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.

And before we get into everything, please don't

forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to it now. We are on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod. I'm a DJ, L-O-U-I-E-X-V on Twitter and Instagram. Cop our niche legend dadhat at Poppantheonpod.com in our merch store. And of course, subscribe to our Patreon channel, Pop Pan panthe on all access where you will be getting

weekly bonus episodes of this show plus so many other perks this week's patreon episode is all about

ariana grande's new single yes and this is of course the lead single from her seventh studio album

eternal sunshine which is dropping sometime in the near future supposedly rus and i are breaking down

everything about this song plus also talking about little Nazex's Jay Christ, as well as Jennifer Lopez's new single, Can't Get Enough. So really great episode about a bunch of new pop singles this week. And finally, gorgeous, gorgeous, my queer pop party has two upcoming installments on each coast of this great country. Next up is New York on February 3rd at the

Sultan Room in Bushwick. And of course, for Valentine's Day, we will be back at Los

Globos in Silver Lake in Los Angeles on February 17th. Tickets for both of those will be

available in the show notes of this episode. So for this week's B-side, I invited Billboards

Andrew Unterberger and writer Eric Bennett

onto the show to discuss a phenomenon that has come up that we were discussing on Twitter

late last year that I felt like was worthy of its own Pop Pantheon episode, which is why major

pop releases seem to be struggling to get second singles off the ground.

There's been a number of major pop releases,

everything from Adele's 30 and Easy on Me, to Harry Stiles' Harry's house, and as it was,

to Miley Cyrus's Endless Summer Vacation and Flowers, to Lizzo's special and about damn time,

and so on and so forth, where major pop stars seem to have one massive hit from their album and then struggle to Lizzo's special and about damn time, and so on and so forth, where major

pop stars seem to have one massive hit from their album and then struggle to get a second

single off the ground. And I wanted to unpack that phenomenon a little bit. Why is that happening?

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