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.

And we've arrived at another B-Side episode.

Before I get into everything, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever you listen to your podcasts. Follow us on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod and me at DJ L-O-U-I-E-X-I-V on both Twitter and Instagram. subscribe to our Patreon Pop Pantheon all access at patreon.com

slash pop pantheon for bonus content access to our Patreon Pop Pantheon all access at patreon.com slash pop pantheon for bonus content,

access to our Discord. And access to the guest list at my queer pop party gorgeous gorgeous,

which is having its next installment on Saturday, May 6th. Sorry, that's a week from this coming

Saturday at resident in downtown Los Angeles. So I'd love to see you guys there. If you're a pop pantheon, all access subscriber, you can DM us on Patreon and get on the guest list. If you're not, buy a ticket using the link in the show notes. And I'd love to see you guys at Gorgeous Gorgeous. All right. So for this week's B-side, I invited the New Yorkers

John Seabrook back on the show. He was famously on our Max Martin episode. He wrote the book on

Max Martin, The Great Song Machine, which if you are listening to the show and haven't read it,

it chronicles Max and Stargate and the whole process of pop writing songmaking in the modern era that is just

an exhaustive and incredibly fascinating read so john recently wrote a piece in the new yorker

a very wide ranging discussion of ticot from niche micro pop stars emerging on the app to the way

that existing pop stars are interacting with

the app, how the app is affecting the sound of music, how the app is affecting the business of

music, how the U.S. government is interacting with this Chinese-owned corporation, et cetera,

et cetera. This piece really runs the game, and it's definitive, I think, about the state of the modern

TikTok ecosystem. And our conversation is equally diverse. Me and John get into lots of different

topics about TikTok, its effect on pop stardom, how it's changing the nature of pop stardom, how current

pop stars are interacting with it, how the sound of music is being affected by it, et cetera, et cetera. It was a really freewheeling convo between John and I and so many interesting things came up. I so loved talking to him. So one quick note before we get into this, this was recorded before the recent government hearing on TikTok in which the CEO appeared in front of the U.S. government, and there's been a big flurry

of attention on whether the government might actually ban the app. We do talk about some of the

ways that the officials or U.S. officials have been threatening to ban TikTok, but this was

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