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.

The 14th, reminding you to

please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. Follow us on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod. Buy our merch. We have some new merch items up in our store over at Poppantheonpod.com. I think there's a tote bag. There's some other new goodies up there. Check out Poppantheonpodcom and check out our new merch. Also, our Patreon, Pop Pantheon, all access is available at patreon.com slash Potanthian for weekly bonus episodes of the show. This past week, Russ and I were digging into both Robin's new album, Sex Essential, and Charlie Puth's new album, Whatever's Clever. You won't want to miss that. Plus all of our amazing episodes there. You can also subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcasts app. All right, here's the episode that I've been waiting for. I don't know how many of you have been waiting for it, but as has become a bit of an inside joke, this has been something I have pushed Russ to let me do for a long time. It's a pop panampion deep dive on the quote unquote band Maroon 5, a career which I find

very interesting, even if I don't always find the music itself that thrilling.

Here is a group that began as kind of a tight pop rock outfit, making some sort of frothy

fun tunes and then ended up taking a pivot and sort of selling their souls in a way that I

sort of respect and becoming kind of like anodyne pop juggernauts for the ages. And I think their

story says a lot about the way pop stardom functions and the way pop music has sounded over the last

20 years. And making the episode was so, so much fun. So even if you don't love Maroon 5,

I really think you're going to

enjoy this deep dive. So without further ado, here it is Pop Pantheon Maroon 5.

I firmly believe that the pop ecosystem thrives on a specific symbiosis. For all your revered pop

monoliths, your Beyoncé's, your tailors, complex acts worthy of our intellect, steady, and respect,

the system also demands some of the opposite. For all that pop-timism, we must also endure,

and sometimes, even against our better judgment sort of fuck with

some truly lowbrow schlock. Maroon 5 is a band in only the loosest idea of the term, at least now.

At one point, they were actually a pretty solid pop rock outfit, churning out some memorable

airless confections that I'll never be mad at hearing and sometimes even actively enjoy.

Around 2010 though, they became something else entirely,

an algorithmic operating system updating every two or so years

...