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 X.

Reminding you to please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. Follow us on social at Pop Pantheon Pod. We have merch at Poppantheonpod.com. And our Patreon channel, Poppantheon, all access is available at patreon.com slash Poppantheon. Just this past week, we did an album deep dive on Hymes latest. I quit,

so you won't want to miss that. And we just announced last week our next installment of our main

pop girls party, which is moving to a new venue in Brooklyn called The Meadows. We're so excited.

We have an incredible array of hosts joining us from Rolling

Stones, Britney Spanos, and Larisha Paul to Legends Only's T. Kyle Mack and Bradley Stern. And our

friend Rivka Reyes will also be there with us. So if you want to grab tickets to that,

go to potpantheonpod.com or click the link in the show notes of this episode. We're so excited. That will be on July 25th at the Meadows. Tickets are currently on the cheaper side. They're going to increase as time goes on, so grab them while you still can. I'm here today with my partner in crime in podcasting crime. Russ. Hello, Russ. Hi, Louie. I'm excited to be gay and do crimes with you. Oh my God. Every

single day, that's what we're doing, right? Putting on our bandit masks and robbing the pop machine

blind. What we are specifically doing today is playing a little game that we call step up,

step down. This is something that we came up with over on our Patreon channel All Access, but have

now brought over to the main feed. Basically, it is an opportunity for us to discuss where

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

not adjudications of tier rankings. These are just steps up and down in the grand, grand staircase

of the pop pantheon. But every once in a while, I like to play this game with you because I think

it's an interesting way of talking about artists who are succeeding, artists who are flopping, what's going on and what

it has to say about the world of pop writ large. I have pulled some stats on the recent output

of several pop stars, and I want to chat with you about them. I can't wait because all we ever do is chat about

pop stars and make judgments about them and that's why we exist as a podcast and a people. So the first

time that we tried this on the main feed, we talked about Drake. And of course, in February, Drake released this collaborative album, some sexy

songs for you with Party Next Door. It opened pretty big, 246,000 units, nearly 300 million

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