(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Lawrence Peryer: I have this little running thesis that I'd like to either have you co-sign or disabuse me of.

Chris Molanphy: Okay.

Lawrence: It seems like over the last six months or so in particular, the artist deep dives you've done seem to be really preoccupied with artists who are renowned for a mutability or a reinvention. Was that intentional on your part? Would you agree with that? And if so, what attracts you to that, through a chart analyst point of view?

Chris: Interesting. I'm thinking of the last six months. Bowie is the obvious example. Billy Idol. Yes, mutability.

Lawrence: Donna Summer.

Chris: Technically we were rerunning the Donna Summer episode. That's an episode I did back in 2017, but yes, she's definitely mutable.

You know what turns me on and makes a great Hit Parade subject? And this would even apply to one I did in February, when I compared the careers of John Denver and Olivia Newton-John, which shouldn't have worked, and I've gotten both head scratches and praise for that episode.

I love an artist who defies genre or cultural expectations. That's what I'm especially turned on by. I love the fact that you look at someone like Olivia Newton-John's career and people forget that she was a country star.

Lawrence: That's right.

Chris: For the first half decade of her career, before Grease—when she died a couple of years ago, everybody was doing still shots of her in Grease, or "Physical." If her career had ended in 1977, she would have been remembered as a big country star.

I once compared her to Taylor Swift. I say that there are whole generations of Taylor Swift fans who may barely know that Taylor Swift started in country music, like Olivia Newton-John. Bowie is a more obvious example, given all his cultural changes over the years.

Another one that to me is one of my sleepers is my Pointer Sisters episode. Yet another group who scored one of their first major hits on the country charts with "Fairytale." They won a country Grammy in 1974 or '75, I think. They scored an R&B number one hit the same year. They scored their country hit with "Fairytale," and then they added new wave keyboards and turned into this bouncy synth pop group in the eighties.

Any artist who defies convention and proves that hitmaking can come in any guise—that's a big turn-on for me. That, to me, is a Hit Parade topic.

Lawrence: So it's not even just necessarily the genre hopping. It's being successful while doing it. That is interesting.

Chris: Hit Parade—I call it a podcast of pop chart history. The artists in question need to have made some kind of dent on the charts. It's not that I am a hater of indie rock or left field. My favorite band of the twenty-first century are LCD Soundsystem, and LCD Soundsystem have had scarcely any hits at all. As popular as they seem to be, their popularity is largely a mirage and based mostly in New York City. And I say that with great love and respect.

I once did an episode about the three angry young men of seventies British rock: Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, and Graham Parker. Their chart history is scant. You have this moment where Elvis scores a couple of random Top 40 hits in the eighties, this moment where Joe Jackson is actually the biggest pop hitmaker of the three of them, and a very brief moment where Graham Parker looks like he's hitting the Hot 100, but then he recedes very quickly.

That was mostly an excuse, because I love all three of those artists and I wanted to do something about what the angry young man thing meant. But generally, I'm looking for chart impact for a subject for Hit Parade. As I often say, the charts don't mean everything, but they don't mean nothing.

They give you a window into understanding how artists are received by the public, and some of the apocryphal stories about rock and roll and pop music revolve to some degree around the charts. You know the famous story that 30,000 people bought the Velvet Underground's first album, but all of them formed a band. The reason people use that very specific number is because Lou Reed told it to Brian Eno, reportedly, and he was checking his charts and royalty statements when he came up with that number.

Lawrence: Never a good indicator of what's actually sold, the royalty statement.

Chris: Certainly not the royalty statement. That's for damn sure. But that's an album that I think The Velvet Underground & Nico peaked at, I don't know, 195 or something like that. Yet it's a totemic album.

Lawrence: Bowie is an interesting one as it relates to the stories the charts do and do not tell. Again, whether this is apocryphal or not, it's reached something of a truism, especially within the business, which was that David was always bigger outside of America than in America. He remained a chart-topping singles artist especially in Western Europe, after his sell-by date here. He was always more renowned than commercially successful. You are primarily concerned with American charts.

Chris: Yes, because it's what I know. It's an American show. I have to start somewhere.

I have done several episodes focused on the British charts. The Britpop episode, by necessity, is mostly about the British charts, because Britpop, other than a couple of Oasis hits, really didn't hit here. My UK Christmas number ones show from 2018 is all about the British charts, because that is such a fascinating phenomenon.

If you are a chart fan, the fact that a country cares as much about the number one song the week of Christmas as the Brits do is fascinating. But yes, primarily I am focused on the American charts, and most specifically the Billboard charts, because they are the Bible of charts.

And the Hot 100 in particular is still, to this day, for all its flaws—and it has many—the best formulated chart, the way it averages different kinds of consumption into one chart to rule them all, as I like to call it.

Lawrence: When you say that, I hear that as a real earnest attempt to have it proximate what's going on in the world, right? It's a construct that's meant to reflect reality.

Chris: It's absolutely a construct. I often get interviewed and I feel like I am standing in for Billboard and defending their charts, even though I don't actually work for the magazine. No chart is perfect, and Billboard has tweaked the rules.

One of the reasons the Hot 100 has lasted nearly seven decades is that it's adaptable. It does not work exactly the same way it worked in 1958. On the other hand, very broadly speaking, its rules attempt to balance different forms of consumption. The Hot 100 has always included at least two pools of data, primarily sales of songs and radio airplay, and I call those two forms of consumption active fandom and passive fandom.

That, to me, is why the Hot 100 works, because radio is a very passive medium. You're leaning back, or you're sitting in your car and letting somebody throw music at you, and the radio stations have researched the crap out of the songs they play because they know what's going to make you stay on the station and what's going to make you change the station. That is one form of consumption.

The other form of consumption is when you actually go in and pick the song and say, I want to buy that song, or I want to stream that song. Those two forms of consumption give you, if you average them out, a pretty good read of what's most popular in America in any given week.

The other thing I say about the charts is that they only tell you what's popular one week at a time, which may sound obvious, but I think people think that the peak a song reaches is its stamp for all time. And there are so many hits that miss the top 10, the Top 40, the Hot 100 entirely, that are now legendary.

I did a whole episode about them called "Legacy Hits." The one I love to point to that everybody talks about is "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John. Peaked at number 41. Was never counted down by Casey Kasem. Not a Top 40 hit. And yet, if I asked you to give me Elton John's five most definitive hits, you're going to name "Bennie and the Jets," you're going to name "Rocket Man," but you're probably going to name "Tiny Dancer." And it never made the Top 40, unlike those other two hits I just rattled off.

Lawrence: It was stunning to me to hear that, because I had the same idea going into that discussion. It had never occurred to me, the role that Almost Famous played in that song's retro-iconic status.

Chris: Or what Stranger Things did for Kate Bush a couple of years ago. That went from a number 30 hit—her only American Top 40 hit, by the way—to a number three hit. That's insane. I could never have predicted "Running Up That Hill," one of my favorite singles of all time, would wind up a top three hit in America in the 2020s and be consumed by armies of Zoomers. I couldn't have seen that coming.

Lawrence: That's something that's so intriguing, because in this world of so many sync placements, so much media that needs music, these songs can just drop out of the sky randomly.

Chris: And it's not as if this didn't happen prior to the digitization of the charts. You go back to 1986, there were a couple of hits in the Top 40 that were made by movies. The Beatles' "Twist and Shout" was brought back to the charts in the summer of '86. I just read an article yesterday celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and that movie made "Twist and Shout" into a Gen X hit. I remember as a teenager, I thought I knew the Beatles, and I don't think I knew "Twist and Shout" all that well until I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

And then later that year, Rob Reiner's Stand by Me made the Ben E. King song a top 10 hit for a second time. When you think about what Wayne's World did for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 1992, it became a bigger hit the second time. It was already a top 10 hit in 1976 in America. It became a number two hit in America in 1992, because of the twin forces of Freddie Mercury's untimely passing and Wayne's World.

So it's not as if this didn't exist prior to the digital era, but the digital era just accelerates it. It makes it so much faster. Because of the way the Fourth of July fell this year—the Fourth of July was a Saturday, which means it appeared at the end of a tracking week—as a result of that, songs that were America-themed did better on the charts than they ever had before.

And Toby Keith now has a new biggest hit. Not number one—I think it reached number 11—a new biggest pop hit of all time, because his "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" came back not only to the Top 40, but to number 11 in the year 2026. So you can't make this stuff up.

Lawrence: Since the seventies, has there been a stranger top 10 hit than "Bohemian Rhapsody"?

Chris: Gosh, I don't know. Now you're making me rack my brain. I would point to maybe "This Is America" by Childish Gambino, which was a number one hit in 2018, fueled mostly by controversy and a really spectacular and strange music video. That's a very odd number one hit. "Rich Men North of Richmond" in 2023 is a weird number one hit. A guy singing in a field with an acoustic guitar and a dog at his feet. That's a strange number one hit.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is pretty weird. It's weird, but it's so operatic, and it's very catchy, obviously. I hesitate to say that it's weirder than some other hits. If you go back to 1971, Paul McCartney's first solo number one hit was "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," a song that changes tempo in the middle and frankly sounds like a Monty Python sketch. I still can't believe that was a number one hit in America. That is such a British song, and yet it was a number one hit.

Lawrence: I get suckered into this every year. I just recently watched the Queen performance at Live Aid. It comes around on social media or whatever every year. This year I was watching it and the thought that came into my head was, every human being interested in music should watch this. It's shocking. Even now watching it, I'm like, man, they really did that.

Chris: Yeah, and it captured what Queen did best. Frankly, I don't think I'm insulting Queen too much when I say their best days were behind them. Not only was Freddie going to die in another six years, they'd recorded all of their best hits.

Even if you include some of the latter-day ones, like "I Want to Break Free" or "Radio Ga Ga," those had already happened. They didn't even play all of their great songs in that Live Aid performance. They play "Hammer to Fall," which is like the third single from the album with "Radio Ga Ga" on it.

It's the majesty of Mercury as a frontman and his ability to command a crowd that makes that performance great. It's not even the set list. If I showed you the set list sight unseen, you wouldn't say, oh, this doesn't look like a great Queen set list. And yet it is.

Lawrence: It really is him. The band sounds great. The way they can reproduce their sound on stage is phenomenal. But really, he's stunning, and his voice—it makes no sense to me that that was really his voice.

Chris: Eighth Wonder of the World, Freddie Mercury's voice.

Lawrence: Absolutely.

You mentioned the Donna Summer episode, a little bit older now, the rebroadcast of that, and the Billy Idol episode. I found them both incredibly inspiring. I find Billy Idol's story—his silliness aside, his biography aside—he's quite an artist.

Chris: He's fascinating, because as I said in the episode, if I ask you what is the genre of Billy Idol, there's no one answer to that question. The guy was about four or five different things. Was he new wave? Yes. And I took pains to point that out. This guy is very legitimately punk.

He was part of the Bromley Contingent. He was there when the Sex Pistols were breaking. He is not a poser. He was the real deal. And then he pretty shamelessly went pop. So he's pop, he's punk, he's new wave. He's arguably metal. He hung out with metalheads, and he's in that Sam Kinison video next to all these long-haired hair metal guys.

He's even a little bit funky. He's a dance artist. Several of his songs were major club hits. "Dancing with Myself" was a club hit. "Hot in the City" was a club hit. "White Wedding." He can't be put into any one box. That's what makes him a great Hit Parade subject, because it shows how mutable popularity is.

I love the fact that the Hot 100 as a chart is called the pop chart, and I think we now have a definition of pop where, oh, pop is Ariana Grande, or it's Sabrina Carpenter. It's a specific strain of sugary sweet pop music—by the way, I love all that stuff.

Pop is also just short for popular, and anything that catches the public's fancy is pop. Billy Idol was a pretty great pop star, as much as he was a rock star.

Lawrence: That's right. The thing your episode pointed out to me, or reminded me of, was that he was all the things you just articulated on one album. It wasn't like he went through these phases—there are phases, but any given record could travel all that musical terrain. It's actually very impressive.

Chris: He only has a handful of top 10 hits. One of his top 10 hits is a rockabilly song. He basically took "To Be a Lover," which was an R&B record the first time, by the way, and turned it into electro rockabilly. Who does that?

His only number one hit is a cover of "Mony Mony" by Tommy James and the Shondells, just like classic sixties pop. He did it all, and he didn't differentiate.

Lawrence: It also reinforces something I've experienced when I talk to successful artists, which is that most of them are also music nerds, or have very encyclopedic knowledge of where they came from. Obviously I can't say everyone, but he clearly was knowledgeable about music.

Chris: Sure. I would say Billy Idol was a cool hunter. He had an instinct for what was going to pop next, and he moved in that direction, which was impressive. That's a skill. Many of our best pop stars—Madonna, certainly Bowie, Taylor Swift to an extent—they're cool hunters, and they move in directions and you want to follow them because they're doing interesting stuff.

Lawrence: The near misses episode was really fascinating. In your now multiple-decade chart analyst view, what are some meta or high-level learnings or conclusions you can draw about the charts over time? What are some things you might say are either truisms or observations? That's question one. And question two is, how do you factor in, or how do you think about, payola?

Chris: Corruption has always been part of the music business. There's low-level corruption and high-level corruption. I consider the high-level corruption really more the stuff that went on decades ago, the early days of payola, or the way certain artists, many of them Black artists, were robbed of their royalties.

If you read Fredric Dannen's book Hit Men, it'll make your toes curl, some of the stories he tells about the involvement of organized crime in the music business. And to this day, if the music business can find a loophole in the chart rules, they will use it. One of the things I wrote about was the practice that became rampant in the 2010s of bundling albums with tickets and eventually merchandise.

It became really just a plague on the charts, where things were going to number one that really weren't about the album at all. They were about a sale of an album tied to a ticket promotion. It started innocently enough with a Prince album back in 2004, where Prince on his Musicology tour was giving away copies of the Musicology CD, and somehow his people talked Billboard into counting that for the charts. Almost immediately they came to regret it, because the CDs were being given away for free.

So people were not even opting in or paying anything for them. Billboard said, all right, at the very least, we've got to have a rule where you have the option not to have the CD, and it's got to cost you something. And they kept tweaking the rules to try and make it more quote-unquote honest. But the business kept driving Mack trucks through the loopholes and finding ways to make the option so invisible that it barely even qualified, such that eventually, by around 2020, Billboard all but shut down the bundling entirely.

And that's what's legal. That's a point I often make to people. The thing about the charts is, I don't know if outraged is the right word, but your eyes should pop at what's legal, not what's illegal, not money and cocaine being slipped under the table. A lot of what qualifies as radio payola nowadays involves horse trading of, oh, if you play our record more, we'll give you this artist for your Jingle Ball concert, or stuff like that.

As we get better data, we learn more about human nature and about how popularity functions. Everybody divides chart history into before SoundScan and after SoundScan. For those who don't know, SoundScan is the technology that was employed on the charts starting in 1991, where Billboard for the first time had actual sales counts of records being sold, thanks to barcode scanners at record stores—the thing you use at the supermarket or the drugstore. That was hot new technology in 1991.

And so for the first time, the charts were really accurate, because Billboard was actually getting a piece count of how many copies that Mariah Carey CD sold in any given week. The fault in the charts prior to this was less about corruption. It was more about a lack of data. The technology didn't exist for Billboard to have piece count data.

So for example, one story I often tell is, in 1989 the rapper Tone Loc should have had a number one hit with the song "Wild Thing." There were certain radio stations that thought the song was too ribald or raw, and it only got to number five on the radio side of the Hot 100 formula. But on the sales side of the Hot 100 formula, not only was "Wild Thing" a number one record, it was number one by like a factor of three to five. It was outselling everything in the top 20, practically.

If Billboard had accurate piece counts in 1989, regardless of how much airplay "Wild Thing" got, those awesome sales numbers would have made "Wild Thing" probably a two-month number one hit. That's a pretty safe assumption. But because we didn't have the data, it goes down in history as a number two hit. I think it peaked at number two behind "Like a Prayer" by Madonna—not a bad record, by the way—but it probably should have been a number one hit for at least a week, if not a month. So better data changes our perceptions of what hits are.

And now the best data we have is streaming data, because prior to the streaming era, really prior to the 2010s, all we knew was whether you bought a record or whether you heard it on the radio. We had no data about, once you bought a record, how much you actually played it. If you bought a CD and then it was a beer coaster and you never played it once, we had no idea. That would be functionally equivalent on the charts to a CD that somebody brought home and played a thousand times.

What we learned when we added streaming data to the charts in the late aughts, and really for all intents and purposes the 2010s, once Spotify comes to America, was that certain types of records get played a lot. It changes our whole understanding of what hit songs are. This renaissance of Christmas music that's happened in the last decade is entirely because of streaming. You're not going to buy another copy of "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby, or "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey, or "Last Christmas" by Wham!

You're not going to buy that every year, but you are going to play it at your Christmas parties, on your phone, in the car, whatever. You're going to play that record intensively from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after Christmas. We now have the data to track that, and as a result, Mariah Carey has a number one hit every Christmas without fail. We didn't have that prior to the streaming era.

Lawrence: Since the charts have been even more data-informed, are there other surprises, or myths and folklore that we've been disabused of?

Chris: This is now going back decades, but one thing we discovered once the charts got computerized in 1991 with the SoundScan system—the way I like to shorthand it is, albums open like movies.

We used to think that an album would debut somewhere in the middle of the chart and rise to number one. That's not what happens. Think about the movie box office, right? When The Odyssey opens, it doesn't start at number 10 at the box office and climb to number one. It's a blockbuster. It opens at number one. The same thing goes for a new Bruce Springsteen album, or a new Whitney Houston album, or a new Mariah Carey album. They open at number one. For many albums, the best week or highest-charting week is the first week. We didn't have that data prior to 1991.

That's one thing. When the Hot 100 was computerized later in 1991, they had to computerize multiple streams of data, because again, the Hot 100 averages radio airplay as well as sales. We discovered that songs can lurch and yo-yo up and down the charts. Songs on the Hot 100 used to have these very tidy climbs. They would climb up the chart and peak and then fall back down very tidily.

What we discovered was that especially if it's a song by a superstar, it may debut really high, fall off for a few weeks, and then climb back up, sometimes even to number one, once the more passive fans catch onto it. We now have more accurate data telling us the way songs are consumed.

One other thing we've learned in the streaming era, and more recently, is that the charts have gotten a lot slower. That may sound counterintuitive. You would think streaming data would make the charts more rapid, but in fact, once a song catches on with the public, they'll just keep streaming it for months, longer than anybody would have guessed. The song that's been number one for most of the spring and summer this year, "Choosin' Texas" by country star Ella Langley, is now in its fourteenth week at number one, mostly because people really love that song. If there's nothing new by Taylor Swift or Drake or Olivia Rodrigo to interrupt it, that Ella Langley song just drifts back to number one and sits there for a couple more weeks. That's probably a closer approximation of the way music consumption works.

Lawrence: At what point do you think the charts started to reflect the media fragmentation that we've all come to accept as a truism? You mentioned Ella Langley. Now granted, let's factor me in for age. I've never heard the song that I'm aware of, and that's a fourteen-week number one. I don't think I would have been able to avoid a number one twenty or thirty years ago, even if I wanted to.

Chris: I think the monoculture lasted through about the 1980s. Now, I've had arguments with millennials and Zoomers who think I knew all the hits on the Hot 100, or I knew all the hits in the top 10 when I was this age, and now I don't know any of them. They think culture was more monolithic when they were younger. I think we all have this vision that when we were teenagers or twentysomethings, everybody knew all the big hits, and now nobody does. And I'm no better. I knew the hits of the eighties better than I knew the hits of the two thousands or 2010s.

But I will say that I started to notice atomization of culture by the nineties. Again, right around when charts got more accurate thanks to SoundScan, you started to see that you had the gangster rap fans and the pure pop fans and the grunge fans, and ne'er the twain shall meet. There was some crossover, but folks lived in their own little pockets. That's only accelerated every decade since then.

On the other hand, every Christmas when "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" by Brenda Lee and "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey go back to number one, suddenly we're a monocultural country again. So it waxes and wanes. But I feel like we've been atomizing for some time now.

In the case of Ella Langley in particular, only because I brought it up and you repeated it—country music is an interesting example. If we were having this conversation in, I don't know, Arkansas, that's the aural wallpaper that surrounds everybody. They consider George Strait a guy who's had fifty number one hits. You know what I mean? If I ask the average person in New York City to name five George Strait songs, I bet they couldn't even get to three.

Country music has been its own world for a long time. The reason we're seeing more country songs on the Hot 100—your Morgan Wallens, your Luke Combs, your Ella Langleys—is because we now have better data, and country fans, who were the last to adopt streaming services, are now on Spotify the same as the rest of us.

So now these Ella Langley and Morgan Wallen records can compete with the Drake and Taylor Swift records in the top 10, and we realize, oh wow. She may mean nothing to somebody on the coasts, but in the middle of the country, Ella Langley is a megastar. We now have the data to show that.

Lawrence: When you did episode 100 and you talked about your own life with the charts, there was so much in your story that resonated for me. Listening to Casey Kasem as a kid, trying to avoid having to go in the car somewhere during the top five or whatever, like I needed to know, for whatever reason. Writing them down in notebooks. Sunday morning to me was listening to the Top 40.

And in fact, I think that's probably around when I managed to stop going to church. But you called Casey Kasem the original poptimist. What is poptimism? What's the risk in that, or what's the benefit of it, being a commentator and a critic? It seems like it serves a bit of a biasing function.

Chris: Poptimism has been a source of much controversy in the pop criticism world. Frankly, the fact that I just said pop criticism, by the way, and not rock criticism, says a lot, right? As recently as two decades ago, you would have called what I do rock criticism. And rock—to use a term I'll borrow, I think, from either my friend Jody Rosen or my friend Douglas Wolk, who were both critics; one of them used the word to describe rock—rock was considered the median or the mean, the norm for what current popular music was.

We've pulled away from that notion in the last twenty to twenty-five years, partially because hip hop overtook rock as the music of youth and the music of rebellion. Partially also because we've become more progressive in our understanding that the high and low that separated somebody who plays a guitar from somebody who uses Pro Tools and a synthesizer, in terms of their cultural value, was loaded with all sorts of intersectional folderol that we needed to move past.

I was being a bit glib when I called Casey Kasem the original poptimist. I was being a bit cute. What I meant was, to the extent Casey cared about the songs he counted down—and there's evidence that he cared only to a point. He was already in his forties, I think, by the time American Top 40 was in its peak, and he probably went home and played Mantovani, for all we know. It's not like the guy went home and played Madonna. He understood that all different kinds of music should bump up against each other. That's what made for great radio and great entertainment.

When you talk to baby boomers, and to an extent my fellow Gen Xers, about what they loved about radio when they were younger, they would say that you heard more different kinds of stuff back to back with each other. In the sixties you could hear a James Brown record back to back with the Beatles record. In the eighties you could hear Van Halen's "Jump" back to back with "When Doves Cry" by Prince. There was a little more variety and a little less narrowcasting.

When you were asking me before, when did we all atomize—one thing that happened in the nineties was that radio in particular got very demographically focused, such that, oh, we're only focused on twenty-five- to thirty-nine-year-old females, or whatever.

Casey's American Top 40—what made it cool was that they were playing all forty records at the top of the Hot 100, regardless of their genre. And frankly, they got pushback from the radio stations that were running the show. Can we have a version of the show that doesn't play the country music? Or can we have a—? And for the first roughly twenty years the show was on the air, they said, no, this is it. This is the show.

They finally caved. As so many things happen, rap forced the issue. By the end of the eighties, as songs like "Me So Horny" by 2 Live Crew made the Top 40, the idea of Casey Kasem counting down "Me So Horny" was unthinkable to the producers of American Top 40.

Lawrence: It's like performance art.

Chris: Yeah. Rather than just expurgate all the rap, what they did was switch the chart they were counting down, and they counted down a radio chart, which was more focused on Top 40 airplay. I didn't like that. In fact, I wrote to Billboard in 1991, as I talked about in that episode, to complain about the fact that they weren't counting down the Hot 100 anymore.

To some degree, it was demographically destined that it couldn't last forever. This is why we can't have nice things. It lasted as long as it lasted, and I'm pleased that for about eighteen years or so, American Top 40 really was counting down the Top 40 records on the Hot 100.

Lawrence: It's so funny that you were a letter writer, because I have very specific instances as a young person coming up as a music fan where I was moved out of either outrage or fandom to write a letter.

But your point about the diversity in the Top 40, and it being on the radio. Radio was so important to me as a kid. It was a lifeline and it was everything. Whether it was Dr. Demento hidden on a Sunday night when I was supposed to be going to bed, or I can remember going to public radio and listening to new age shows. Radio started the musical journey I'm still on, hands down, and all ends of the dial.

But the Top 40 in particular, I think about music I might not otherwise have come by. I don't know that I would have known about Eddie Rabbitt or Juice Newton, or that sort of country pop of the early eighties. I don't know if I would have heard that music as a kid who was getting into classic rock.

Chris: Absolutely.

Lawrence: You don't strike me as somebody who gets hung up on the notion of guilty pleasures.

Chris: I don't. I like to say I don't believe in guilty pleasures. I'm a bit of a hypocrite when I say that, because sometimes I'm a little sheepish when I admit some of the things I like. Generally I feel like you like what you like. It's all grist for the mill. It's all pop to some extent. Ideally, you want it all to be mixing up together.

For about just shy of thirty years now, I've been putting together an annual mix that I call my summer mix, and it's basically my dream radio station. It's all popular songs, but it's much wider ranging than any radio playlist. Anything that's penetrating the culture right now, I put in my summer mix.

I am a firm believer that it should have a little bit of country music, and a little bit of pop music, and a little bit of hip hop, and a little bit of rock. There should be interesting juxtapositions. One year, I think it was the 2020 mix, I discovered that a record by country artist Maren Morris sounded really good coming out of a record by DaBaby and Roddy Ricch. A rap song into a country song sounded natural, because I feel like ideally this is what we're all doing.

If you ask most people what kind of music they like, they'll say all different kinds. And when you scratch the surface a little further—do you like country music? Oh no, I don't like that. People aspire to liking a little bit of everything. What's great about radio, ideally, is that it's exposing us to a little bit of everything. That's healthy for us.

I like the fact that more country music has wound up in the Hot 100 and in the top 10 this decade, because I think more of us should be exposed more to country music. And I say that as a coastal liberal blue stater. We dismiss that music, but there's so much great music being made by country stars, and it should be part of the stew, ideally.

Lawrence: Country's fascinating, because I don't think of myself as someone who's really listened to country pop in that post–Garth Brooks era. We're around the SoundScan era, right, when SoundScan made everybody realize that country was selling the way hip hop was. It's there in the lineage of rock and roll, right? All the artists that a lot of us look back to, they all acknowledge the role that more roots and traditional American country music played. But it's also interesting the way modern music has seeped its way now into country, whether it's the power ballad or hard rock or dance and hip hop.

Chris: Rap beats are in country music. Morgan Wallen uses trap beats on probably half of his hits. The same beats that are powering a song by Future or pick-your-rapper are powering hits by folks like Morgan Wallen. Jason Aldean was rapping on a number one country hit back in 2010. These tools are available to everybody.

And I love the fact that our most imperial star, Taylor Swift, started out in country music, because she determined this is the medium that's going to let me be a singer-songwriter and have hits. She leveraged that for a few years, and then she felt, you know what, I think I want to make pop music. I even want to make music that has hip hop infused into it.

But she's just scored a number one hit this summer that is getting played on country radio again, this song from Toy Story 5. It's part of the overall fabric of American music, and I like that they're coming back together again.

Lawrence: It's interesting about that hit, because it seems like once you leave country, it's hard to get back. It could be just that you can't deny her, but country radio is pretty good about keeping out people once they turn their back on them, and it's amazing that she's gotten that hit on that chart.

Chris: I write a series for Slate called "Why Is This Song Number One?" And when that song, "I Knew It, I Knew You," reached number one, I wrote about not only the fact that it was number one on the pop chart—that wasn't all that interesting; anything Taylor Swift releases, she's going to get a number one hit out of it—but the fact that it was embraced by country radio so rapidly. That is unusual, because you're right, country radio gatekeeps more than most genres, and it's cultural as much as it is musical. If they believe that you are not one of us, they won't play it, and they are very wary of carpetbaggers. Whether it's Jewel trying to have a country hit, or Bon Jovi trying to have a country hit, they are very selective over who they'll let over the fence, so to speak.

I did a book a few years ago about "Old Town Road," Lil Nas X's song. It was not my idea to write this book. I was approached by Duke University Press, and I had written a lot about "Old Town Road" for Slate, for my "Why Is This Song Number One?" series. They said, would you like to write a book about this?

And I realized that "Old Town Road" was a perfect prism to talk about the history of charts, the history of genre, the history of race and genre. What happened to "Old Town Road" in 2019, where it was briefly on the country charts and then folks in Nashville complained and Billboard yanked it from the country charts—that is the Nashville industrial complex in full effect. They are very wary of people poking fun at them, not being true adherents to the genre. They were very skeptical of Beyoncé trying country music. And of course race is a factor as well.

Lawrence: Does country have the same history of novelty songs breaking through on their charts the way the pop chart does?

Chris: Absolutely. Think of anything from "Take This Job and Shove It" to "If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?" There's a great history of country music novelty records. They've got a great sense of humor, and it's a lyrics-first genre. There's so much room to play with words in country music.

Lawrence: Talk to me about something you consider a guilty pleasure that you feel self-conscious about laying claim to. For me, it's Journey.

Chris: Journey is interesting, right? Because post-Sopranos, when "Don't Stop Believin'" became one of our most shared cultural artifacts, younger generations don't see anything wrong with Journey. Zoomers don't see anything wrong with Toto's "Africa." A ridiculous song, but a great song. As dumb as the lyrics of that song are—and by the way, the members of Toto know it's dumb too.

If you read interviews with them, they're like, David Paich brought us this song where he's like, I've never been to Africa, but I have all these ideas of what Africa should be. They recorded the song and stuck it at the very end of their album, and it turned out to be the biggest hit they ever had.

I don't know what I should consider a guilty pleasure. Owning up that there were one or two Nickelback songs I liked, because I mostly think Nickelback are schlock. I have to admit that "How You Remind Me," their biggest hit, is a jam. That's embarrassing.

In the episode you were talking about, where I did my one hundredth episode and I talked about my personal history, the first song that I was able to name and say that's going to be a number one hit was Bruce Hornsby and the Range's "The Way It Is." I have loved that song for forty years. It's now the fortieth anniversary of that song. It went to number one in 1986.

That is a resolutely square song. It was square even in 1986. I love the fact that it got sampled by Tupac Shakur and turned into "Changes" in the 1990s. And by the way, it's been sampled by multiple rappers since Tupac. Rappers retroactively made Bruce Hornsby and the Range cool in a way they weren't in 1986. That's the sort of stuff you're supposed to be sheepish about loving, but I don't know. There's a limit to how sheepish I can feel.

Lawrence: Me as well. I agree with you. You like what you like. I think what Bon Jovi is for you, James Taylor is for me. James Taylor gives me stomach cramps.

Chris: Interesting. Is it across the board? It's his voice, it's his guitar playing, the whole nine?

Lawrence: You know what really gets me about him? When he tries to be like a bluesman, I'm just like, what are you talking about?

Chris: Oh God. Yeah, even I'm a little embarrassed by "Steamroller."

Lawrence: I can't tease out the Carly Simon stuff. He doesn't strike me as really being a kindly, gentle guy.

Chris: Did you like his guest voice on The Simpsons, where he gets pissed off at Homer Simpson and talks shit?

Lawrence: I'm sure I saw it, but I don't remember. But I'm going to say yes, because I would appreciate that. He bothers me.

Chris: So even "Fire and Rain," no use for it?

Lawrence: It's just so trite. I don't know.

Chris: Yeah. All right, fair enough.

Lawrence: What happened for you with Bon Jovi? Did you always hate it?

Chris: I actually wrote an article about this about fifteen years ago, when I was a freelancer for the Village Voice. They did a series called "First Worst," where they wanted you to do a little essay about the first time you remember, usually as a teenager, thinking, I don't like this. What was it?

First of all, I've never liked Jon Bon Jovi's voice. Even when he's singing well, the quality of his voice has always rubbed me the wrong way. There's something cultural mixed into it, because I am half Italian American on my mom's side. There's something about the New Jersey–ness, the bridge-and-tunnel-ness of it, that has always felt hokey to me in a way that only I can recognize, because I am from a similarly hokey milieu. Something about it really strikes me as phony.

Also, I have called Bon Jovi's music captain-of-the-football-team music. It came out when I was in high school, and it was the music loved by the cheerleader types or the football player types. It was music for the people who won the birthright lottery. That was always my vibe on Bon Jovi, and I never got over it.

Lawrence: He doesn't have an Italian bone in his body.

Chris: And yet his name is Jon Bongiovi.

Lawrence: That's the other thing too, though. He changed his name.

Chris: That should piss me off in a way. It's almost the sort of base Italian-ness—and I can say this as an Italian American myself—that somehow it just rubs me the wrong way.

Lawrence: He was the opening act for the first concert I ever walked out of. I actually made it through his set. He was the opening act for Ratt.

Chris: Wow.

Lawrence: And this was, I don't know, whatever year that would have been, 1984. I was already agitated after sitting through him. I think I had realized at that point, oh, Ratt only has one song. I have to do this for ninety minutes.

Chris: "Round and Round" is a great pop metal song. I love "Round and Round." Great song. But yeah, they never had anything remotely that good. "Lay It Down" is not as good. Any of their other subsequent hits were not as good.

Lawrence: It's funny, because Bon Jovi is the kind of artist I should like, because I like power pop. I like hard rock. He's adjacent to so many things I like.

Chris: The thing is, I actually like a lot of pop metal, and not just the respected stuff like Guns N' Roses. I like Poison. Poison, for crying out loud. I could probably name five or six Poison songs I genuinely like.

Lawrence: That's funny.

Chris: And yet, I don't know, Bon Jovi just does not work for me.

Lawrence: I'm glad to be able to share in that, and I'm glad to be able to get James Taylor off my chest.

Chris: Good for you.

Lawrence: I think if I had to write my version of that column you just talked about, mine would definitely be James Taylor. I can remember being a kid and being like, why does everybody like James Taylor? I don't get it. And then feeling like I'm supposed to like him. That raises my hackles, and now I'm going to dig in.

Chris: My sister loves folk music and sixties music and seventies music, and she mostly can't stand Joni Mitchell. And people look at her like she's nuts. How do you like all this stuff and you don't like Joni Mitchell? Because I just don't. You've got to let people have their broccoli, or whatever the thing is that just doesn't work for them.

Lawrence: If you're going to let them like what they like, you've got to let them dislike what they dislike. I guess that's all fair.

Chart analyst, pop critic—are you the first one? And if not, is there a lineage you see yourself within? Tell me a little bit about that.

Chris: I'm laughing, because I often say it's a title I made up, and it's not as if I have no predecessors at all. It's more that joint beat, chart analyst and pop critic, the way I phrase it—that's what is bespoke.

What I noticed—I've been writing about music in some form or another since high school—for the first decade and a half that I was doing it, pretty much the only game in town was reviewing rock records. And when I wrote record reviews for CMJ in the nineties, I managed to review rap records and some pop records, so it wasn't as if it was all just indie rock. But rock was normative. This was the last decade of rockism, if you will.

My love of the charts was the love that dare not speak its name. It was not considered cool to be as into Billboard and as into the charts as I was. What I often say about my beat is that a couple of things had to get invented for my beat to make sense in the twenty-first century. Blogging had to be invented. Podcasting had to be invented. Blogging, because it aggregated niche interests in a way that the internet revealed that people actually care about stuff that you think is niche and uninteresting and nerdy and weird.

So I started hanging around a music blog from the Gawker empire, back when Gawker was an empire, called Idolator. And they noticed that I wrote fairly authoritatively about the charts, and they finally said to me, would you like to do some guest posts for us? And eventually I said to them, hey, listen, if I wrote about the charts every week, would you pay for that? And they said, yeah, we would publish that. And so they paid me to write a column that I called "100 & Single."

And what occurred to me at that time was that you had these music critics, rock critics, pop critics. These people were very important to me. I started reading Rolling Stone in the eighties, just like most teenagers. And they would occasionally talk about the charts, but only as a sideline, an addendum to what they did. But they wrote like critics.

Then you had the people who wrote about the charts, whether it's the people who actually wrote for Billboard, who were explaining what happened on the charts every week, or Fred Bronson, the guy who wrote The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, or Paul Grein, who wrote the original "Chart Beat" column in Billboard. They did phenomenal research. Fred Bronson in particular interviewed so many artists for his Billboard Book of Number One Hits. That's such a beautifully researched book. But they didn't really try to write like critics.

And it occurred to me that if you could analyze the charts like somebody who wrote for Billboard, but you wrote like a critic, with a little bit of wit and snark and piercing cultural analysis, that was new. Nobody was doing that. And so I made up this beat. To this day, when All Things Considered on NPR or some newspaper needs somebody who understands how the charts work but can talk about them like a critic, they tend to call me, which is nice. It's a beat that I made up.

Lawrence: That's great. I'm a fan and admirer both of that approach and of the work itself, and I very much appreciate you making time to do this. I would love to do it again someday, so I hope we get to.

Chris: I hope we get to too. This was great, Lawrence. Thank you.