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 Louie, the 14th.

This weekend is our main pop girls dance party at Parkside Lounge in the East Village. This is happening on Saturday, February 1st. Tickets are quickly running out, so grab them while you still can. We will have some available at the door, but they will be cheaper online the sooner you grab them. So get them at the link in the show notes in this episode, or you can grab them at poppathyonpod.com. Gorgeous, gorgeous. My queer pop party is happening in L.A. on February 14th, this will be our Valentine's Day party. A portion of the proceeds is being donated to L.A. Wildfire relief. Really excited to be back in L.A. DJ and Gorgeous Gorgeous. That will be at Los Glo Globos again on February 14th. And you can also purchase tickets in the show notes of this episode. I want to also make a quick call out to say that we're always on the lookout for new audio editors. If you are an audio editor and you want to do some freelance work with Pop Pantheon, please email us a resume and explain your interest to Poppantheon pod at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you and speak with you and maybe talk about working with us here on the podcast. Also, we are now at the end of accepting mailbag questions for our upcoming mailbag episode. So mail us all your pop questions, your pop pantheon questions to pop pantheon questions to pop pantheon pod at gmail.com, and we will be answering some of them

on an upcoming mailbag episode. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. We're on social at Pop Pantheon pod. Merch is at Poppantheon.com. And our Patreon channel where we do weekly bonus episodes of this show is at patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon. This week we had Friend of the Pod,

Rich Joswiak on to name our Grammy. bonus episodes of this show is at patreon.com slash pot pantheon this week we had friend of the pod rich

juzziwiac on to name our grammy nomination predictions the grammies are happening this weekend

and to discuss fkat twig's new record usexua which came out last week so that was a really fun

conversation you don't want to miss it you can subscribe at the link in the show notes of this episode

you can go to patreon.com slash pot pantheon or You can subscribe with the link in the show notes of this episode. You can go to patreon.com slash Poppanthian or you can subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app. All right. So Kendrick Lamar is the headliner at the Super Bowl in a couple of weeks. And we thought that was the perfect opportunity to dive in on one of the most naughty, erudite complex. Rappers come pop stars in existence at the moment. It was such an interesting deep dive, a really dense one, but I think a really informative one for people that maybe know of Kendrick on some level, but want to understand the complexities of his work. I learned a lot. So this will be the first of two episodes. This episode will cover his early life through 2015's to Pimp a Butterfly, and the next episode will cover Damn, his 2017 album, through

his recent rap battle with Drake and set up what will surely be a memorable performance on the

Super Bowl. So without further ado, here is Kendrick Lamar Part 1.

Kendrick Lamar is currently fresh off vanquishing Drake in their recent rap battle royale,

not only the biggest rapper in the world, but with a Super Bowl headlighting performance

just two weeks away, he is poised to claim his place amongst a vaunted pop royalty,

taking the stage for a career retrospective during our nation's most watched event.

How unlikely is this?

Not only that a boy from Compton would rise to the top of the pop pyramid,

but that a cerebral, socially conscious, esoteric,

sometimes unfathomably Byzantine rap classicists,

could also serve as one of our most populous and universally beloved superstars.

It's a pretty singular intersection of the erudite and the chart

scaling that it seems like perhaps only Kendrick Lamar could properly occupy, having both

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