Welcome to Pop Panty on 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 there's a couple gorgeous, gorgeous pride parties coming up on June 20th. That's a week from tomorrow in

L.A. We will be doing a party at Los Globals in Silver Lake. And the following week, June 27th,

we will be doing a party in Brooklyn at the Sultan Room. Tickets for both are available in the show notes of this episode.

And especially for New York, grab them while you can because there are very, very few of them left. Don't forget to rate review and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. Follow us on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod. Merch is at Poppantheonpod.com. and our Patreon channel, Pop Pantheon, All Access, where we do weekly bonus episodes of this show is available at patreon.com slash pot Pantheon. This past week, Russ and I broke

down Addison Ray's auspicious debut record. Addison, so you won't want to miss that. Okay, for our

Pride Month content this year, we're hitting a LGBTQ icon Biggie. We're doing

the first of our two episodes on Elton John. Perhaps you've heard of him. The series will be

split up as follows. This episode will cover Elton's early life through his commercial and

critical peak, goodbye, Yellow Brick Road in 1973. And then the second episode will cover the rest of his career.

I had such a fun time learning about this man's music and his life, even though I knew a lot about the songs and I knew the songs loosely and the story loosely.

It was so fun getting to deep dive in this new way.

And Rob Sheffield is going to be here on both episodes of the show to help me and us get

granularly into the details of this man's story run. So it's been an incredible experience for me,

and I hope you enjoy it too. So here it is, without further ado, Pop Pantheon Elton John,

part one.

If you're under the age of, say, 50, do a thought experiment with me. Try to imagine a world where your song doesn't exist.

Or Rocket Man, for that matter, or Tiny Dancer, Candle in the Wind.

Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road, I'm still standing, where I could probably rattle off about 20 more.

Indeed, Elton John and his Uvra are such towering pop monoliths so fundamental to the bedrock of our culture that I sometimes actually have trouble fathoming that these songs had to be made at some point, that people lived lives on this earth, never having heard them, that it wasn't always a foregone conclusion that Elton John would exist and his songbook of modern standards

would serve as a de facto soundtrack for generations. And yet, that did happen. At some point,

a young queer boy named Reginald Kenneth Dwight decided to strike out as a musician and in turn

...