Hit Parade: This Ain’t No Party?! Edition Part 2

Slate Culture

Slate Podcasts

Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

HEY! HO! LET’S GO!! Is this chant: (a) a movement of disaffected hipsters, (b) walkup music for a baseball player, or (c) a really catchy bop? How about all of the above? The legendary New York nightclub CBGB was the birthplace of punk. But it was also the future of pop: the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie. To varying degrees, these acts either became hitmakers, tried to reshape their music for the charts, or influenced generations of future multiplatinum stars. Honestly? Their music was pretty infectious from the jump, even if it was too advanced for the ’70s hit parade. The music we called punk contained multitudes: the improvisatory jazz-rock of Television. The demented anthems of the Ramones. The quirky funk of Talking Heads. The stylistic eclecticism of Blondie—who scored four No. 1 hits in four different genres. Join Chris Molanphy on a journey back to New York’s dirty days to try to answer: When did CBGB punk morph into chart pop? Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about
0:18.0	the hits from Coast to Coast.
0:19.9	I'm Chris Mulanvie, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why is this song number
0:25.2	one series on our last episode.
0:28.6	We talked about how the New York City Nightclub CBGB became the birthplace of punk in the
0:36.4	1970s, and what a wide range of sounds fell under that term.
0:42.6	From the pure punk of the remones to the free verse of Paddy Smith, the quirky funk rock
0:49.0	of talking heads to the genre-hopping blondie.
0:53.3	We are now at the start of the 1980s, when several of these bands are trying to figure
0:59.9	out how much they can stretch the definition of punk and score some actual pop chart hits.
1:08.4	In early 1980, blondie pulled one last single from their 1979 Eat to the Beat LP.
1:17.8	Although it barely scraped the top 40 in America, peaking at number 39, in the UK, this single,
1:26.0	Atomic, was a smash, spending a fortnight at number one.
1:41.4	What was most important about Atomic was how it pointed a way forward for blondie in the
1:48.3	New Wave era.
1:50.2	It had elements of surf rock and even a cowboy-like twang, but it wasn't retro.
1:57.8	It was danceable, but it wasn't disco the way heart of glass was.
2:03.3	Fundamentally, it was a rock song.
2:06.8	A credibly commercial blondie sound.
2:21.0	Around the same time, blondie's Debbie Harry was invited to contribute to the soundtrack
2:27.2	of director Paul Schrader's 1980 Richard Geer neo-noir film American Jigalo.
2:35.0	The man in charge of the film's score was Italian producer composer Georgio Moroder,
	...

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