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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfi, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One Series. On our last episode we walked through the history of the instrumental through the early years of the rock era, from syrupy orchestras and fierce electric guitarists to Herb Alpert and disco grooves, we're now moving into the 80s when the instrumental is diminishing as a pop force, and yet one smooth instrumentalist is going to outsell every player who came before him. Though disco fell off commercially at the start of the 1980s, it continued to produce random hits, including the bizarre vocal medley of Beatles covers by Dutch group the stars on 45 that we talked about in our without the Beatles episode of Hit Parade. He's a real nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land. Stars on 45 is obviously not an instrumental. However, as we discussed in that episode, the stars on 45's unexpected rise to number one in 1981 prompted a roughly 18 month medley craze that saw a range of random acts compiling familiar tunes into a danceable mashup. Among the most successful, improbably, was London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who smashed together snippets of such well known classical pieces as Flight of the Bumblebee, Rhapsody in Blue and the Marriage of Figaro. On Top of a relentless stars on 45 like Clap Beat, the RPO's Hooked on Classics reached number 10 on the Hot 100 in early 1982. Hooked On Classics had more to do with a a fleeting fad than anything to do with the instrumental as an enduring pop form. For the first half of the 80s, the surest route to instrumental chart success continued to be TV and the movies. TV theme song king Mike Post, for example, who had already gone top 10 in 1975 with his theme to the Rockford Files, returned to the top 10 in 1981 with his piano centric theme to Hill Street Blues. And just a few months later, Post was back in the top 40 with his theme to the Tom Selleck detective show Magnum PI a 25 hit in May of 82. That same month, the biggest instrumental of the 1980s reached its peak of number one on the Hot 100. The theme to a recent Oscar Best Picture composed and performed by a Greek synthesizer wizard named Evangelos Papathanasio, who went by the singular and simpler artist name Vangelis. Chariots of Fire Vangelis Stirring Beloved and much parodied theme to the film of the same name was, you might say, a long distance runner. It debuted on the Hot 100 in December 1981, the start of that year's movie awards season, and took until May of 82 to reach the top of the Hot 100. More than a month after Vangelis won the best original Score Oscar and the movie won Best Picture, Chariots of Fire was one of only two instrumentals to hit number one in the entire 1980s. We'll get to the other one in a moment. It wasn't as if artists were avoiding instrumental tracks, it was more that radio was turning away from them. Major market FM programmers preferred songs listeners could sing along to, which depressed these instrumentals, record sales and subsequent chart performance. This was a shame as some of the 80s most innovative music was instrumental, including jazzman Herbie Hancock's breakbeat experiment and MTV favorite rocket. Avant garde synth popsters the Art of Noise, who also wowed MTV viewers with their cutting edge electro dance single Close to the Edit, And Swiss new wave duo Yellow, whose oh yeah, those two words are practically its only intelligible lyrics for first hit record stores in 1985 and gained a wider following after appearing in 1986's hit teen film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Oh yeah. None of these instrumental new wave classics were top 40 pop hits. Hancock's Rocket peaked at number 71, although it did reach number six on the R and B chart. The Art of Noises Close to the Edit bubbled under the hot 100 at number 102 and yellow's oh yeah. Even after the Ferris Bueller boost and a re release could only manage a number 51 peak. Still, thanks to movies and TV, instrumentals weren't extinct yet. As I mentioned at the top of our show in 1985, three wordless hits from score composers for visual media made the top 20 on the Hot 100. The first came from the smash Eddie Murphy comedy Beverly Hills Cop Munich composer Harold Faltermeier took his iconic action theme for Murphy's Axel Foley character simply titled Act Axel F to number three in June of 85. Next to hit was Canadian super producer David Foster's love theme from the Brat Pack coming of age film St. Elmo's Fire by November 85, this Dewey love letter to Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Judd Nelson peaked at number 15. That same month the biggest of these screen symphonies reached the very top of the chart. The Czech born composer Jan Hammer took the theme from NBC TV's sleek music video influenced and top rated cop drama Miami vice to number one on the Hot 100. It even pushed the Vice soundtrack LP to number one on the album chart, where it stayed for 11 weeks. In the 38 years since since this song topped the Hot 100, no pure instrumental, that is a song without any words at all has gone to number one. There is one de facto instrumental with just a few words in it that did top the chart. I'll get to it momentarily. So what happened? By the mid-80s, it could be argued that instrumentals were falling out of favor. For thanks to the rise of that most verbose popular music form, rap don't push me cause I'm close to the edge I'm trying not to lose my head after early rap hits by the Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and Melly Mel changed the game for cutting edge hits. Regular pop songs by the mid-80s were getting more lyrics forward too. How often would she choose a hard or soft option? But a likelier explanation is that the instrumental, like much of popular music in the 80s and 90s, became more niche focused. A relatively new radio format was about to find its spot on the dialogue, and while it rarely crossed to the pop charts, this format thrived on instrumentals. More on that in a moment. From the silkiness of a George Benson guitar solo to the languor of a shade jam, smooth Jazz rewarded artists who straddled the worlds of jazz, R and B and pop. Allmusic defines the genre as an outgrowth of jazz fusion that emphasizes its polished side and relies on rhythms and grooves instead of improvisation. Smooth Jazz tried to project cool, but to both its lovers and haters, it was never really cool music, which made it the ideal format for an earnest soprano saxophone player from Seattle named Kenneth Gorelick, who would become the signature artist of smooth Jazz. But at first, the man who branded himself Kenny G was trying to cross over with singers fronting his tracks. Kenny G didn't want to break his music with vocalists, but after he was signed by record mogul Clive Davis to his Arista label In the early 80s, the the label brass insisted Kenny would sell better if his singles had vocals. So he dutifully recorded R and B tracks with vocalists like Kashif, the singer songwriter behind hits from George Benson, Evelyn Champagne King and Whitney Hous. This worked well enough. Kenny and Kashif's love on the rise from the 1985 Kenny G album Gravity reached number 24 on Billboard's Hot Black Singles chart. But Kenny's albums were still selling modestly, and he was eager to showcase his melodic brand of soprano sax playing Vocal free. In 1986, Kenny recorded another album for Arista called Duotones. It featured more instrumentals, but for the first single, Arista went with yet another vocal track, a cover of the Junior Walker hit what Does It Take To Win youn Love? Featuring singer Ellis hall, it hit number 15 on the black singles chart. That's when the saxophonist's career took an unexpected turn. In the 2021 HBO documentary Listening to Kenny G, Kenny recounts a story of appearing on Johnny Carson's the Tonight show for the first time, being instructed to play his vocal single, but playing an instrumental song instead. Much to the anger of the Tonight show producers, that instrumental was Songbird. The Tonight show performed performance of Songbird was highly acclaimed and Clive Davis and the team at Arista relented. They agreed to promote Songbird not just to R B stations, but to top 40 pop stations. Remarkably, the single took off scaling the Hot 100 in the spring and summer of 1987. On American Top 40, Casey Kasem counted it down number nine. Here's the first top 10 instrumental since Jan Hammer hit number one back in 1985 with a Miami Vice theme, Kenny G with Songbird. Songbird ultimately topped out at number four and duotones immediately hit the top ten and went double platinum. It went on to sell five million copies. Though Songbird was the last top ten pop instrumental of the 1980s, Kenny G wasn't done. He defied the typical one hit wonder status of most instrumental hit makers. In 1988, his silhouette reached number 13 on the hot one. While Kenny would continue to record with vocalists occasionally, like Motown legend Smokey Robinson, He typically did better with his instrumentals, like for example, going Home, a track from his 1990 album Kenny G Live that became a standard in the People's Republic of China, it is routinely played over public address systems at the end of the Chinese work. By the time Kenny G broke on the charts, smooth jazz had taken off as a radio format. Launched at a Chicago station in 1987, smooth jazz stations blended R B instrumentalists like Naj, The more ambient tracks from pop acts like Sade, And the most accessible of jazz fusion players like the Daves, David Sanborn, Dave Grusin, David Benoit and Dave Cos. It was, in short, a format made for Kenny G, a niche form of pop adjacency that the soprano saxman could dominate. In 1992, Kenny's sixth album, Breathless, which spawned the Grammy winning number 18 hit Forever in Love, Became a chart colossus. Breathless sold 6 million copies in its first year alone and was later certified for sales of 12 million. In 1993, Breathless spent 11 weeks at number two on the Billboard 200 album chart, second only in all those weeks to Kenny's Arista Records labelmate Whitney Houston and her Bodyguard soundtrack I Don't Wanna Hurt Anymore, which in a way made sense. Like Whitney Houston, who'd turned singing into a feat of athletic prowess, Kenny G attracted fans who saw his circular, breath held notes and aggressively melodic playing as the work of a diligent competitor, Kenny didn't just soothe his fans, he aimed to wow them. In 1994, Kenny finally scored a number one CD with Miracles, the holiday album, which went octuple platinum. Loathed by critics but loved by the public, including sax playing President Bill Clinton and Kenny G had become an institution. He also built a business model. Other instrumentalists imitated accessible pseudo pop with a virtuosic gloss and a high energy live show, as was recently chronicled on Slate's Decoder Ring podcast. This approach led to best selling albums by Greek New Age keyboardist Jani. And TV Entertainment Tonight anchorman turned composer John Tesh. With so many instrumentals now aimed at the smooth jazz and New Age markets, actual top 40 pop hits by anyone not named Kenny G were increasingly rare. The instrumental became more fluky than ever. In 1991, David Stewart, one half of synth pop duo Eurythmics, teamed with saxophonist Candy Dulfer on the single Lily Was Here. It just missed the top 10, peaking at number 11. In 1996, Italian ambient trance DJ Robert Miles scored a hit that crossed over from clubs to the pop charts called children. A number one hit across Europe. Children also reached number 21 in America. And later, in 1996, the rhythm section of the band U2 bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen helped launch Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible movie franchise by covering the 60s TV theme song by Lalo Shiffrin as light electronic dance pop. Their version of the Mi theme reached number seven, the only top ten pop instrumental of the entire 1990s. By the 90s, classic instrumentals were being sampled, remixed and rebooted. For example, a kitschy 1962 deep cut by composer producer Quincy Jones called Soul Bossa Nova. Was not only adopted by comedian Mike Myers as the theme to his movie spy spoof character Austin Powers, it was also sampled by Canadian rap duo the Dream Warriors. Here we go, are you ready for one another Dream warriors noises, new discovery and Herb Alpert's 1979 number one smash Rise. Was transformed in 1997 by producer rapper Sean Puff Daddy Combs into a posthumous number one smash for the Notorious B.I.G. hypnotox. In a parallel universe where instrumentals remained more a part of the pop canon, you can imagine that a musically adept troupe like the Roots would become a pure instrumental combo like the meters or the JB's in a prior generation. But given the commercial imperatives of the 90s and aughts and it made more sense for the Roots to pursue a career in rap. To get over the Roots not only needed great music, they needed bars. Bad misses Throwing raspberry kisses on me. You looking for direction, girl, I feel your vision on me. Just don't let them see you sweating. We'll be right back. By the turn of the millennium, even Kenny G's career as a hitmaker had fallen off a bit. In a bid for continued commercial relevance, in 1999 he produced a second collection of holiday standards called Faith. Buried near the end of the CD was a cover of the New Year's standard Auld Lang Syne, featuring keyboards from fellow instrumental schlockmeister Janni. However, Team Kenny anticipated that around the celebratory flip to the year 2000, Americans might feel wistful about the end of the 20th century, which wouldn't actually take place till the start of 2001. But never mind. So Team Kenny produced a second version of Auld Lang Syne, dubbed the Millennium Mix. Featuring an audio collage of Sound bites from 20th century history. Distinguished lying fault upon colonel Charles A. Lind, this very kitschy version of Auld Lang Syne debuted on the Hot 100 just before Christmas of 99, and then the week of New Year's 2000 made a massive 47 point leap up to number seven. Though it tumbled off the chart before the end of January, this brief visit to the top 10 gave Kenny G his last major pop hit, 1941. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, a date which will live. Since the turn of the century, instrumentals have become exceedingly rare on the charts, though they sometimes will make an impact in a movie, such as Japanese composer Tomoyasu Hotei's muscular Battle Without Honor or Humanity, which was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino's 2003 film Kill Bill. Tracks like this rarely grace the Hot 100. However, there is one genre where the instrumental is still fairly omnipresent. The dance club. Daft Punk kicked off their career in the mid-90s with the instrumental Dafunk, which missed the Hot 100 but reached number one on Billboard's Club Play chart in 1997 and other DJ producers have turned instrumentals into innovative clubland hits. Fatboy Slim's The Rockefeller Skank, a number two dance single in 1998, is a de facto instrumental studded with spoken word samples. Finnish DJ Darude took his pulse pounding instrumental Sandstorm to number five on the club play chart in 2000 and it has enjoyed a long afterlife in sports stadiums as a crowd pump up anthem. Dutch super DJ Tiesto turned Samuel Barber's classical composition into adagio for Strings into an uplifting trance anthem in 2005. This too was a top five dance single. And of course multi Grammy winning DJ producer Skrillex made his name with the de facto instrumental and bone rattling bass dropper, Scary Monsters and Nice sprites, another top five dance single that even made it to number 69 on the Hot 100 in 2011. Oh my God. In fact, it was another club driven bass dropper that in a total fluke finally ended the drought for instrumentals ATOP the Hot 100 in 2013. Unlike the prior number one from Miami Vice, this one had just a few instructional words in it. Do the Harlem Shake. Harry Bauer Rodriguez, a Philadelphia born Brooklyn based DJ who went by the name Bauer, became an instant Billboard chart topper in February 2013 when his trap jam Harlem Shake debuted on the chart at number one. Overwhelmingly, Harlem Shake was powered to the top of the the chart by viral videos on YouTube. Bower was benefiting from a new Billboard rule counting music plays on YouTube for the first time. Harlem Shake was the centerpiece of an uber meme in which gangs of amateur dancers, often in costume, awkwardly pelvic thrusted to Bowers Club jam. In the first week of Billboard's new YouTube chart tally, Harlem Shake was powered to the top of the hot 100 by more than 100 million streams in a single week. Bauer was yet another instrumental one hit wonder, but his EDM success paved the way for other instrumentals on the Hot 100, including Dutch DJ Martin Garrix's 2014 single Animals, a number 21 hit. A decade after Harlem Shake, instrumental smashes remain rare. You have to look to alternative charts such as Billboard's Adult Album Alternative or Triple A chart to find wordless hits like Rodrigo y Gabriela's meta volution in 2019. However, instrumentals are still inspiring hits in in unexpected ways. Remember that it was this obscure 2008 instrumental by Nine Inch Nails. That led to this 19 week number one smash by Lil Nas X in 2019 Old Town Road yeah, I'm gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road I'm gonna ride till I can't no more. By the way, you can now pre order my book on Old Town Road, coming to bookstores in November 2023. Will the instrumental ever make a more prominent and permanent chart comeback? In the age of TikTok, anything's possible. But truthfully, across the last 70 years on the charts, instrumental hits have almost always been moments of serendipity, strokes of luck and mad inspiration. Even when an act as careerist as Kenny G turned instrumentals into mega platinum, his hits were random and fluky. The instrumentals that live on as more than just earworms have a certain cultural meta resonance. The melody matters, but so does the package Speaking of instrumentalists who know a thing or two about packaging, trumpeter Herb Alpert is still touring, and I kid you not, while he is on stage, the COVID of Whipped Cream and Other Delights is projected on a screen behind him. When Herb Alpert plays hits like his chart topper Rise, he knows he's invoking memories for both 90s Biggie Smalls fans and 60s LP buyers. Because, like that old album cover, a catchy melody is worth more than a thousand words. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and and narrated by Chris Melanfy. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis, and we had help from Benjamin Frisch, who produced the latest installment of our monthly show, Hit Parade the Bridge, available exclusively to Slate plus members. In our latest Bridge episode, I talked to blogger and pop historian Tom Nawrocki about his breakdown of a half century of instrumental top 10 hits. To sign up for Slate plus and hear not only the Bridge but all our shows the day they drop, visit slate.com hitparade plus. Derek John is executive producer of Narrative Podcasts and we had help from Joel Meyer. Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com 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. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanfy. Sam.