POP CULTURE'S LAST STAND

Turbulent Trump politics aside, Rolling Stone US reflects on how pop culture reached peak panic mode in 2025

- Rob Sheffield

Maybe 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 ZetaJones 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 cinemas 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 favourite 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 to do with our hearts besides bleed and something to do with our rage besides waste it.

When Stephen Colbert got axed 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 after winning an Emmy two months later. "God bless America.