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- [00:00]
Chris Melanphy
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. 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 hitparadeplus 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 hitparadeplus 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 Melanthe, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One? Series on today's show 35 years ago this month, in July of 1987, the Hot 100 was awash in pulsating synthesizers and pinging rhythms. In the early 80s, you might have expected these electronic musical tools to be wielded by such MTV synth pop gods as Duran Duran or Prince. But in the second half of that decade, they were most effectively deployed by acts crossing over from the worlds of urban club music, hip hop and especially Latin dance. Led by Miami girl group trio Expose.
- [02:12]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
Me.
- [02:14]
Chris Melanphy
Expose were in the Top five that summer with Point of no Return. But they were not alone. A cornucopia of similar acts, many female led, were all over the Hot 100. Their angular beats and yearning vocals formed a new sub genre identified by DJs and club tastemakers as freestyle. Emerging from the clubs and radio stations in Miami and New York, freestyle was a hybrid genre that combined the dance rhythms of post disco and electro. With the florid romantic yearnings of 80s Latin club music. Even when a man was doing the singing, freestyle was a fundamentally romantic genre. The beats were frenetic, the lyrics impassioned. Freestyle caught lightning in a bottle, creating stars and generating hits that crossed over at Top 40 radio. Some artists who went on to mainstream pop success got their start with freestyle music. You could even argue that the biggest female pop star of the entire 1980s broke, thanks in part to freestyle, And soon artists from the worlds of new wave rock and British synth pop were seeking out freestyle producers to refresh their sound.
- [04:44]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
Watch them all fall down domino dancing.
- [04:53]
Chris Melanphy
At the peak of freestyle Billboard magazine even gave the music more or less its own chart. But on the mainstream charts, the frustration for freestyle was that to go all the way to the top of the Hot 100, the music had to get a lot softer, Slower, Even mushier, because I love you. But in clubs and on the radio, the energetic rhythms of freestyle carried into the 90s and beyond. Today on Hit Parade, we will attempt to define the 80s dance of mini genre that bridged the disco era into the house era, a style so bespoke they had to call it freestyle and explain how we traveled from Lisa Lisa. To Timmy till one more try. Whether they were swooning or grooving, freestyle got a lot of people moving in the 80s. But no track got more people to the floor than the song that dance historians say started it all on the charts. Freestyle's big bang moment. And that's where your hit parade marches today, the week ending February 25, 1984, when let the music play by Shannon reached its peak of number eight on Billboard's Hot 100, by the way, eight spots higher than even Madonna had gotten to that date. How did this pop one hit wonder Shannon would never return to the American top 40, manage to get a jump on the sound of 80s dance pop and start a musical movement? The beat, the lyrics, the synths, the production, all of it mattered. And it changed the game for dance pop for the next decade. You might say we started dancing and freestyle love put us into a group.
- [08:19]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
But now he's with somebody new. What does love want me to do? Foreign.
- [08:36]
Chris Melanphy
I want to start this episode by taking us back very briefly to the girl group era of the early 60s. In 1961, the Shirelles scored one of the earliest number one hits of this girl group wave with their recording of the Carole King Jerry Goffin classic will you love me tomorrow? The song, seemingly innocent, was actually about a very adult subject for its day. Whether sleeping with the object of one's affection will leave a girl heartbroken by morning. It was about the most overt a song about sex and female agency could be in the early 60s. Now let's flash ahead about a quarter century and consider this song on the same subject. Lisa Lisa. And Cult Jam's 1985 hit I Wonder if I take you home, a quintessential example of the freestyle movement we are going to discuss in this episode is about, bluntly, a teen girl fretting over whether she should sleep with the boy she's dating. It's about 40 to 50% more excited, explicit than will you love me tomorrow. The Lisa Lisa song has no curses and very little actual sex talk, but there's far less obfuscation of what the song is about than there was on the Shirell's hit. Moreover, the pulsating, quantized backing track couldn't sound less like the swirling orchestration of the Shirell's classic. But the topic of I wonder if I take you home, more to the point, the yearning in this young woman's dilemma? It's precisely the same. Or how about this girl group classic? Martha and the Vandella's 1963 hit Heatw. In this Motown chestnut, Martha Reeves sings about a passion that utterly overcomes her, an uncontrollable burning whenever the object of her desire so much as calls her name. At one point, Reeves even diagnoses herself with high blood pressure. As the Detroit trio's harmonies build to a crescendo, this illness, this love fever feels like an addiction. Two and a half decades later, the Bronx, New York trio Sweet Sensation knew a thing or two about addictions. Sweet sensation's 1987 hit Hooked on youn is about an overcoming passion. Front woman Betty lebron self diagnoses as insane and sings about an uncontrollable feeling fire Again. Compared with the 60s hit, Hooked on youn was made on a shoestring, its backing track largely built out of a sequencer. But for a younger generation, this is what overpowering lust sounded like. Now I'm not claiming these 80s freestyle examples are going to go down as comparable pop classics to their 60s forebears. For starters, the Lisa Lisa and Sweet Sensation singles were smaller chart hits than the Shirelles and Martha and the Vandellas hits were. My only point is that every generation will find the medium to express universal needs, desires and doubts. And if you grew up in the 80s, particularly if you were a young woman like, say, a teenage Jennifer Lopez, captured in this 2017 video singing along in a car with a 1988 hit by Latin freestyle singer Noel Old School.
- [14:02]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
New York what you know about it? Oh yes.
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Chris Melanphy
If this was your formative period, then freestyle might have been the music that captured your heart and expressed your longings. And frankly, the seeming simplicity of the production was a feature, not a bug. These freestyle tracks arrangements were deceptively complex even when they were built on off the shelf first wave 80s synthesizer. That sound gave freestyle a street immediacy that spoke to a generation of hip hop and pop fans, particularly black and brown listeners. Now, to explain just how freestyle blew up, we need to walk through some Post Disco History. As we've noted in several Hit Parade episodes, disco didn't really die after the 70s. Rather, it morphed into a myriad of captivating dance floor idioms. Let's briefly recap a few of them. The Instrumental Chase by Giorgio Moroder, a hit late in the disco movement reaching number 33 in 1979, was an early example of the so called Italo disco genre. The Italian born marauder, whom we discussed in depth in our Donna Summer episode of Hit Parade, had already helped define the the future of dance music with such Donna classics as the all synthesized I Feel Love and with the lush throbbing Chase, he was pointing one direction disco might take after its commercial implosion. Here was another. Patrick Cowley, whom we discussed in our remix episode, was one of the forefathers of so called High Energy. Spelled colloquially as H I N R G. At the turn of the 80s, high energy was synthesized disco reduced to its densest form and spun up to a relentless tempo with staccato rhythms and pulsating basslines. Basically, it felt like dance music as a drug. Soon dance forms like Italo and High Energy became swept up in the larger 80s dance culture known as post disco. This was mostly club music, but what was interesting was how these post disco forms were adapted on records that might receive radio play, especially when lyrics were piled on top. New York R B duo D Train produced soulful records in the post disco idiom, heavy with Synthesizers. On their 1982 number 13 R B hit you're the One For Me, the synths are more than rhythmic or ornamental, they are like an extra voice on the track. Across the Atlantic, Italian singer Ryan Paris, dolce vita, number one in a half dozen European countries in early 83 as well as top five in the UK, took the Italo disco style, added pop vocals in English and achieved a blend of romantic lushness and synth pop angularity. And in England, new wave duo Yazoo, known as Yaz in the US brought synth pop to the dance floor with their 1982 classic Situation. Only a number 73 US pop hit, but a number one club hit, Situation combined anesthetic British chill with the soulful American sounding vocals of Alison Moyet, including her immortal laugh. All of these forms of dance music eventually culminated in the short lived genre that is freestyle's closest cousin and direct forebear electro. As its name suggests, Electra was a kind of technopop rooted in the synth based innovations of groups like kraftwerk. The German innovator's 1981 album Computer World is Considered a kind of proto electro, American producers like Arthur Baker and John Robey fused this German austerity with American R and B and the earliest glimmers of hip hop's breakdance and breakbeat culture. In 1982, Baker and Roby teamed with a quintet of Boston vocalists to form R and B troop Planet Patrol. A kind of experiment that all music notes quote, walked an intriguing line between electronic and the classic Motown sound. Planet Patrol's play At your own Risk was built out of electro beats that Arthur Baker and John Robey had discarded from another track they were working on, a seminal rap recording that, speaking of planets, was also a much bigger hit.
- [21:41]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
Funky yeah, Just Hit Me.
- [21:47]
Chris Melanphy
Planet Rock by Afrika Bambatta and Soul Sonic Force is considered electro's signature track. It reached number four on the R&B chart in 1982. Built out of an interpolation of Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express plus behind the beat rapping by Bombata. Filtered through a vocoder, explosive synth stabs and a dizzying array of electronic effects, Planet Rock, most critics agree, changed the course of R and B, rap and dance production for the rest of the 1980s. As seminal as it is, Planet Rock is what you might also call a scrappy record. Producers Baker and Robey take thin electronic sounds and and make them seem massive. On Bombata's follow up, Looking for the Perfect Beat, Baker and Robey further refined the electro sound down to its essence. By 1983, the Breakbeats and synth stabs of electronic were cropping up on records far beyond the New York streets, such as on UK post punk quartet New Order's single Confusion, which they co produced with Baker and Rogen. Around this time, these pulsating electro sounds began to morph as they were applied to even scrappier records recorded by producers with more limited budgets than Arthur Baker. Miami producer Tony Butler, who produced under the name Pretty Tony, simplified the electro sound even further on tracks like Don't Stop the Rock. By the way, the group name for that Pretty Tony track was simply freestyle. Though this backstory is much debated, that group name is credited as the likely origin of the genre name freestyle. Even though Pretty Tony was largely working off the building blocks of electro, Tony was shifting the sound in the direction Miami freestyle would ultimately go, especially when he began producing singles by a club singer named Deborah Kowalski, who called herself Debbie debt. Debbie Deb's pair of flagship singles in 1983 and 84, when I hear Music, and Lookout Weekend, respectively, Built a template for other freestyle acts to follow this vocal style is part of what distinguishes freestyle from electro or high energy. Deb's vocals were pleading, a bit deliberately flat and filled with attitude, a female version of Breakdance, or so called B Boy culture. This same B girl attitude was picked up by R B vocalist Lisa Fisher, who was then recording as a club singer named Xena. Xena's on the Upside is now considered a B Boy B Girl classic and another building block of what freestyle became. Around this same time in New York city clubs in 1982 and 83, another attitudinal singer was making a bit of a splash. More than a bit, Let's just say it. Madonna, in a parallel universe where she didn't wind up taking over the world, could have been remembered primarily as a club singer and more specifically a proto freestyle singer. Madonna's debut single, 1982's Everybody, Was closer to post disco synth pop than freestyle, though it had some of freestyle's scrappiness. Everybody was only a club hit, reaching number three in January 1983 on Billboard's Club chart, then called Dance Disco. But a year later, on the hit that would prove her mainstream pop breakthrough, Madonna moved more firmly in the direction of freestyle because she was working with one of the prime producers of the freestyle movement, John Jellybean. Benitez was not only Madonna's then boyfriend, he was the producer of Holiday, the song that would bring Madonna onto the Hot 100 for the first time. Jellybean, like Pretty Tony and several other producers we'll discuss, is virtually synonymous with freestyle. A descendant of Puerto Rican immigrants from the Bronx, Benitez innately knew how to arrange and mix a record with the pinging synthesizers and Latin polyrhythms Freestyle became known for. Holiday was a last minute substitution on Madonna's self titled 1983 debut album and the only track on the set produced by Jellybean Benitez. When it broke in New York City, black radio played it first and Madonna's early gigs were largely in downtown clubs frequented by Latin audiences. In other words, even as the single climbed the charts, peaking at number 16 on the Hot 100, many listeners didn't realize the singer of Holiday was neither black nor Latina, but rather an Italian American white girl from Michigan. This stew of cultural influences would foreshadow where Freestyle would wind up. But though it was produced by a freestyle auteur, Holiday is not a pure freestyle single per se. Its instrumentation is more lush with post disco elements like cowbell and piano. It doesn't have the whip crack synth sounds later associated with freestyle by mid-1983, the pure freestyle sound was still only a club phenomenon. The song that would finally break freestyle on the pop charts, its signature hit, came out while Madonna's holiday was scaling the Hot 100. And for a brief moment, this was one of the last times you could say this. For the next decade, this performer did better on the charts than Madonna. Let the Music Play landed in the summer of 1983. By 1984, it was everywhere. Its blazing rhythm track summed up everything that had been happening in dance music and hip hop with gated snare inspired by Arthur Baker and John Robey's work with Afrika Bambat, syncopation that echoed both breakbeats and Latin salsa and on trend synth sounds, including the seminal Roland TR808 that literally cracked like a whip. When teenage Puerto Rican producer Chris Barbosa composed the track in his home studio in the Bronx, he originally titled it It Fire and Ice for its combination of a sizzling rhythm track and the chili pop melody he put on top of it. Then there was the vocal from Brenda Shannon Green. Raised in Washington, D.C. and as an adult working as a boy bookkeeper in New York City, Shannon had previously sung with jazz ensembles and an R B troupe, so her vocal on Let the Music Play had R B in its bones. But it was pure club in its attitude. The lyrics, in fact Ghost, written by songwriter Anne Godwin, are about the club, how dancing is tantamount to foreplay, and how the dance floor both reveals and conceals. Quote I thought it was clear the plan was we would share this feeling just between ourselves, shannon sings. But when the music changed, the plan was rearranged. He went to dance with someone else. Unquote. It was a flashy B boy record with female lyrical interiority. It was both romantic and enigmatic. It was legible to white, black and brown audiences. Let the Music Play was the galvanizing hit Freestyle had been waiting for. Debuting on the Hot 100 in November 1983, Shannon's Let the Music Play a dozen weeks later pushed past Madonna's Holiday to become freestyles first top 10 hit. Casey Kasen counted it down.
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Casey Kasem
Brenda Shannon Green, who records just as Shannon, her recent number one dance and disco hit, is at number eight this week on American Top. Here's Shannon from Washington, D.C. with Let the Music Play.
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Chris Melanphy
Though it would wind up peaking at number eight. Trust me, if you lived in a place like New York or Miami in 1984, let the music Play had the ubiquity of a number one hit Echoing out of car radios and boomboxes citywide, it changed the game for dance pop. After Let the Music Play, Jelly Bean, Benitez went back and remixed tracks from Madonna's debut album that he hadn't worked on like the eventual number four hit Lucky Star. To give them more of a freestyle vibe. Shannon herself would try to recreate the magic of Let the Music Play on her own follow up hit, Give Me Tonight. It only reached number 46 on the Hot 100, though it did reach number six on Billboard's R B truck. That R B chart peak suggested that Shannon had established freestyle as a firmly black driven genre. But another 1984 single by Jelly Bean Benitez suggested a different direction. The Mexican, featuring vocals by singer Jenny Ha, was a number one club hit for Jellybean in the fall of 84, a cover of a 70s rock song by British band Babe Ruth. The Mexican featured more prominent Latin performance percussion than either Madonna's Holiday or Shannon's Let the Music Play, both of which were produced by Puerto Rican creators. Jelly Bean was tying freestyle even closer to its Latin roots. Jelly Bean would go on went on to score much bigger top 40 pop hits including Sidewalk Talk, a collaboration co written by Madonna. She even sang the chorus that eventually reached number 18. And for Madonna herself, Jelly bean produced the 1985 number one hit Crazy for you, a full on ballad that used the tools of freestyle in the service of a synthesized torch song. But Jelly Bean's the Mexican was closer to where freestyle was headed next. The birth of what came to be called Latin freestyle. Please Don't Go was a late 1984 single by Naobi Catalina Gomez, known professionally as Naomi. The Brooklyn born Afro Cuban singer is credited with recording the first universally recognized Latin freestyle hit with pinging rhythms that approximated the sound of salsa music. Niobe would later re record the song in Spanish as Note. By the time Please don't go hit number 23 on Billboard's Dance Disco chart in early 85, the Latin freestyle sound was already spreading to other more top 40 friendly hits such as Yo Little Brother, a single by Nolan Thomas, a New Jersey singer discovered and produced by the same team behind Shannon's Let the Music Play. Yo Little Brother peaked at number 57 on the Hot 100 in February 1985. Other singers adapting the emerging Latin freestyle sound, not all of them Latinx included Alicia Itkin from Brooklyn, who recorded simply as Alicia and scored a string of fiendishly catchy New York radio hits such as All Night Passion. And two turned on. As well as the Maryland family band Starpoint, an R B and funk combo fronted by singer Renee Diggs that only finally cracked the pop top 40 when they too adopted the freestyle sound on Object of My desire, a number 25 hit. To be sure, R and B acts were still experimenting and blending elements of freestyle with synth funk. Shannon herself came back in 1985 with a new album, do you Wanna get away? Whose title track topped the dance disco chart and reached the r b top 20s. But the moment momentum in freestyle had shifted by mid 85 toward Latin freestyle. In the spring of 85, Expose, a girl group from Miami formed by producer Louis A. Martinet, topped the Billboard dance disco chart with a frenetic Latin freestyle jam called Point of no Return. This got Expose signed to Arista Records, the Clive Davis run label that was about to tear up the R B and pop charts with Whitney Houston. But Expose would take two more years and a full lineup change to experience a complete breakthrough. We'll come back to Expose momentarily. In the meantime, a different Latina, a young woman from New York's Hell's Kitchen, born Lisa Velez, would give Freestyle its first real infusion of visual star quality.
- [42:43]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
Take it all.
- [42:49]
Chris Melanphy
In a genre often known more for its sounds and its producers than its singers. Lisa Lisa, as she called herself, an Adaptation of the 1984 Street Rap Record Roxanne. Roxanne would become Freestyle's most recognizable singer. Her debut single, I Wonder if I take you Home, which we played you earlier in our show, is still regarded as one of Freestyle's signature hits. Not the biggest hit, it only reached number 34 on the Hot 100 and only gradually over a five month chart run. But you might call Lisa Lisa's breakthrough single archetypal. The chugging, pinging production punctuated by vocal chops, Lisa Lisa's aching lead vocals offset by a small crew of male backing singers, the aforementioned lyrics wrestling with a teenage dilemma. That vibe was maintained on Lisa Lisa's follow up hit, can youn Feel the Beat?
- [44:15]
Freestyle Music Vocalist (e.g., Lisa Lisa or similar artist)
Can you feel the beat within my heart? Can you see my love Shine through the dark?
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Chris Melanphy
Which only reached number 69 on the Hot 100, but did well in clubs and on urban radio stations. What distinguished Lisa Lisa from other freestyle acts was how she was presented as part of an established group. The full title of her 1985 debut LP Read Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force. Full Force were a Brooklyn rap crew, and they were the ones who formed Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam as a multicultural black and Latin group. They auditioned and hired not only Lisa Velez, but also also the two men who backed her up as Cult Jam guitarist and bassist Alex Spanador Moseley and drummer and keyboardist Mike Hughes. This made Lisa Lisa an easier sell not only on pop radio but on mtv, which gave the visually striking trio more airtime than they otherwise might to a dance act that would pay big dividends later in Lisa Lisa's career. Meanwhile, by 1986, the freestyle sound was spreading in all sorts of unpredictable directions, Not Unlike Madonna in 1983. When radio listeners in 1986 first heard the group New Shoes spelled N U S H O O Z, many assumed they were black or maybe Latin. In fact, their single I Can't Wait broke first at black radio before crossing to top 40 radio. I can't Wait was on trend cutting edge freestyle pop and beat built around pinging synthesizers a la Shannon and vocal chops a la Lisa Lisa. But New Shoes Only when their video broke on MTV later that year did music fans learn they were a pair of white people from Portland, Oregon, a wife and husband named Valerie Day and John Smith. This was, in essence, the magic of the freestyle sound. It crossed over effortlessly. I Can't Wait ultimately reached number three on the Hot 102 on the R B chart. Day and Smith followed it up quickly with the Sound Alike single Point of no Return, which made it to number 28, pop number 36. R B. Freestyle also worked in the world of mainstream teen population. The Jets, a family band from Minneapolis comprising members of the Wolf Graham family, broke in 1986 with their top three hit Crush on you, a frothy freestyle confection. Though the jets would score a string of hits in a variety of styles, they kept returning to freestyle, as on their number seven hit Cross My Broken Heart. So whether it was freestyle soul like Rainy Davis's number 25 for R B hit Sweetheart, Or Latin freestyle like Nice and Wild's hip hop flavored top 20 club hit Diamond Girl. Or Transatlantic freestyle, as on British duo Mel and Kim's Showing Out. Produced by the UK high energy production wizards Stock Aiken and Waterman, Freestyle and its offshoots were now infiltrating a full radio dial's worth of hits. By 1987, the sound was becoming so prevalent and expanding in so many directions it was colonizing its own corner of the radio universe. And Billboard felt it needed to respond with a new chart. In the issue dated February 28, 1987, Billboard made a front page announcement. Quote, Hot 30 crossover chart tracks New Breed of Radio. Read the headline in the article the magazine revealed that 18 radio stations nationwide in cities from Miami to Alabama, La, San Antonio, Texas to Norfolk, Virginia had created a new hybrid format, one that played songs, quote, that were officially classified as pop or black, but were integrating dance records that didn't chart either as pop or black, unquote. For lack of a better term. Billboard called this hybridized radio format crossover and they named their new chart the Crossover 30. The week the chart debuted, placing high on the survey was Miami trio Expose, who had scored that big club hit in 1985 but but at the time hadn't made any other chart. Their mastermind and producer Louis Martinet had swapped out all three original members, replacing them with Miami based singers Joya Bruno, Ann Curless and Jeanette Jurado. Their new single Come Go With Me ranked number two on the Crossover 30 in its first week, months ahead of the song's top five peak on the Hot 100. Like all charts, the crossover 30 was, as I often say on Hit Parade, a feedback loop. It revealed to the music industry the public's embrace of freestyle dance tracks like Exposes and made those tracks more popular, popular enough for mainstream rotation. Come Go With Me eventually reached number five on the Hot 100 and it was quickly followed by a 1987 re recording of Expose's 1985 club hit point of no Return. Mind you, not every track on this new chart was freestyle at number one. That first week of the crossover 30 was an R and B hit with a beat taken from Washington DC's Go Go Music Club Nouveau's smash cover of Bill Withers Lean On Me. But in most other regards, the Crossover 30 in its first year was a parade of freestyle and high, high energy hits, whether from New York girl group the COVID Girls, Gay club singer Paul Lacocas, British pinup moment model turned freestyle singer Samantha Fox, Or former Shalimar singer Jody Watley, who kicked off her solo career with the freestyle flavored smash Looking for a New Love. The crossover 30 also revealed that even music that wasn't strictly speaking freestyle was building off of the club driven energy of then current pop Janet Jackson, who by the summer of 87 was six singles deep into her 1986 album Control missed the top 10 on the Hot 100 with her hit the Pleasure Principle. But on the Crossover 30 chart that freestyle adjacent jam went to number one. And the exposure provided by this new chart did wonders for newer dancers acts, giving them a minor league playground to conquer before moving on to the big Show later in 87, the Philadelphia Quartet Pretty Poison took their freestyle jam Catch Me I'm Falling to number two on the crossover chart weeks before it cracked the top 10 on the Hot 100. As exciting as all of this was, the biggest small C crossover of 1987 by any freestyle act came from Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, who not only topped the new crossover 30 chart, but even in a first topped the hot 100. The only question was whether they were already moving away from freestyle altogether. When we come back, Lisa Lisa conquers the charts, but also reveals Freestyle's dilemma to be embraced outside of the clubs and the big cities, how much would Freestyle stars need to water down their music? Non Slate plus listeners will hear the rest of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanphy. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis. Alicia Montgomery is the executive producer and Derek John, the supervising narrative Producer of Slate Podcasts. Check out their 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 subscribed 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. We'll see you for Part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melancholy. From.