← Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
The Twerking and Chatrouletting Edition
01:03:36
Even before the launch of MTV, the music video has been making pop songs buzzworthy.
Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:00]
Chris Melanfi
You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Welcome 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.
- [00:29]
Guest or Listener
But here's my number.
- [00:34]
Chris Melanfi
On today's show five years ago, in the late winter of 2013, Billboard made a pivotal change in how it formulates its charts. They added YouTube data to the Hot 100 more than seven years after the launch of the online video service and more than 30 years after the launch of MTV. For the first time in its history, the flagship US pop chart would count not only the songs Americans bought or heard on the radio, but the ones in their favorite music videos. In MTV's heyday, video rotations on the music channel never counted toward the Hot 100. But now, playing a music video on YouTube or the YouTube affiliated AllMusic channel Vevo could help power a song up the charts. As you can imagine, this meant that more than ever, a hit record could be fueled by all sorts of things besides the music, from explicit visuals to songs that accompanied comical clips.
- [01:40]
Guest or Listener
What the fuck say?
- [01:42]
Chris Melanfi
Or even viral memes. But arguably, within the first year of the new YouTube fueled Hot 100, no artist benefited more from the new rules than a young Disney Channel incubated pop star looking to grow up her image in a hurry. Miley Cyrus. Cyrus was popular music royalty and a former Disney Channel star who used visual imagery and viral video to reinvent herself. VideoPlay got her breakthrough adult pop hit, We Can't Stop all the way to number two on Billboard's Hot 100, and an even more eye popping video got her all the way to the top of the chart.
- [02:43]
Guest or Listener
I came in like a wrecking ball I never hit so hard in love All I wanted was to break your walls all you ever did was wreck me ye.
- [03:04]
Chris Melanfi
The week in September 2013 that the operatic torch ballad Wrecking Ball, Miley Cyrus only number one song reached the top. If I asked you to describe it, you'd probably have had an easier time recounting the visuals than singing the chorus. Indeed, throughout pop history since the 1980s, numerous chart toppers have been led by eye catching videos, which at times are more memorable than the song, at least at first. But video play also helped break songs that later became enduring. Today on Hit Parade, we examine the phenomenon of the music video. How does it make songs hits? How has it changed over the years? And what happens when songs that start as visual memes become audio wallpaper across the country. These questions apply to dozens of Hot 100 hits, but we can provide some answers by examining the very recent past and focusing on an artist and a number one hit that the pop world underestimated. Even after the song went to number one, which it did twice.
- [04:30]
Guest or Listener
Don't you ever say I just walked away I will always want you I came in like a wrecking ball.
- [04:43]
Chris Melanfi
And that's where your hit parade marches today. Two in different weeks in 2013 the week ending September 28th, when Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus leapt all the way to number one, and the week ending December 14th nearly three months later when that same song went back to number one. In so doing, Wrecking Ball set an all time Hot 100 record for the longest gap at number one for a song in a single chart run, but it also proved something more subtle. Wrecking Ball was going viral, but Wrecking Ball was also enduring. A pop song could be both a flash in the pan and a permanent fixture. When Wrecking Ball first reached the top, it did so in spectacular fashion, hurtling from no. 22 to no. 1 in a single week. That was largely because of its video, which featured Cyrus in a tank top, panties and boots, roaming with a sledgehammer around an industrial room full of masonry and a giant wrecking ball hanging from the ceiling. One she rode in the altogether. Billboard reported that on September 9, 2013, the ball video's first day on YouTube and Vevo, it drew 19.3 million views, beating the previous one day record holder, a clip by the boy band One Direction, by 7 million. Billboard counts only U.S. views for the Hot 100. But even with that limitation, the weekly numbers for Wrecking ball were staggering 36.5 million views in its first week, a total that was more than enough to send Wrecking Ball to the top spot in one fell swoop. In so doing, it ejected a smash by Katy Perry called Roar.
- [06:38]
Guest or Listener
I got the eye of the tiger, the fighter dancing through the fire Cause I am a champion and you're gonna hear me roar Louder, louder than a lion Cause I am the champion and you're gonna hear me roar.
- [07:04]
Chris Melanfi
Roar had a glossy, high budget and also popular video, a kitschy adventure tale of Perry surviving a plane wreck and becoming a jungle queen. That video has been viewed nearly 2.5 billion times on YouTube over five years, but it amassed that amazing total over time. For all its slickness, Perry's video was less buzzed about than Wrecking Ball. After taking over the number one spot from Perry, Miley Cyrus new hit remained at number one for just one week before succumbing in early October to Lorde's smash hit Royals. Royals too had a fairly popular video, a minimalist clip of the then 16 year old singing dead on to the camera while a pair of young male actors laze about and box each other in a near empty apartment. But again, it wasn't a water cooler video and oh my God, have you seen this clip? Like Wrecking Ball was at the time, Cyrus was making headlines not only for the risque content of the video, but also the people behind the camera. Wrecking Ball was directed by photographer boundary pusher and future accused sex offender Terry Richardson. The song too was the handiwork of an aggressive male behind the scenes craftsman producer Lucas Gottwald, aka Dr. Luke, who one year later would be sued by his former protege Kesha for sexual harassment and emotional distress. Ironically, Roar, the song Cyrus replaced at number one was also produced by Dr. Luke, then at the top of his game. If Cyrus was looking to push buttons, get attention and break with her past, she couldn't have done much better than Wrecking Ball. This begs the if Cyrus only chart topper reached the penthouse largely due to a racy video, can we actually call it the biggest song in the usa? Didn't her move to the top of the chart reflect more about our collective prurience than our love of the song? And wasn't Cyrus using a chart technicality to give herself a number one hit? The short answer to that last question actually all three questions is yes. But on a chart with a history of one off faddish but surprisingly enduring number one hits, Wrecking Ball is part of a long tradition. Ever since the music video was devised, critics and listeners have been accusing it of distracting from the actual music or claiming that the songs that become hits because of videos are fleeting and flimsy. But there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
- [09:58]
Guest or Listener
I heard you on Mo wireless back in 52.
- [10:05]
Chris Melanfi
That's video killed the radio star, the only US top 40 hit for British duo the Buggles, super producer Trevor Horne's project with keyboardist Jeff Downs, and it scraped the American top 40 in would you like to guess? Nope, Nothing with an 8 in front of it. The video that would famously Launch MTV in 1981 spent its only week on America's hit parade in in mid December 1979. There are three debut songs in this week's survey. The first of them is by the English duo of Trevor Horn and Jeffrey Downs. They call themselves the Buggles. Here they are at number 40 with a bit of social commentary called Video Kill the radio Star Video Kill the radio star horns and downs. New wave ditty was in effect launching the 1980s just before the ball dropped and ended the 1970s. I could frankly devote a half dozen Hit parade episodes to the history of the music video. Whole books have been written about the launch of mtv. What we're going to focus on in this episode, however, is the chart impact of the music video, primarily on the Hot 100. The day MTV launched on cable TV, Saturday, August 1, 1981, the number one song on America's flagship pop chart was.
- [11:52]
Guest or Listener
Where Can I Find a Woman like that?
- [11:56]
Chris Melanfi
Jesse's Girl was by Rick Springfield, a guy so telegenic he was crossing over from a soap opera, ABC's General Hospital. Appropriately, Jesse's Girl came packaged with a fairly slick music video for its day. So the perfect chart topper for the launch of mtv, right? Except Springfield had made it this far without the help of an all video channel and Jessie's Girl was out of the number one spot in just one week. MTV had no real impact on Springfield's chart triumph. Indeed, on the first day of MTV programming, the channel didn't play the video for the no. 1 song in America even once. The idea that the music video would become a sure route to chart dominance would take a while to bear out. In late 1981 and early 1982, a string of Billboard chart toppers gave no clue of MTV's penetration in America. Several number ones in this period, including Endless Love and Chariots of Fire, didn't even have official music videos at all. Or when they did, they were shoddy looking clips like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder's Green Screen Piffle, Ebony and Ivory. These early videos, most shot on cheap looking videotape, didn't play much of a role in the songs hit potato. It took about a year and 10 more number one hits after Rick Springfield for MTV to finally affirm its chart clout. The Human League's don't yout Want Me, a chart topper in July of 1982, utterly outclassed the other videos in MTV's rotation at this time. The sleek self serious and metatextual music video starred the heavily made up members of the Human League enacting the song's melodramatic lyrics both behind and in front of movie cameras.
- [14:16]
Guest or Listener
Don't, don't you want me? You know I can't believe it when I hear that you won't see me. Don't, don't you want me? You know I don't believe you when you say that you don't need me it's what you like to find to.
- [14:34]
Chris Melanfi
Be sure don't yout Want Me is an irresistible pop song, but it almost surely never would have dominated the US charts in the summer of 82 if it hadn't been for that video and for MTV. Prior to this moment, UK new wave was still pretty deeply unfashionable in the US. The list of songs we now consider turn of the 80s Britain pop classics that missed our top 10, our top 40, or even the entire Hot 100 is long and bewildering. From I Don't Like Mondays to Love Will Tear Us Apart, Mirror in the Bathroom to Tempted Just Can't Get Enough to A Town Called Malice, none of them major American hits in their day, remember, even video killed the radio star, now considered a new wave classic, only peaked at number 40 in America in 1979. With don't yout Want Me, the Human League essentially created the MTV to radio feedback loop, and the imminent US Dominance of such new romantic acts as Culture Club and Duran Duran became conceivable.
- [15:47]
Guest or Listener
My name is Rio and she dances on the sand Just like that river twisting through a dusty land.
- [16:02]
Chris Melanfi
Even after the Human League and Duran Duran breakthrough, the relationship of a big MTV video to pop chart potential was not always a direct one. While Duran Duran's US breakthrough Hungry like the Wolf reached number three on the Hot 100 in the spring of 1983 thanks to its cinematic video, the equally glossy video for Rio only got that song as high as number 14 on the charts. Even the early 80s video that looked the most like a big budget Hollywood movie fell short of the top of the charts. Michael Jackson's late 1983 John Landis lensed clip for Thriller, later named the greatest video of all time, Thriller only got that final single from the album of the same name, as high on the charts as number four in its day, it was actually a slightly smaller hit than Billie Jean, Beat it and Even the Girl Is Mine. Of course, if televised music video play had counted for the Hot 100, Thriller surely would have been a number one hit. But MTV play has never been factored by Billboard into the Hot 100. With good reason, given MTV's near monopoly on video play in its early years. But Billboard and the record industry did monitor MTV closely. By 1984, the labels began signing exclusivity agreements with the channel for their biggest acts clips. In October of that year, Billboard began tracking MTV rotations and the magazine redesigned its Hot 100 to include a symbol by each song indicating the availability of a video. The overwhelming majority of Hot 100 hits had a video. No label in the mid-80s would think of promoting a priority single without a music video. That fall, MTV held its first Video Music Awards, and the winners of the first Moon man statues were all hits made bigger by music videos, including the first ever video of the year, the Cars. You might think.
- [18:26]
Guest or Listener
I'm foolish maybe it's untrue you might all I want is you.
- [18:39]
Chris Melanfi
On the charts, music videos had a secondhand knock on effect. They drove consumers into record stores and drove requests to radio stations, which would then take their cues from MTV for most of the next decade. The videos that won MTV's coveted video of the Year prize were all made bigger by their acclaimed videos from Don Henley's the Boys of Summer.
- [19:03]
Guest or Listener
I can tell you my love feelings.
- [19:13]
Chris Melanfi
Two in excesses need you tonight.
- [19:25]
Guest or Listener
There's something about you girl that makes me sweat.
- [19:33]
Chris Melanfi
And the winningest video of MTV's first decade reinvented the career of an arch, artsy British singer who'd never cracked the chart's upper reaches, let alone topped the Hot 100. In the inventive clip for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, a cascade of stop motion animated figures swirl around the head of a very patient Gabriel, including claymation figures from Aardman Studios of Wallace and Gromit fame. The Steven Johnson directed clip was the most acclaimed of MTV's first decade, and it rebooted Gabriel's career. The former leader of Genesis in the 70s, when they were still a prog rock band, Gabriel was not a major hitmaker. He had scored One prior top 40 hit, the brooding shock the Monkeys, another song with a cinematic quality video that reached number 29 in 1983. But the innovative Sledgehammer video took Gabriel to a whole other level of fame. It broke into the Billboard top 10 in June of 1986, and by late July was the number one song in America. As Gabriel himself told Rolling Stone, I'm not sure that it would have been as big a hit without that video because I think it had a sense of both humor and fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me. I think I was seen as a fairly intense, eccentric englishman. At the 1987 Video Music Awards, Sledgehammer walked away with 9 MTV Moonlight. Still an all time VMAs record.
- [21:31]
Guest or Listener
A.
- [21:31]
Chris Melanfi
Video made Sledgehammer a smash. But the song, even without the video, was not a fleeting hit. To this day, Sledgehammer receives nearly 20,000 plays a year on U.S. terrestrial radio station, second only in Gabriel's catalog to his smash ballad in youn Eyes. The same goes for another video fueled mid-80s song that has proved equally enduring. In most countries around the world other than America. The Norwegian band AHA are megastars with piles of chart hits in the United States, they are virtually a one hit wonder. But what a hit Take On Me is a synth pop classic played more than 76,000 times on US radio last year alone. And of course, its 1985 video was what made it famous a live plus animated fantasy about a young woman sucked into a comic book by beckoning, winking lead singer morton Harkett. In 1985, AHA had even less of a Billboard track record than Peter Gabriel, and the video spent most of the summer on MTV before the song even cracked US top 40 playlists. Even after it reached the Hot 100 in July, take On Me took the better part of four months to scale the chart, finally reaching number one in October 1985 at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards. Take On Me took home six Moonmen, but it was hardly forgotten after its moment of Billboard fame. To a generation of millennials and Postmillennials Born after 1985, Take On Me is a beloved source of YouTube memes. The website Know youw Meme estimates there are more than 20 million search results related to the phrase take on me on YouTube. Even when divorced from its original video, Take On Me remains indelible. What MTV's first decade established was something that had been true since Elvis appeared on the Steve Allen show or the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. A great song is important, but a visual connection makes a hit immortal. Whether it's a TV appearance, a movie soundtrack or even a dance that goes viral. Like the Twist, visual aids help establish our audio favorites. When we come back, we'll talk about how the relationship between video and pop hits began to evolve in the 90s and how Miley Cyrus was raised by a man who depended on visuals and dance steps to score his enormous fluke hit. By the 90s, the connection between glossy music videos and chart success began to fray, given the rise of genres like alt rock that did better on MTV than on Top 40 radio and the channel's gradual move away from music videos in favor of reality TV shows like their juggernaut the Real World, which premiered in 1992. In the late 90s, the rise of teen pop, coinciding with the launch of the midday MTV after school show Total Request Live, did reconnect the Hot 100 with video ubiquity. Even if TRL wouldn't play more than a minute or two of a Christina Aguilera or Backstreet Boys clip before cutting to host Carson Bailey, Many of the just minted pop stars of the new millennium had actually been incubated on TV even before they appeared on MTV. With fewer hours of MTV's broadcast day now devoted to music videos, the recording industry sought other avenues for gestating pop stars. Avenues like kids television. Roughly a dozen major pop stars over the next two decades would be launched to fame on children's tv, most of them on the Disney Channel. That included new Mickey Mouse Club alumnae Aguilera and Britney Spears, and Mouseketeer alumnus Justin Timberlake of nsync. R and B pop crossover singer Christina Milian broke by hosting a Disney Channel series called Movie Surfers before scoring her chart hits. By the early 2000s, Disney wasn't farming out its future pop stars to other record labels, it was cultivating both their pop stardom and their TV stardom. In House, Hilary Duff was a star on Disney's Lizzie McGuire while topping the Billboard album chart.
- [27:27]
Guest or Listener
Feel the Thunder, I Want the Scream, Let the Rain Fall Down, I'm Coming Clean.
- [27:36]
Chris Melanfi
And mid aughts boy band sensation the Jonas Brothers soundtracked several Disney TV movies before topping the charts themselves. Like Duff, their top selling albums were on Disney's own Hollywood Records. But arguably no Disney incubated TV actor turned pop star went on to greater heights than Miley Cyrus, whose entire career was made possible through carefully coordinated millennial multimedia fam.
- [28:20]
Guest or Listener
Chill it out, take it slow when you rock out the show, you pick the best of both worlds Mix it all together and you know that it's the best of both worlds.
- [28:33]
Chris Melanfi
Like Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus broke her career playing a character on a Disney Channel show, in her case the titular star of Hannah Montana, a show with pop music baked into its premise. Cyrus played regular schoolgirl Miley Stewart, who by night was global pop sensation Hannah Montana. Stewart Montana's masterful disguise was a blonde wig. Miley's character on the show was the child of a fictional country music performer named Robbie Ray. The show was a smash, running for four seasons and among the highest rated programs in Disney Channel history. And the teenage Cyrus was a natural in the role, both singing and acting. Maybe that was because the show was a thinly veiled facsimile of Cyrus own life. The Robbie Ray character was played by Miley's own real life dad, who in the early 90s brought Miley into The World as Children Chart Topping American Royalty. Improbable as it might sound a quarter century later, Billy Ray Cyrus was the progenitor of one of the most successful country recordings of all time. His 1992 album Some Gave all spent 17 consecutive consecutive weeks atop the Billboard album chart. That's the all genre pop album chart, by the way, not the country chart, where it was on top twice as long. The album is nine times platinum in the United States and has sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide, making Some Gave all one of the best selling albums of all time, let alone country albums. And it was all fueled by one obnoxiously catchy crossover hit. Achy Breaky Heart was a phenomenon. Though it routinely shows up in Worst Song of All Time polls, Americans in 1992 couldn't get enough of it. The songs popped up. Popularity was exceptional on several levels. At a time when country was out of favor on pop radio, Achy Breaky heart made the Hot 100's top five, peaking at number four in the summer of 1992, fueled by its blockbuster sales as a casingal. While the country format in the 90s was selling exceptionally well in general, many country hits, even by such a megastars as Garth Brooks, didn't have music videos at all. By contrast, Achy Breaky Heart was sold to the public thanks to its video, which featured Billy Ray in his best Chippendale style beef. More significant was the dancing. The video introduced a specific country line dance to go with Achy Breaky, and it spawned a line dance fad that took over clubs and honky tonks across America. Within a year, other country superstars such as duo Brooks and Dunn were scoring with line dance hits of their own, complete with videos that practically instructed viewers on the steps.
- [32:19]
Guest or Listener
Baby meet me, I'm back We're gonna boogie oh get down, turn around go to town boot scoot, boogie.
- [32:30]
Chris Melanfi
Miley Cyrus was born in November 1992 with the country line dance fad her father spawned in full swing and his album still lodged in the top 10. Though Billy Ray Cyrus would never have a hit quite as big as Achy Breaky Heart again, it was his only country number one. He was a fairly steady Nashville hitmaker for the rest of the 90s and early 2000s as Miley grew into a child star like her dad, Miley would ultimately use viral video and a frisson of sexual energy to reinvent her career. But first she had to escape the gravitational pull of Disney, which in a carefully coordinated battle plan, began breaking the real life. Miley Cyrus as a legitimate, legitimate pop star while she was still acting as her alter ego Hannah Montana. The mid aughts was a bit of a strange time to launch a career as a pop starlet, because the machinery of hit making had changed after the launch of Napster at the turn of the millennium, which we talked about in our great war against the single episode of Hit Parade, industry sales had begun to crater, and with millions of consumers now tethered to white ipod earbuds, the recording business was navigating a radically changed chart landscape. By the mid-2000s, the music video was, if not dead, in fairly critical condition. MTV was no longer playing videos on any but a couple of brief spots in its schedule, mostly in the wee hours of the night and through about 2005. Sharing music videos online was a tedious and bandwidth hogging effort, but 2005 is when all that began to change.
- [34:36]
Guest or Listener
Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon, call Parnell just to see how.
- [34:47]
Chris Melanfi
YouTube was the brainchild of several former employees of PayPal who wanted to make video sharing easy on the Internet in a broadband enabled world. They were actually initially inspired to create the site by pop music's equivalent of the Zapruder film, the Justin Timberlake Janet Jackson nipplegate controversy at the 2004 Super Bowl. As millions of Americans scoured the web trying to find playable video of the offending incident after broadcast TV had scrubbed it from their air, the YouTube founders figured there had to be an easier way to share video. Launched in early 05, YouTube was live for several months before a faux music video On a December 2005 episode of Saturday Night Live served as an unwitting proof of concept for the technology. Lazy Sunday was a rap song about a pair of layabout New York City residents who spit rhymes about their quotidian plans to work off a weekend hangover at a Narnia movie. It was wrapped by SNL cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, the latter a new addition to the cast who'd made his bones writing parody songs as part of the comic trio the Lonely Island. When Lazy Sunday landed on a pre Christmas episode of snl, it instantly went viral, and dozens of viewers uploaded bootleg copies of the hilarious video to YouTube.
- [36:25]
Guest or Listener
Cousin yo, where's the movie playing at? The west side, dude? Well, let's hit up Yahoo Master by the dopest route. I prefer Mac Quest. That's a good one too. Google Maps is the best true dad.
- [36:35]
Chris Melanfi
The millions of views these videos racked up as Lazy Sunday made the rounds on blogs and early social media sites like LiveJournal, MySpace and the then new Facebook proved not only that YouTube had cracked the code for online video sharing, but that YouTube's ideal content, professionally produced, appropriate in length and inherently shareable, was the music video. In the second half of the Aughts, the music industry would battle YouTube for the piles of unauthorized music content that found its way to the site, which was making the fledgling service rich, eventually leading to their acquisition by Google, but none of which the industry was monetizing. It took until 2009 for the record business to find a way to get in bed with YouTube with the launch of Vevo, an all music site that used YouTube's video sharing technology, cross posted its content across both sites, Vevo and YouTube and generated advertising revenue against music videos for the first time. By the way, this was arguably the first time the music business had directly monetized music videos period in the 80s heyday of MTV. In a move the business later came to regret, the labels gave away their videos to the cable channel for promotional purposes. One of the first artists to benefit from the 2009 launch of Vevo was Miley Cyrus, who by this point was in her penultimate season on Hannah Montana and successfully scaling the Hot 100 not as Hannah, but under her given name as Miley Cyrus. The emerging star first breached the pop top 10 in 2008 with See youe Again, a song that took five months to squeak to number 10 on the Hot 100. But by the summer of 2009, Miley was becoming a regular hitmaker.
- [38:40]
Guest or Listener
Butterflies fly away not in my head like yeah Moving my hips like yeah. It's a party in the USA it's.
- [39:00]
Chris Melanfi
A party in the USA In August of 09, Miley's new single Party in the USA debuted on the Hot 100, all the way up at number two, fueled by blockbuster download sales on itunes. After the video debuted on YouTube a month later, the single, which had slipped out of the top five, moved back up the chart, returning to its number two peak. If the song hadn't gotten stuck behind the Black Eyed Peas juggernaut hit the 14 week chart topper I Got a Feeling, Cyrus would have scored her first ever number one pop hit. None of Miley's YouTube views actually counted toward the Hot 100. In 2009, Billboard was still using its age old formula for the chart that combined two primary pools of sales of singles, which by the late aughts meant digital downloads and radio airplay, which still meant terrestrial radio. But in the 2000 and tens, Billboard would begin expanding the formula for the Hot 100, taking into account a wider array of data streams. Spotify and other streaming services were added to the Hot 100 in 2012 because Spotify was still only about a year old in America to that point. Early on, demand audio streaming didn't have an enormous chart impact at first. First Indeed, in the early tens, most of the music streaming and sharing action was on YouTube. In a tale so often told, it has inspired a generation of hopeful pop stars. Canadian singing sensation Justin Bieber broke at the turn of the 10s on YouTube, which ultimately led to a signing by veteran R and B pop star usher. In 2010, the then 15 year old Bieber issued the single Baby, which became the first video of any kind on YouTube to break half a billion views. Again, none of that counted for the charts, but all the viral attention helped turn the song, which received only modest airplay on tween averse top 40 radio stations, into a huge seller. Baby reached number five on the Hot 100 in the winter of 2010 and went on to sell 4 million copies. Not bad for a song whose fan base was largely in middle school. But within a couple of years, YouTube and social sharing would snowball into even bigger chart hits. The top two songs of 2012, in fact, were arguably both made by YouTube.
- [42:00]
Guest or Listener
Hey, I just made you and this is crazy but here's my number so call me maybe it's hard to look right at your baby.
- [42:16]
Chris Melanfi
Though she wasn't actually discovered by Justin Bieber, fellow Canadian pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen was given a big boost by her countrymen who talked up Call Me maybe when the song wasn't even on the charts yet. Then in the late winter of 2012, Jepsen dropped the video for Call Me maybe and the song blew up, debuting on the Hot 100 in March and becoming 2012's song of the Summer by June. What made the song viral wasn't just its official video, a suburban daydream in which the crushing Carly Rae pines for a local boy who, in a final twist, might turn out to prefer men. It was also a swarm of viral user videos, everything from members of the 2012 U.S. olympic team to an assortment of Sesame street muppets uploaded lip dubs and covers of the song to YouTube, all of which fueled the song's blockbuster sales and airplay. A similar phenomenon fueled the rise of a much quieter 2012 number one smash. Somebody that I Used to Know was the only major hit by Belgian born Australian singer songwriter Gautier, but it wound up being America's number one song for all of 2012, an eventual Grammy winner for Record of the year, and again, YouTube played a major role in making it a sleeper hit. Gaultier's original video for the aching ballad A Breakup Lament, featuring avenging counterpoint vocals by female singer Kimbra, first appeared on YouTube in the late summer of 2011. The arresting clip was simple naked figures of Gaultier and Kimbra in an empty room, enacting their breakup with wounded expressions and strategically applied body paint. The video, even more than the song, became a word of mouth hit, leading to covers of the song across YouTube and an eventual Uber cover by the TV show Glee. A rare instance of the smash Ryan Murphy show covering a song still rising on the charts. By the spring of 2012, somebody that I used to know began an eight week run atop the Hot 100, and the video was eventually watched more than a billion times. It still ranks among the top 100 clips in YouTube history. Again, as of 2012, none of this YouTube activity actually counted directly for the Hot 100. It made those songs sell better and in turn show up on radio playlists, which fueled them up the charts. But both Call Me maybe and Somebody that I Used to Know were catchy pop songs by foreigners well suited to the American airwaves. What if a song was a YouTube phenomenon, but almost not? None of its lyrics were in English. And what if that video wound up being, for its day, the biggest YouTube sensation of all time? Gangnam Style by psy like Achy Breaky Heart two decades earlier was a pop phenomenon. Also like Achy Breaky Heart, it even came with a little dance, a sort of horsey riding maneuver by the playfully rotund South Korean artist psy. That, come to think of it, looked a lot like a country line dance. The hilarious video for Gangnam Style, which observers of South Korean culture pointed out was actually a sly satire of materialistic East Asian consumerism, was the first clip on YouTube to surpass 1 billion views. It also sold more than 5 million copies in America, making it a serious Hot 100 hit, basically the biggest K pop track in US history. At its peak, Gangnam Style had so penetrated American culture that it ranked 12th on Billboard's weekly radio songs chart, remarkably strong airplay for a song whose lyrics were 98% in Korean. And for more than a month, Gangnam Style was America's top selling download. If YouTube views had counted for the Hot 100 in 2012, Psy would have had K Pop's first ever American chart topper. Instead, the song peaked at number two on the Hot 100 stuck behind a Maroon 5 song, one more Night that was a terrestrial radio smash.
- [47:10]
Guest or Listener
Heart and I hope to die.
- [47:14]
Chris Melanfi
That.
- [47:14]
Guest or Listener
I'll only stay with you one more.
- [47:16]
Chris Melanfi
Night.
- [47:19]
Guest or Listener
And I know I said it a million times But I'll only stay with you one more night.
- [47:29]
Chris Melanfi
Try to tell you no By 2013, Psy would be within his rights, thinking he'd gotten robbed because two months into the new year, Billboard finally officially added YouTube data to the Hot 10054 years after the Hot 100 was founded, and more than 30 after the launch of MTV, video plays finally counted on America's pop barometer. The very first week they made the rule change, a new song with very little radio airplay and only modest download sales shot to number one EDM DJ Bauer's Viral phenomenon Harlem Shake. Unlike hits by Gaultier or psy, what made Harlem Shake a smash wasn't actually its original official video by Bauer. It was the hundreds of videos and the tens of millions of views of people in gangs of dozens of doing the silly pelvic thrusting, oddly white people beloved Harlem Shake Dance Harlem Shake. The song benefited from Billboard's new chart rules, which were exceedingly populist. Not only were plays of official label sanctioned videos on Vevo now chart legal, but YouTube fan videos incorporating at least half a minute of the original recording also counted for the chart. Bauer became an instant Hot 100 chart topper thanks to some 100 million video views that included some portion of the song, most of them viral fan videos. Bauer would never have another Hot 100 hit, and while Psy would release other smash viral videos, none came close to topping the Hot 100 after Gangnam Style. After the YouTube rule took effect on the Hot 100, the question was what superstar artist would be the first major beneficiary? From viral video and YouTube chart data, the answer was a former Disney princess who'd been off the radar since her TV show went off the air. The effort to transition Miley Cyrus from teen family entertainer to adult pop star had so far only half succeeded. A 2010 single and album issued just as Hannah Montana was going off the air, each with the gently ribbled title Can't Be Tamed, spent only a week or two apiece in Billboard's top 10 before tumbling down the charts. Clearly, Miley concluded, if she was going to be taken seriously as a boundary pushing adult, she was going to have to go further than such mild provocations. She took three years off before coming back with her catchiest pop song and most daring video Yet. We Can't Stop, an ode to drug intake and generally not giving a crap, co created by famed hip hop producer Mike Will made it was one of the top songs of the summer of 2013. And a big reason why was its video a gleefully surreal clip that looked like a lurid American Apparel ad come to life. Dozens of leotard and bikini clad teen bodies writhing, hip thrusting and most notably twerking a black derived booty shaking dance Cyrus adapted or more precisely appropriated from New Orleans bounce music. The song, fueled in part by tens of millions of video views, reached number two on the Hot 100 in July of 2013. It was only held out of the number one spot and by summer 2013's top song, a track that also benefited from a video sporting acres of unclad flesh. Robin Thicke, who like Miley Cyrus had been born into a showbiz family the son of TV stars Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring, had been scoring Blue Eyed soul hits on the R and B chart for about a decade. But Blurred Lines, his collaboration with Pharrell Williams in a knowing homage to Marvin Gaye's 1977 number one hit Got to Give It up, was Thicke's biggest ever pop crossover hit. Again, its music video played a role, a NSFW R rated clip that in its uncensored form featured topless supermodels cavorting next to Thicke and Williams. At the very end of summer 2013, Thicke and Cyrus, progenitors of two of the summer's top hits and literally most sensational videos, teamed up for a MashUp performance on MTV's Video Music Awards. It generated huge ratings and spawned dozens of think pieces. Thicke's half of the performance was relatively tame. It turned out Blurred Lines was considerably less risque and less interesting without its video, but it was especially so compared with Cyrus, who stole the performance and the VMA show with her rendition of We Can't Stop, accompanied by an army of African American twerkers who backed up Miley. While she backed that thing up, Cyrus was hounded in the press for her cultural appropriation. But the ginning up of controversy was only good for the Miley business and it proved a perfect setup for Cyrus next single and even more flesh bearing video, which debuted just days later.
- [53:51]
Guest or Listener
Thank you, I came in like a.
- [53:58]
Chris Melanfi
I already talked at the top of our show about how record views of the official Wrecking ball video in September 2013 powered the song to number one from outside the top 20. Usurping pop queen Katy Perry in the process. What I didn't mention was how the story went back to number one three months later in December. And yet again, it had everything to do with YouTube.
- [54:25]
Guest or Listener
So disturbing. Ew. That is not natural.
- [54:32]
Chris Melanfi
I think this is omegle. It's amazing the confidence he has in himself. In late November 2013, YouTuber Stephen Cardinal uploaded a super Cut video of himself wearing just his underwear and a bushy beard, lip syncing Wrecking Ball to dozens of unsuspecting users of Chatroulette, a then new momentarily popular video chat service which linked random users for a trip to the Wayback Machine of five years ago. We'll link on the Hit Parade show page to an episode of Slate's Culture Gabfest in in which the gabfesters try Chatroulette and are mostly traumatized by the results. Anyway, in his take on Wrecking Ball, the shaggy haired Cardinal parodied virtually every part of the original Miley Cyrus video, complete with him in his birthday suit riding a wrecking ball. His YouTube compilation captures viewers reactions on the left side of the screen, most of them delighted but flabbergasted because Cardinal's video contained the original audio of Cyrus hit in full views of the clip in the United States counted for the Hot 100, and for one week there were a ton of them, Billboard estimated for the chart week of December 14, 2013, more than half of the 18 million weekly streams tallied by Wrecking Ball were for Cardinal's video. That alone was enough to push Wrecking Ball back to number one on the Hot 100, where it ejected the song that nine weeks earlier had actually replaced it on Top Lord's Royals. It was Miley Cyrus third and final week on top of the big chart. This all brings us back around to the questions I asked at the top of the Is Wrecking Ball as a song a real hit? If millions of people are trolling YouTube to gaze upon naked flesh, either Cyrus's flesh or her devoted doppelganger Steven Cardinal is the Hot 100 accurately measuring a big hit song or just a meme? To me, the success of Cardinal's affectionate, comical video actually strengthens the argument that Wrecking Ball was a for real hit. If you watch Cardinal Supercut, his fellow Chatrouletters are singing along melodramatically to Cyrus ballad and they know every word. It's the MTV era all over again now made more participatory like we've all been invited into the hormonal fishbowl of Total Request Live. Or to ask more directly. Does sex sell? It always has. Does sex in a video make a song a hit? Of course it does. But whether the song is by Miley Cyrus or say George Michael in 1987 or Madonna in 1990 or even Cisco in 2000, Songs that start out as heavy breathing, headline grabbing phenomena do have a way of staying on the cultural radar. It should also be said that both of Cyrus Big 2013 hits we can't Stop and especially Wrecking Ball have endured on both streaming services and the radio. Neither one has the classic hits rotation of such yesteryear hits as Take on Me or Sledgehammer, at least not yet. But according to Nielsen Music, since they both came out five years ago, each of Cyrus hits has been spun extensively at on demand streaming services like Spotify. The more hip hop friendly We Can't Stop has been the slightly bigger hit, but traditional AM FM radio is the truth serum of hit making. Old songs will only stay on stations playlists if they keep listeners from flipping the station. And the sturdily written, passionately sung Wrecking Ball has become a modest radio perennial. It's been played 366,000 times on terrestrial radio in total, and more than half of those plays have come after 2013, long after the song fell off the Hot 100. In the five years since YouTube rebooted the chart, pop analysts have grown used to big budget music videos making songs explained explode up the Hot 100 from Taylor Swift to Nicki Minaj. More recently, however, the energy has been in audio streaming. Most of the music industry's growth and the bulk of its revenue have come not from YouTube but from Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and the other on demand services. Audio streams are what make most songs big hits nowadays, but video and YouTube still matter, and we here at Hit Parade HQ were reminded of this literally the week we recorded this episode. As I speak, the number one song in the country, a song that actually debuted in the top slot just days ago, is by the multi hyphenate actor, singer and rapper Donald Glover under his nom de rap, Childish Gambino. His shocking, disturbing, inflammatory and unforgettable video for this Is America, an indictment of our culture in the age of gun violence and social media, premiered in early May 2018, the same night Glover debuted the song on Saturday Night Live. In its its first week, this Is America was watched more than 85 million times on YouTube, according to Billboard. Of the 65 million US streams that pushed the song to number one, the America Video accounted for more than two thirds of that total. In other words. Americans have been watching the video even more than they have been streaming the song. Look how I'm living now Police be.
- [61:03]
Guest or Listener
Tripping up yeah, this is America I got the strap.
- [61:14]
Chris Melanfi
Divorced from its video, this Is America is a jarring, lurching song. It is also memorable and oddly catchy. While it may seem difficult at first to picture the song in regular radio rotation, Billboard reports that this Is America in its first week amassed a terrestrial radio audience of nearly 10 million, mostly on R and B and hip hop stations. Will it cross over to more stations, particularly at top 40 pop radio? Will this Is America endure as a song or just as 2018's video driven conversation piece? It's far too soon to say, but one thing is assured. Childish Gambino is now down in the record books as having a hot 100 number one hit. And if there's one thing we've learned from number one songs throughout the video age from don't you want me to Sledgehammer, Call Me maybe to Wrecking Ball, great videos can make songs legendary on my Kodak. Oh, know that I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. My producer for this month was Steve Lichtod, who is also the executive producer of Slate Podcasts, and we also had help this episode from Danielle Hewitt. Our senior producer is TJ Raphael and the managing producer of Slate Podcasts is June Thomas. 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 Gabfest 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 Melanfi.