Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon.

This is your host, DJ Louis the 14th, reminding you that gorgeous, gorgeous,

my queer pop party is happening tomorrow night, April 11th in New York City at the Sultan Room, and then the following Friday, April 18th at Los Globos and Silver Lake. Tickets for both of those

are available in the show notes of this episode. Please don't forget to rate review and subscribe to

this podcast wherever you're listening to it now.

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We have merch available at Poppantheonpod.com and our Patreon, Pop Pantheon, all access, is available at patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon.

We do weekly bonus episodes of the show there.

Just this past week, we sat down for a Lady Gaga-specific mailbag,

which was so much fun. I don't think you'll want to miss that if you care about mayhem, if you care

about Gaga and everything that's going on around Mother Monster right now, that episode was such a

blast. So that's available at patreon.com slash pot pantheon. You can click the link in the show notes

of this episode or you can subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcasts app. All right. So

I'm here today for a very special episode with Russ, producer Russ, Russ Martin, Russ. Hello,

welcome to the main feed. Hi, Louie. Thanks so much. I am around here a little bit more often lately. I hope that the listeners are happy to have me. Oh, they better be, please. If they're not, they can kick rocks. Delighted to be here. Yes, delighted to have you. Want to talk a little bit about what we're kicking off today?

Absolutely. So this is a game that we created and incubated on our Pop Pantheon All Access Subscription Show. It is called Step Up, Step Down. We created this as an opportunity to discuss where in the pop firm and contemporary pop stars sit based on their

stardom at this very moment. I want to encourage listeners to think of the pop pantheon as sort of a grand

staircase that gets narrow and narrower with each step. It's been a temple. It's been a pyramid.

There are many different metaphors.

Today, what we are going to do is discuss whether a series of artists' recent track records constitute

either a step up or a step down on this grand staircase of the pop pantheon.

These are not official tier adjustments in any way.

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