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.

I'm your host, DJ Louis the 14th, and this is a special edition of the show

where, because we just completed a three-episode run on the epic career and discography of the

great Madonna, we thought it would be good for us to publish an episode that came out way back in April, 2021.

So nearly two years ago.

Wow, it's incredible how long we've been doing the show.

And this was our original Madonna episode.

Now, this episode with Jezebel's Rich Joswiak, a Pop Pantheon fave, who I would like to add is currently featured

on our latest episode of Pop Pantheon All Access, which is our Patreon channel. And we just

put out an episode a couple days ago where Rich and I are deep diving into Madonna's primary pop

counterpart, Janet Jackson's seminal 1997 album, The Velvet Rope.

And I just wanted to take an opportunity to throw that in here.

If you're not a subscriber to Patreon, if you subscribe at the icon tier, you're getting at least

one bonus episode of the show per month, access to our Discord channel, access to the guest list

at my pop party, gorgeous, gorgeous here in L.A. and so many other perks.

So our latest episode is a deep dive into the velvet rope and Rich who is the guest on this episode we're about to

get into on Madonna is also our guest on that so subscribe at patreon.com slash pot pantheon or I will

also put the link in the show notes of this episode but back to to this episode, which is one that is divisive,

I would say. Some people think it's the crown jewel of the early episodes of the show. Some people

really found it frustrating at the time because we chose to focus the whole episode on a period

of Madonna's career where she was not at her peak. I want to reiterate something I've said in

...