Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all your favorite

pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon.

This is your host, DJ Louis X.

And I'm reminding everybody quickly that there are gorgeous, gorgeouses coming up in both cities in L.A. on May 2nd and in New York on May 8th. You can pick up tickets to either of those parties in the show notes of this episode. Can't wait to see you there. Don't forget to rate review and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. Follow us on social at Pop Pantheon Pod by our merch at Poppantheonpod.com and subscribe to our

Patreon channel, Pop Pantheon, All Access, where we are doing weekly bonus episodes of this show.

You can also subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app. I am here today with producer Russ

Martin, Russ. Louis, hi. It is so good to be here. It's great to be here. Love when it's just

fam in the house. It is just fam. I have been itching to do this episode for a long time. Today we are

going to do a conversation-based game called Step Up, Step Down. This is our opportunity to discuss

where in the pop firmament contemporary stars sit based on their stardom at this very moment.

So to run this back, if you're unfamiliar with the game,

think of the Pop Pantheon as this sort of grand staircase,

getting narrower at every step.

Every single step has fewer and fewer people who are allowed upon it.

We are going to discuss whether a series

of artists, recent track records, constitute a small step up or a small step down on that grand

staircase of the Pantheon. This is not an official tier adjustment. It's more of a checkpoint.

We are checking in, so I've pulled stats on a bunch of

artists who have recently been active with some form of release, some form of era. I'm going to run

each of them by Louie. We always debate behind the scenes when it is time to do one of these. And I feel this is the first

time that we've done it since actually October of last year. The end of the year gets crowded

by Christmas, by best of the year lists, all of that stuff. There's not a ton of new releases in

...