The White and Nerdy Edition Part 1

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sped-up voices. Wacky instruments. Songs about cavemen, bathtubs, bikinis and mothers-in-law. From the very birth of rock-and-roll, novelty songs were essential elements of the hit parade. Right through the ’70s—the age of streaking, CB radios, disco and King Tut—novelty songs could be chart-topping hits. But by the corporate ’80s, it was harder for goofballs to score round-the-clock hits on regimented radio playlists. Until one perm-headed, mustachioed, accordion-playing parodist who called himself “Weird” rebooted novelty hits for the new millennium. A video jokester before YouTube, he just might have ushered in the age of the meme. So join Hit Parade this month as we walk through the history of novelty hits on the charts—most especially if M.C. Escher is your favorite M.C. Podcast production by Justin D. Wright and Kevin Bendis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.2	Hello, Hit Parade listeners. It's Chris. The month of August means we at Hit Parade are taking
0:37.3	our much-deserved annual break.
0:39.7	We'll be back with a brand-new episode in September.
0:43.2	But, in the meantime, we're bringing you an encore episode from the Hit Parade Archives.
0:48.8	This show, on the chart history of novelty hits, was originally released in January 2020. We're bringing it back
0:58.2	in 2025 because I was inspired by this year's tour by comedy genius and national treasure, Weird Al Yankovic.
1:07.9	I caught Al at Madison Square Garden in July, and it was a delight.
1:13.2	What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast
1:18.9	feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear every episode all at once the day it drops?
1:25.3	Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's
1:30.8	acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com slash hit parade plus. You'll get to hear
1:38.7	every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus, hit parade The Bridge, our bonus episodes,
1:46.8	with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again,
1:52.9	to join, that's slate.com slash hit parade plus. Thanks. And now, please enjoy part one of this Encore Hit Parade episode.
2:09.3	Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from
2:15.5	coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Milanfitt, chart analyst, pop critic,
2:19.7	and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On today's show, in our December
	...

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