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Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from

Coast to Coast.

I'm Chris Malanfi, Chart Analysts pop critic, and writer of Slates Why Is This Song Number One series?

On today's show, The End of 2019 is just weeks away, which means the end of another decade we don't quite

know what to call. The teens, the tens, I'm going with the tens. No matter what you call it or where you reside along the

cultural, political, or musical divide, I think we can all agree. This has been a pretty flukee decade, particularly on the pop charts.

In movies, the TENS will be remembered, for better and worse, as the decade of the Marvel Cinematic

universe.

On television, we will remember the T as a golden age of Peak TV, from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones.

But music?

Will this decade of popular song be remembered for anything at all?

Some of this confusion is due to the difficulty we critics have summarizing an art form as ever evolving as popular music, which has always moved through phases faster than movies or TV. And some of it is just the typical

declinist narrative we see at the end of any decade, the idea that the period we just experienced was the worst ever.

It's like the every other decade theory, you know?

The 50s were boring.

The 60s rocked.

...