I've been waiting
2:54.4	so smooth band of session players toto to the debut of a new easy listening singer-songwriter Christopher
3:04.1	cross and i've got such a long way to go to make it to the boat Christopher Cross.
3:23.2	All of this music by white performers on the charts owed something to the sound of contemporary black music.
	...

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