
For Hit Parade’s 100th episode, Chris reflects on the nature of chart fandom—and salutes the countdown king.
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Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. Part Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at once? The day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com hit parade+ you'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus Hit Parade the Bridge, our bonus episodes with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia once again to join, that's slate.com hit parade plus thanks and now please enjoy part one of this hit Parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number one? Series on today's show. Speaking of why is this song number one? This is the current number one song in America, the country song choose in Texas by Ella Langley. I just wrote about this for my Slate series a couple of weeks ago and I'm playing it not just because it's an excellent song. But as a reminder that we still get some great chart topping hits Today, even in 2026,
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it doesn't take a crystal ball to see a cowboy always finds a way to leave Drinking jack all by my In Texas I can tell
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the charts have always been our focus on hit parade. Over 100 episodes and nine years, this podcast has covered a lot of artists, genres, producers, pop trends and weird chart phenomena. From songs of the summer to holiday perennials, legacy hits to one hit wonders. But one thing we haven't explored in depth is chart fandom itself. What makes a person want to track these rankings? Why do we care about what or who is number one? The best way I can explain it is to share with you pieces of my story. How the charts have informed, inspired and infiltrated my life.
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Something tells me a lot of our
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listeners feel the same way. Over the years, Hit Parade has tried a lot of different formats as we've brought you stories from chart history. Well, please consider this episode our most far flung experiment. Can a person build an autobiography around music charts? As part of that experiment, we are not only going to bring you stories of your humble Hit Parade host, we're also going to remember a legend of chart history, a man who brought us the hits. Today on Hit Parade, we will tell the stories of a podcast host and a radio DJ and how their love of pop music, the charts and trivia gave shape to their lives and brought joy to others. And it all started with a shimmering, sensual, synthetic chart topper from the summer I turned 10. The moment when I and this DJ first crossed paths. And that's where your Hit Parade marches today, the week ending June 27, 1981, when Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Karnes returned to number one on the Hot 100 after a rather dramatic one week interruption on its way to establishing itself as Billboard's top song of the year. How did the aforementioned DJ amp up the drama of this chart topping moment? And what does it tell you about my story besides the fact that I am a huge nerd? Join me as I explore this Proustian madeleine of a song and try to determine how did the Hit Parade, the American top 40, eventually lead to hit the podcast?
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this episode feels so reflective, it's because we've reached a milestone. This is Hit Parade's 100th episode. For the record, we count each monthly topic, whether you listen to it in one part or two, as one episode. The podcast launched in April 2017, and this month we finally cross a C note's worth of topics. If this were a television show, Hit Parade would would be going into syndication right about now.
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Friends weeknights at 11 on UPN 28.
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We've covered a lot of ground across these 100 episodes. I like to think of them collectively as a curriculum.
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Don't know much about history.
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Don't know much biology.
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We've already recapped much of that body of work in our five year anniversary show back in 2022, and in the four years since then, we've devoted episodes to artists from Aretha Franklin.
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To david bowie,
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From Bob Dylan getting
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through
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Tangle up in Blue to Barbra Streisand, From Sting. To Rihanna,
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To name just a few.
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We've also covered legendary hit making producers from Quincy Jones.
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To mutt lang.
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We've devoted episodes over the last four years to whole genres from funk. To grunge, Pop trends like boy bands, I Want it that and girl groups, Instrumentals. And even Britp pop. And weird chart phenomena, Legacy hits, Imperial phases, Second chance hits. And Beef Records.
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They not like us they not like us they not like us they not like us they not like us as we've approached this milestone and as I've been working on this 100th episode, I've been thinking a lot about Hit Parade. Where it started and where it's going and of course, about you listeners. I've received so many encouraging messages from you and it's gratifying to hear when one of my episodes makes a connection with you. So I'm using this 100th episode as a bit of a reflective pause for your thoughts about Hit Parade. What do you love? What do you want more of? What's something we haven't done that you want to hear? Send us your feedback at hit parade@slate.com and in the meantime, what about this episode?
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In the nine years I and my production team have been delivering this show to your podcatcher, one thing I haven't discussed much is the person who makes it.
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And how exactly did your Hit Parade
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host become the chart nerd he is now? Well, at the risk of testing your indulgence, Please consider this 100th episode of Hit Parade my memoir. A brief chronicle of my life in charts. And then in part two of this episode, I'll offer some backstory on an important figure who delivered those charts. Of course, I didn't enter the world a chart nerd, but I was exposed to a lot of music. I grew up in a two family house in Brooklyn, New York in the late 70s. My three teenage cousins who lived with my aunt and uncle in the downstairs apartment played records loud enough to be heard upstairs, beckoning my little sister and me to come downstairs and dance. Rosemary, Josephine and Loretta. My cousins exposed me to Casey and the Sunshine Band, the Grease soundtrack, the entire Bee Gees, Irv and Donna Summers epic cover of MacArthur Park. It was around this time that my chart follower history had its humble beginning. It involved a TV show my cousins flipped on one night. But my first countdown love didn't even involve the charts of Billboard Magazine.
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Welcome to solid gold 79.
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In early 1980, a syndicated musical variety show called Solid Gold premiered on television in my New York hometown. It ran on WPIX channel 11 on 1 March 1980, the show started as a one off. Its original name was Solid Gold 79 and it was a countdown of the top songs of the prior year. Their number one song of the year
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for the record was Rod Stewart's do
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youo Think I'm Sexy? Later, in 1980, they made it a weekly show. And the centerpiece of each episode, accompanied
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by a troupe of athletic leotard clad
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hoofers called the Solid Gold Dancers, was
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the Countdown, produced by Quincy Jones. George Benson's Give Me the Night is holding strong at number eight.
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I remember this being a revelation to me as a kid raised on Sesame street who loved numbers. The idea that you could count down songs was exciting. The Solid Gold Dancers were certainly also alluring, but not my main focus. At age 8. Little did I know that countdowns had been on the radio and television for decades. My parents later recalled that they had grown up with the show your hit parade on TV in the 1950s.
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It had started as a radio show
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as far back as the 30s.
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Your hit parade, the top tunes all over America, as determined by your Hit Parade survey. That's Amorli.
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There'd also been countdowns on other legendary music and dance TV shows like American Bandstand and Soul Train. But they didn't make the countdown the focus of the show the way Solid Gold did.
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On her way to her seventh Solid Gold record, Diana Ross in Upside down is up to number two.
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I couldn't have known this at the time, but Solid Gold's Countdown was based on the charts in Radio and Records magazine, a competitor to Billboard that focused on the radio industry. Even then, I later learned, Solid Gold's producers would fudge chart positions based on who was available. They seemed to love Laura Brannigan, for example, who was always willing to show up to lip sync her latest hit.
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This exciting performer's name, Laura Brannigan. And now, along with a special film feature and our great Solid Gold Dancers, here's our new number one hit, Solitaire.
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Solid Gold was on TV for most
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of the 1980s through 1988. I watched the first few years of the show, but by 1981 I had alternatives and I was learning what Billboard magazine was from Hollywood.
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It's America's number one pop music show, America's Top 10 with Casey Kasem. This week you'll see Pat Benatar. Plus exclusive reviews of the top 10 on Billboard's Pop, sold, country and album charts for the week ending October 4, 1981.
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I can't remember if I first heard a Billboard countdown on television or the radio? On TV, the show was called America's Top 10. On the radio, it was American Top 40.
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Hi and welcome to American top 40. Casey Kasem is off this week. I'm Charlie Van Dyke sitting in for him. And I'm all set to count down the latest rankings from the official Billboard survey leading into this week's 40 biggest hits.
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Here's our recap of But I definitely remember the first time I got wrapped up in the drama of a number one hit. It was a Sunday in late June 1981, just shy of 10 years old and in the car with my cousins driving to the beach, the same cousins who'd introduced me to solid gold, I asked them to stop flipping the radio. When they landed on American top 40, it was near the end of the show, a couple of songs away from revealing that week's number one.
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Number two this week was number one. Last week it lasted one week at the top at number two. Stars on 40.
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The prior week, Kim Karns's summer smash Bette Davis Eyes had been ejected from number one after five weeks on top. It had been overtaken by a bizarre dance medley of old pop songs, mostly Beatles songs that went by the name Stars on 45. By the way, we discussed the Stars on 45 phenomenon in our Lennon McCartney
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episode of Hit Parade.
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No reply. They said it wasn't you but I saw you be through your window.
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But.
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But Bette Davis Eyes wasn't out of the picture yet. I knew who I was rooting for. I made my cousin stay on that radio station. They poked fun at me the whole time for being wrapped up in this drama until at 40 revealed that Kim Karns hit had indeed returned to number one.
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She got.
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Better days aside,
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Bette Davis Eyes wound up on top four more weeks, nine in all, solidifying its status as the top song of 1981. As for at 40, I was hooked. But at age 9, going on 10, I didn't realize for a while that you could listen to this countdown on the radio every week. It wasn't until two years later when at age 12, I stumbled upon the year end countdown of the top 100 songs of 1983. On Christmas Day that I understood this countdown was a regular feature on the airwaves.
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Was it something that he said? All the voices in your head calling the real.
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In my family Italian on my mom's side, Christmas was a big time for gathering with relatives. That afternoon I listened to the upper reaches of the year end 1983 countdown in my Aunt Rose's basement. I would have listened to the whole thing, but it was Christmas and I had to go to church and open gifts and kiss relatives hello and all that holiday stuff. As my cousins walked in and out of my aunt's kitchen, they saw me glued to the radio, and sometimes they'd stop to sing along. Gloria by Laura Brannigan ranked number nine for the year according to @40 was a big family favorite, as was the 22nd second ranked. She works Hard for the Money by Donna Summer. Years later I would learn that the American top 40 year end rankings had different positions from the official billboard rankings. At 40 used a different 12 month period to make its Year End countdown, but both the Billboard year end number one for 1983 and the top song on American top 40 for 83 were the same. The Police's gargantuan Every Breath youh Take. Reaching the end of a Countdown took longer than any movie I'd ever seen at that age, and to me it was just as suspenseful. By February 1984, I finally figured out when my local radio station played American top 40 each Sunday morning, and it became a weekly ritual. I started begging my mom to let me attend church services at times that wouldn't conflict with at 40. Karma Chameleon by Culture club was number one the first time I listened to a full weekly. At 40. I started keeping a cassette tape by the radio in my living room to tape my favorite songs as they were counted down. I remember taping hits by Genesis, Cindy lauper, Shannon, The late John Lennon with his posthumous 1984 hit Nobody Told Me.
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Nobody told Me they'd be these like these Nobody told me they'd be Days like these
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and Duran Duran, Duran Duran were particularly important to me at the time. Now in junior high school, I discovered that if I knew the songs that were charting, especially the hits by new wave pinup stars like Duran Duran, I could talk to my fellow seventh graders, especially the girls. On Monday morning at school. I could update them on how New Moon on Monday was faring on the chart. I reached high school in 1985. That year my dad got a new job as business manager at a prep school in Connecticut, so we all moved up there and I attended the school as a faculty brat shout out to Canterbury in New Milford. Go Saints. I kept listening to at 40 while I navigated the leafy bucolic campus, which was a very different world from the New York City public schools I was previously used to.
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By this point, it had occurred to
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me that each week when The American Top 40 hosts said they were counting down the hits on according to Billboard, that Billboard was an actual magazine you could buy in a newsstand. The town of New Milford had just one well stocked newsstand. So one Saturday in the fall of 85, as my running coach was driving the team back from a cross country meet, I was not a great runner and looking to cheer myself up after a terrible performance, I asked if he could stop by that newsstand so I could buy a magazine. When I walked out with my first
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ever issue of Billboard, the whole cross
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country team looked at me like I was a freak. Billboard. I remember one alpha boy scoffing and they were right. I was a weirdo coming out of the closet as a full blown pop nerd. In the boys locker room later that afternoon waiting for my dad to pick me up, I remember pouring over that
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billboard like it held the mysteries of the universe.
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More in a moment.
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In that first Billboard magazine I bought, I not only discovered there were more than 40 hits on the big pop chart, it was called the Hot 100 and there were hits on there that might never make the top 40. Songs I'd heard of on MTV like the singles by Go West, Call Me,
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Call Me, no Time to Hesitate.
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I also saw some of these other genre charts I'd heard mentioned on at 40 that week. For example, Stevie Wonder was number one on both the Hot 100 and the R B chart, then called no Kidding, Hot Black Singles and the Adult Contemporary chart with his latest hit Part Time Lover. Two genre charts especially fascinated me rock tracks which contained all of the album oriented rock or AOR hits. The guys on the cross country team were always listening to bands that never or only occasionally made the top of the pop charts like ZZ Top, Kiss, Motley Crue and Ruff. And the aforementioned hot black singles. On my New York hit music station. I'd heard a lot of R B, including songs that would do well on the Black singles chart but might never cross over to the pop top 40 like, say, Renee and Angela's top five R B hit in the fall of 85, I'll be good. As I got into the habit of buying Billboard on the newsstand every few weeks, I began following the R B charts more closely. I remember one week in the spring of 86 when the chart was especially good. Number one R B that week was Janet Jackson with her Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis produced breakthrough what you done for me lately. Even more interesting were the R B hits that would never come as close to the top of the Hot 100 as Janet did. Also produced by Jam Lewis, Shirell's Saturday Love featuring Alexander O'. Neal. It was number 2R that week, but would only reach number 26 on the Hot 100. At number 3R B that week. New Additions A Little Bit of Love is all it takes. The Boston based boy band had put out several singles I'd loved like Candy Girl, Cool It now and Mr. Telephone Man. But A Little Bit of Love, another favorite of mine, only reached number 38. Pop. There were even hits on hot Black singles by white artists that broke bigger and faster at R B radio than they did on pop radio. New Shoes, a white husband and wife duo from Portland, Oregon were already in the R B top 10 that week with I Can't Wait Within a few weeks it would eventually reach number two on Hot Black Singles weeks before reaching number three on the Hot 100. Living in the Connecticut suburbs as a teenager, following the R B chart kept me in touch with the literally urban music I had grown up with with in Brooklyn. Frankly, it helped alleviate my homesickness. Studying Billboard also honed my sixth sense for when a song had hit potential. Over the summer of 86, one day while watching MTV, I saw a new video by a nerdy looking curly headed piano player that struck me as really catchy. I have sometimes been asked in interviews if I can tell when a song is a hit. My answer is mostly no, but I have my moments. The first time I heard the Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, I said to myself that sounds like a number one hit. When I said that the Way It Is was not even on the Hot 100 and Hornsby had yet to score a pop hit that had gone higher on the Hot 100 than number 72. In September, the Way It Is finally debuted on the Hot 100 at number 86. It took a month to crack the top 40. Two months after that, the way it is was number one. Sometimes you just know.
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That's just the way it is.
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My most musical summer came the next year in 1987. My summer job was on the paint crew at Canterbury School. Two other faculty brats and I. All of us teenagers were paid five days a week to roll eggshell white latex on the walls of the school's dormitories. And all we listened to all day radio station that came in clearest on one kid's boombox, i95, western Connecticut's local album oriented rock station.
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Brookfield Danbury, the home of rock and roll. I 95.
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What I learned that summer about AOR radio is it has its own set of hits, even if they're not intended for pop radio. The week I started the paint crew, I checked Billboard's album Rock Tracks chart. And the number one song was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Jammin Me on the Hot 100. It only got as high as number 18. But on i95, every day we were rolling paint. Tom Petty might as well have been Madonna. They were jamming, jamming me every couple of hours.
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Hours.
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AOR was a split personality radio format. The foundation was the 60s and 70s rock cannon canon. On i95's Two for Tuesdays, when they would play a pair of songs back to back by the same classic rock band, we would hear the first song and try to guess what the second song would be. So right after you heard the opening seconds of, say, a Led Zeppelin song,
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You need cool Air.
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You'd yell out Black Dog or Stairway or over the Hills and Far Away. About half the time, one of us was right. Mind you, at age 15, going on stage 16, I was still learning the canon of these dinosaur rock acts which blared out of the radio all day. The Steve Miller Band, Cream and Eric Clapton
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with black curtains.
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Aerosmith, Boston. And the only women who typically made the cut, Heart, Come On Home Girl. Because these weren't current hits, I couldn't look them up in Billboard magazine. I would instead try to remember the song titles, go Home After Work and check my reference volume, the Billboard book of top 40 hits, to see if they'd ever charted. All of the above songs were top 40 hits back in the day. And then next to these classic rock chestnuts, i95 was playing a steady diet of current rock hits. Everything from Richard Marks, whose Summer 87 number one rock smash Don't Mean Nothing featured guitar playing and backing vocals from three former Eagles. To Bob Seeger, whose movie soundtrack smash Shakedown From Beverly Hills Cop 2 topped the rock chart that summer even though it had more synthesizers and horns than guitar parts. And even the Grateful Dead, who were enjoying their first ever major hit that summer, a number one rock and even top 10 pop hit with the groovy Touch of gray. Every time i95 played it, we were getting a dose of boomer rock and Gen X pop all at once. A little over a year later, Billboard launched two more genre charts that would prove formative for me as I entered college. Modern Rock Tracks, the magazine's first alternative rock radio chart launched in September 1980, more on that one in a few minutes. And Hot Rap Singles, which launched in March 1989. The timing was ideal as rap was taking up a larger proportion of my musical diet and hip hop had entered its first so called golden age or as De La Soul would put it, the Daisy Age. Delaw's Me, Myself and I was one of the first number ones on Hot Rap Singles, and it nudged me to buy the trio's seminal debut album Three Feet High and Rising weeks later as Spike Lee's do the Right Thing landed on movie screens. One of my most inspiring moviegoing experiences, Public Enemies Incendiary theme song Fight the Power, also topped hot rap singles. 1989 the number another Summer. Many of the rap songs I discovered on this chart that summer became part of my rotation as I entered college, including NWA's number two rap song Express Yourself.
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Don't agree with how I do this
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I get straight meditate like a Buddhist Young MCs Party Rap Classic Bust a Move which cracked the rap chart top 10 months before it crossed over at pop radio.
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So come on Fat so and just bust the move.
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Just bust the mo and Slick Rex Mountain Much sampled Tall Tale Children's Story, which reached number two on the rap singles chart.
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Here we go. Once upon a time, not long ago, when people wore pajamas and live life slow willows were stern and justice stood and people were behaving like they ought to good to live the little boy
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When I got to Yale in the fall of 89, I needed a campus job. I found one at the Durfy Sweet Shop Shop, a student hangout that sold frozen yogurt, coffee and candy by the pound. I befriended my night shift boss leola, who by 1990 turned me onto the one major genre of music I hadn't explored in depth country music.
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Forever and ever. Amen.
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Reading Billboard for the prior half decade, I'd picked up on names like Randy Travis, George Strait, The Judds, Reba McIntyre and Clint Black. But it was only while working the night shift at Durfee that I began actually listening to and appreciating country stars like Garth Brooks
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in all places where
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the whiskey drowns and the beer Jesus My blues College was a melting pot of music. I djed several dances, co edited an arts magazine and a music magazine and served as a charts reference for my schoolmates. They pretended they didn't care about the charts, but when I brought Billboard to the weekly meeting of the music magazine, I noticed everyone reaching for it. It do you remember where you were when Nirvana's Nevermind replaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart? I certainly do. As I discussed in a previous episode of Hit Parade, I was on my way back to college. College from winter break in the middle of my junior year when I opened the new Billboard on the floor of Tower Records. I nearly dropped it out of shock. The Saturday after I returned to school, we all gathered around the TV to watch Nirvana make their high stakes debut on Saturday Night Live. It felt like our generation after a long boomer hangover, was finally taking over the culture.
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Nirvana.
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I only began to fully appreciate how Generation X was now in charge after I graduated and made my way into the world. Let me share a story that mixes music with a moment of romantic abandon.
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Here you come, I'm knocking knocking on my door well I've never met a
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girl like you before In September 1995, a week before my 24th birthday, I met a woman named named Sarah. She was the best friend of my college friend Jenny. Sarah and I had not intended to connect. We were coincidentally both in Boston for Labor Day weekend visiting Jenny who just started law school. Before the weekend was over, Sarah and I were an item. The only problem was I lived in New York City. Sarah lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. Virginia as a pair of financially strapped 20 somethings. A long distance relationship was going to be tough. I didn't even own a car. But then I had a crazy brainstorm. My parents were about to leave for a week long cruise to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. After I dropped them off at the airport, they left me in charge of the family minivan. Sarah informed me that she was house sitting in Charlottesville. The weekend after my parents left, I decided I wanted to surprise Sarah. You probably see where this is going.
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Have I been blind? Have I been lost inside myself, in my own mind, hypnotized, mesmerized.
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That Friday, I took the afternoon off work, packed a bag and sorry, mom and Dad. I hope you'll forgive me. Thirty years later, I drove down to Charlottesville. I'd never been there before, and by the way, this was a year before MapQuest, let alone phones with GPS. Yes, so my friend Jenny had to give me directions over the phone that I wrote down on paper before I left. Ah, 1995. The most memorable part of the journey. I mean, besides the gobsmacked look on Sarah's face when I arrived, it was the drive itself. The whole way down, the radio was blaring and every town along the route had a station playing Gen X alt rock. Indeed, as I discussed last year in our 90s rock episode of Hit Parade by name 1995, even nominal top 40 pop stations like New York's Z100 were playing alt rock as if it were mainstream pop. It was all stuff catering to Gen Xers, most of it recorded by Gen Xers. I felt super served by the cultural zeitgeist as I drove down to Charlottesville, probably two, three fast. I heard them all. Green Day, Edwin Collins, Natalie Merchant, the Goo Goo Dolls, and of course, Alanis Morissette. When I arrived in Charlottesville, I had to find Sarah at her job, which was in a store at the mall. Even that mall was playing Gen X alt rock over the pa. I recall hearing Come down by Bush, which was number one on the modern rock chart that very week. So yeah, yes, I found Sarah that Friday night. We had a lovely weekend. Less than a month later, we would break up when she went back to her old boyfriend, who had the advantage of actually living in Charlottesville. Oh, and the minivan. I got it back to New York in time, barely. On the Sunday, I belatedly remembered that I was supposed to pick my parents up at the airport, and I got a little lost driving back from Virginia. And none of us had cell phones. Hey mom, if you've ever wondered why I was an hour late fetching you guys in Newark, well, now you know. And what about my generation's music? A couple of years after my Charlottesville adventure, Gen X's moment as the sun around which popular culture orbited was over as alt rock departed the pop airwaves and the much larger millennial generation took over the charts. Well, we had a short but good run. It was fun while it lasted. And I'll always have a story about the wacky things 20 somethings do for romance, complete with a period appropriate soundtrack. So that's how I became a lifelong chart nerd. I hope you enjoyed this musical memoir. But wait, you may have noticed that in all of these chart related and radio driven stories, there's one name I haven't mentioned. He looms large not only in my personal history as a chartologist, but in the history of Hit Parade. We invoke him on this podcast all the time. And in part two of this 100th hit parade episode, we're going to walk through his story.
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I'm Casey Kasem. This is American top 40 in Hollywood. We have five new songs debuting in this week's countdown. One of them recently spent on Billboard's dance chart five weeks in a row at number one. And here it is, the first pop hit for a singer named Madonna. She's originally from Detroit and her song debuts at number 39. Here's Madonna with Hollister.
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When we come back, how did Casey Kasem become a radio savant, a trivia junkie, a cartoon stoner, and finally a God? To chart nerds everywhere, we tell the story of the man who originally brought you the hits from coast to coast. Non Slate plus listeners will hear the rest of this episode next week. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis, our supervising producer is Joel Meyer, and the executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Mia Lov Bell. Check out Slate's roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit parade back your way. Way. We'll see you for part two in a week. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Malanfi.
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Slate Podcasts – March 21, 2026
Host: Chris Molanphy
This special 100th episode of Hit Parade is a deeply personal and reflective journey through host Chris Molanphy’s lifelong fascination with music charts. Rather than focusing on a single artist, genre, or trend, Chris turns the spotlight on himself—tracing his evolution from an intrigued Brooklyn kid to a self-admitted "chart nerd" and, eventually, the creator of this acclaimed podcast. Along the way, he also sets up a tribute in part two to Casey Kasem, the iconic radio DJ whose passion for countdowns helped inspire Chris and generations of chart watchers.
Quote (at 04:21):
"This episode our most far flung experiment. Can a person build an autobiography around music charts?"
— Chris
Quote (at 31:47):
"The whole cross country team looked at me like I was a freak. Billboard. I remember one alpha boy scoffing...I was a weirdo coming out of the closet as a full blown pop nerd.”
— Chris
Quote (at 24:14):
"Bette Davis Eyes wound up on top four more weeks, nine in all, solidifying its status as the top song of 1981. As for AT 40, I was hooked."
— Chris
Memorable Moment (at 39:05):
Chris recounting his first accurate “hit prediction” with Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is,” before it topped the charts.
Quote (at 39:38):
"Sometimes you just know."
— Chris
Quote (at 48:12):
"Many of the rap songs I discovered on this chart that summer became part of my rotation as I entered college..."
— Chris
Quote (at 55:28):
"It was all stuff catering to Gen Xers, most of it recorded by Gen Xers. I felt super served by the cultural zeitgeist as I drove down to Charlottesville."
— Chris
For longtime fans, this episode is a tribute to the community of chart obsessives and a blueprint for how deeply the pop charts can intertwine with the personal histories of music lovers. If you’ve ever cared who’s number one, Chris Molanphy is walking you through why it matters, one chapter of his own story at a time.