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 am your host, DJ Louis X. Louis X. And this a B-Side episode. Before we get into it today,

as always, please rate, review, and subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever you listen to podcasts. It really

helps us get recognized by algorithms and up in the ratings, especially on Apple Podcasts. So

thank you so much to everybody for doing that. Please follow us on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod and me at DJ L-O-U-I-E-X-I-E-V on both Twitter and Instagram. And send us your questions for the listener mailbag episode that we have coming out. We're taking questions on pop. We're taking questions on the Pop Pantheon. We're taking questions on anything that's even tangentially related to those things and also disputes on tiers. If you feel like I ranked somebody wrong, I want to hear from you. Let's talk about it. We're doing voice notes as a priority. So if you can record yourself and drop that in the email to Poppantheon pod at gmail.com, we get priority boarding to voice notes, but we will take written questions as well

if you don't feel comfortable recording your voice. So send us your questions and we will be

answering them in an upcoming episode. So this week's B-side is about the MTV VMAs. They're

coming up on August 28th. And I thought that would be a good time for us to both do a little previewing of the show coming up,

although I think the VMAs have become less of a cultural event than they've ever been.

So it's less really about us previewing them and more about us reflecting on what made them great.

Obviously, the VMAs were an absolute juggernaut in terms of their ability

to affect a pop star's career and trajectory for many, many years, starting from their inception

in the 1980s through even the early 2010s. And it's only really been in recent years with the

death of terrestrial TV and the waning importance of MTV, generally speaking,

and I guess of award shows more broadly that they've really lost their cachet and their meaning

and their ability to create, quote unquote, VMA moments, which so many of us remember as

some of the most important, exciting, thrilling, titillating, aghast moments that we've ever had

with pop stars. So I thought it would be fun to reflect

a little bit, share the history of the show, talk about some of my favorite moments and some of

my venerated guest, Dunzo's Troy McKee, who did our wonderful TRL episode a few months ago.

And it's just us kind of waxing poetic on the history of the VMAs

and sharing some of our favorite memories from them

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