M
aybe Liam Neeson said it best this year, summing up this brutally loathsome moment in history with a line in the Naked Gun reboot. The bumbling son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, he’s a man lost in the modern world, trapped in a time and place he can’t understand. “Electric [cars], huh?” he growls. “I remember when only three things were electric. Eels, chairs, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago!”
Look, we all felt that. This year was a disaster for our morale, our nation, whatever you want to stick an “our” in front of. But what was going on all over our culture, from the high to the low, was the fight against surrender. The fight against caving in to the despair you get watching everything you care about get bulldozed at warp speed. People wanted to laugh — like packed theaters did at Neeson — and howl, and rage, and feel.
The voices of the year — the music, art, movies, television, podcasts that connected in 2025 — spoke to that daily fight. We turned to our favorite artists not simply to drown out the destruction and betrayal we see around us (though we needed some of that), but to point to the imaginable futures ahead. Whether it was Ryan Coogler using music as a cheat sheet to our sordid national history in Sinners, or Lady Gaga making Mayhem as a burning-house party, we looked to people with something to say, voices who gave us something do with our hearts besides bleed and something to do with our rage besides waste it.
When Stephen Colbert got axed right after using the word “bribe” on TV to refer to his network’s payoff of a White House shakedown, it was the biggest, most shocking TV story in years. Colbert turned it into a rallying cry. “In September 2025, I have never loved my country more desperately,” he said from the stage after winning an Emmy two months later. “God bless America. Stay strong. Be brave. And if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor!”
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That remained the biggest, most shocking TV story in years — for a couple of days. Then Jimmy Kimmel got dropped in the late-night bloodbath after telling jokes the president didn’t like. That isn’t supposed to happen in this country, is it? When ABC suspended him, it was eerie to see the nation rally to the cause of a late-night talk-show host — by definition the safest, mainest of the mainstream in comedy — as if this were some inalienable right we suddenly needed to fight for. But it worked this time, as the public outrage forced the network to bring Kimmel back. All we know about next time is that there’ll be one.
Back when Colbert had a different job, playing his old Colbert Report “Blame America Last” character, he coined the principle of “Wikiality.” As he declared, “The revolution will not be verified!” That turned out to be prophetic, as our era gets more and more Wikial. Google AI rattles ahead in its quest to wipe out sources of information or ideas beyond its own glut of algorithmic brain rot, while the feds step up attacks on noncorporate discourse. (You remember “college”?)
So 2025 was a year full of moments, eras, vibes, all in the quest for a single minute or two that felt like it made sense. Artists went for connections that hadn’t been made before: Bad Bunny put his home not just on the map but at the center of it, with his epochal Puerto Rican shows, his blockbuster album, and the announcement that he’s doing the first Super Bowl halftime en Español, which triggered loads of doofus outrage. FKA Twigs stunned with her New Age erotic electro-yurt. KPop Demon Hunters brought to life a planet of quick-change neural adventures so carefree it was a jolt to recall that it’s the planet we live on. Mariah Carey did heroic duty when, asked if she was planning to go into outer space (as other celebs did in a humiliating product-placement stunt), she sneered, “I think I’ve done enough.” That speaks to the 2020s even harder than “I don’t know her” spoke to the 2010s.
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Harry Styles celebrated Oscar night by showing up unannounced to run the Tokyo Marathon, then did it again months later, running the Berlin Marathon incognito. He even appeared in St. Peter’s Square for the election of the new pope, proving yet again he is the most DGAF star in the history of F’s and the non-bestowal thereof. (By the way, Harry ran both marathons faster than the actual Oscars, thanks largely to Adrien Brody, the Meryl Streep of AI-enhanced accents. Rumors that he has finally finished his Best Actor speech could not be confirmed at press time.)
There were signs of life all over the screen. The year’s TV highlights included the savage satire of The Studio and South Park and the dark drama of Adolescence, Task, and The Pitt — not to mention however the hell you’d classify The Hunting Wives. James Gunn gave us a Superman for our times. Pedro Pascal was everywhere, from The Last of Us to Eddington, rescuing the planet in Fantastic Four and Dakota Johnson’s feelings in Materialists, the unintentionally laughable rom-trag of the year.
Onstage, I saw live shows by eightysomethings refusing to take the easy way home — Neil Young, George Clinton, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon. Most of them didn’t need to talk shit about right now; they served as a reminder of how many inevitable futures they’ve seen rise and fall. Willie Nelson picking his guitar through “Funny How Time Slips Away” at 92 wasn’t just an inspiration, it was a challenge: What are you doing with your slipping-away?
We entered the year with an excellent Bob Dylan biopic, with Timothée Chalamet finding acoustic folkways in his ghost-of-electricity cheekbones; we ended it with an excellent Bruce Springsteen biopic where Jeremy Allen White did the same with his born-to-run sweat glands. Both flicks lifted entire scenes from Purple Rain, because we all wanna be Prince, just like Colbert. It’s kind of beautiful how Hollywood keeps proving America is still madly in love with rock-star stories, the kind that the actual music industry can’t figure out how to sell.
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Justin Bieber, widely dismissed as a sad social-media-burnout casualty, came back standing on business with the startlingly excellent Swag, then returned just a few months later with the in-no-way startling sequel Swag II, which included Biebs’ seven-plus-minute spoken-word sermon on the Garden of Eden, “Story of God.” Cardi B came back strong with her long-awaited sophomore album, Am I the Drama? André 3000 dropped an album of piano solos he recorded on his phone nearly a decade ago. Dead & Company played a string of shows for the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary, with a shall-we-go sense of purpose; the Dead also released a cookbook with the brilliant title Dead in the Kitchen.
For Taylor Swift, the communal catharsis of the Eras Tour gave way to the hardcore jollies of The Life of a Showgirl. In a world where it’s easy to get distracted by calculating the discourse math, it was an invitation to put the cultural narratives aside and just listen to the fucking music for a few minutes. Result: an album worth arguing over, a gift she’s given us many times before. One of the brightest signs of life all year: One Battle After Another, with Paul Thomas Anderson turning an old Thomas Pynchon novel into a popcorn caper flick about dead revolutions bumbling back into being. It accidentally summed up the moment in a perfect way — funny, poignant, elegiac, gritty, crackling with energy, with star turns from Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, and Benicio del Toro. Leonardo DiCaprio represented an unlikely antihero for our times, stuck on the phone, trying to remember the password to answer the question “What time is it?” In 2025, he wasn’t the only one facing that question. But the artists who answered kept reminding us that tomorrow is on the way.
