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.

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So I'm back this week for the second installment of our Girl Group trilogy that we're rolling out

over April.

This episode follows last week's episode, which introduced us to a series of mid-century

girl groups who helped provide the foundation for what our girl group is. And now we're moving

on to another wave, a wave of girl groups that were defined by R&B and hip-hop aesthetics in the 90s, and we're exploring

an integral part of that wave, which was TLC, who is one of the greatest selling girl groups

of all time, released the biggest selling girl group album of all time with 1994's Crazy Sexy Cool,

and is one that is close to my heart, one of my first favorite acts,

one of the first pop acts that I really understood to be my musical taste, something that

really awakened me to who I was as a music consumer and fan. So this episode has been one that I've

been really wanting to do for a long time and I'm so excited that we finally got to this place and it turned out better than I could have even imagined. So I'm very excited for you guys to hear it. If you want to go back and listen to last week's episode before this one, it does provide some interesting context. You don't have to. This is enjoyable as a standalone, but I do think consuming these three episodes as a trio will give you the most bang for your buck.

I also want to clarify something about the trilogy, which is that this is a trilogy that is specifically focusing on American girl groups.

And I should have mentioned that earlier.

This is particularly a series about the history of girl groups in American culture.

We have plans on the show.

And I've heard from people who want us to talk about, you know, groups from the UK, like Little Mix and Girls Aloud, etc. I'm very excited to do episodes on them in the future. We have plans for that, but I just wanted to clarify for everybody that this particular series is focusing on American girl groups. We'll, of course, be back next week with another girl group episode

that's covering a wave that happened closer to the present day. So anyway, without further ado,

...