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. Louis X. Reminding you to please rate, review, and subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever you are your host, DJ Louis the 14th, reminding you to please rate, review, and

subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever you are listening to this podcast right now. Thank you so, so much for helping us with that. Follow us on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod. I'm at DJ, L-O-U-I-E-X-V on Twitter and Instagram. We have merch, our niche legend dad hat, and I think multiple colors at this point at pop pantheon pod.com in our merch store.

And of course, we have our Patreon channel, Pop Pantheon, all access, where we give at least three bonus episodes of the show per month.

And that is available at patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon.

Also, gorgeous, gorgeous. My queer pop party, you know it, you love it,

has its next installment in Los Angeles on August 25th. The link to my tickets to that will be in

the show notes of this episode. Really look forward to seeing everybody there, my favorite

night of every month, pretty much. And that's about it on the housekeeping front from me.

This week's episode is the second installment of our Gwen Stefani series.

Last week we covered no doubt her band from the late 80s through the present day,

but really their run of canonical hits in the mid-90s through the early 2000s.

And today we're picking up after their fifth studio album, Rock Steady, and into Gwen's

solo career, which peaked in the mid-2000s.

This was such a great episode to tape.

Obviously, Gwen's solo music had a huge impact on me as a music listener, as a high school student who was of prime age to consume

her at the peak of her pop powers. There's so much interesting controversy here. There's a lot of

great music. So I really hope you enjoy Pop Pantheon Gwen Stefani.

If I were to name the top 10 albums that have shaped how I think about pop music,

Gwen Stefani's certifiably bonkers, extraordinarily controversial, and perhaps most importantly,

hit-stacked solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, would most certainly be on that list.

Looking back on it is like an unhinged time capsule, a gleefully polyglot musical aesthetic that somehow both perfectly enshrines the mid-aughts moment in which it dropped,

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