Insert Lyrics Here Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If an instrumental tops the charts, it’s probably an earworm: “Tequila.” “Wipeout.” “Dueling Banjos.” “The Hustle.” “Feels So Good.” “Chariots of Fire.” “Axel F.” You can probably whistle or hum several of those from memory. But do you remember the artists? All were one-hit wonders. By and large, instrumental hits throughout chart history were flukes. But there were exceptions: a trumpet player from Los Angeles who pretended to be Latin, made up a fake mariachi band, put sexy models on his album covers and topped the charts almost as much as the Beatles. Or, a try-hard, perm-headed soprano saxophone player from Seattle, who turned holding his breath while playing dizzying runs of notes into an athletic feat. How do songs without words become hits? Why were Herb Alpert and Kenny G so good at it? Why did instrumentals fall off the charts after the ’80s—and who is bringing them back? (Hint: think oontz-oontz-oontz.) Join Chris Molanphy as he throws away the lyric sheet and explains how a catchy melody can be worth a thousand words. Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, hit parade listeners. Before we start the show, I want to let you know about
0:06.7	a story coming up a little later. It's from one of our partners, SAP. Is your business
0:14.0	reaching an exciting turning point? Are you ready to seize the moment for growth? When
0:19.3	you're facing uncertainty, SAP can help you be ready for anything that happens next.
0:25.7	To learn more, head to SAP.com slash be ready, and stick around to hear how Ember Technologies
0:34.4	seized the moment.
0:52.6	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about
0:58.5	the hits from Coast to Coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slates
1:04.3	Why Is This Song No. 1 series on our last episode. We walked through the history of the
1:10.7	instrumental through the early years of the rock era, from syrupy orchestras and fierce
1:17.4	electric guitarists to herb-alpert and disco grooves. We're now moving into the 80s when
1:24.7	the instrumental is diminishing as a pop force, and yet one smooth instrumentalist is going
1:32.3	to outsell every player who came before him. Though disco fell off commercially at the
1:40.6	start of the 1980s, it continued to produce random hits, including the bizarre vocal medley
1:48.7	of Beatles' covers by Dutch Group The Stars on 45 that we talked about in our Without
1:55.7	The Beatles episode of Hit Parade. Stars on 45 is obviously not an instrumental. However,
2:14.3	as we discussed in that episode, the Stars on 45's unexpected rise to No. 1 in 1981 prompted
2:22.9	a roughly 18-month medley craze that saw a range of random acts compiling familiar tunes
2:31.3	into a danceable mashup. Among the most successful, improbably, was London's Royal Philharmonic
2:49.3	Orchestra, who smashed together snippets of such well-known classical pieces as Flight
2:55.7	of the Bumblebee, Rhapsody and Blue, and the Marriage of Figaro, on top of a relentless
3:02.6	Stars on 45 like Clap Beat. The RPOs hooked on classics reached No. 10 on the Hot 100 in early 1982.
	...

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