Aida actually wanted to write a review of the year, but then world politics, biggie and ragebait got in the way.
There should actually be a review of the year at this point, Pop 2025 – because there’s always room for one more, right? I actually started telling you with shame that I just can’t get into Geese’s album, even though everyone loves it except me. Sorry, I’m ashamed of that too! But right at the beginning of the year the world is upside down again. I know this is no longer news after the last few years. Our current timeline can’t seem to do anything other than keep going one step further.
But just to briefly summarize: In some federal states, for example Berlin, the police have very far-reaching rights through new police laws. But there was no broad discussion about the balance between the right to privacy and supposed security because we see on our screens how people in Iran take to the streets and risk arrest, torture and death to protest against the system. But we can’t really concentrate on that, because on the other side of the world, Trump has the head of state of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife arrested – or more appropriately: kidnapped -, taken to the USA and charged with drug trafficking. Maduro, for his part, ruled as a dictator, and over a quarter of Venezuelans fled the country because of his catastrophic, authoritarian policies and state violence. On the other hand, invading a country, arresting (or as I said, kidnapping) the head of state and saying “we’re going to close the shop and the oil is ours” is not okay. So based on international law. And generally in international cooperation. Even if the ruler in question was a dictator whom the vast majority presumably wanted to get rid of. It’s complicated, but then again not at all, you can find everything terrible at the same time. And worrying about what this all means for the rest of the world, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, for Iran, for Gaza, Sudan and Congo anyway. My head is already spinning. On Russian state television, Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev fantasizes about kidnapping Merz. Good times!
Pop and politics as an inseparable unit
But this is a pop column, so we have to talk about the pop aspect of it all. And there’s a lot to discuss, because pop and politics were never really separate, but for a long time they at least pretended to be different worlds. That has clearly been over since 2025. Last year, the current US government repeatedly showed that it likes to use pop and internet codes in its communication. We remember: AI-generated illustrations of Studio Ghibli-style arrests, arrests as ASMR video. And the latest prank: A video of the kidnapping of Maduro, which the White House of course spread on social media, is accompanied by Notorious BIG’s super-anthem “Hypnotize”. Is Biggie rolling in his grave? Surely. But that’s what’s left of him, certainly since the release of the Diddy documentary.
Politics has always worked with pop culture codes and references, sometimes more, sometimes less obviously – but 2025 seems to me to be the year in which this practice has finally dominated everything. Maybe because the US has a government in power where a lot of people definitely spent too much time on the internet. Maybe because Millennials and Gen Z are now at the controls of power everywhere. And because postmodernism has finally prevailed: nothing means anything anymore, everything is endlessly remixed and taken out of context, and what generates reach is right. No matter what the content says.
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Ragebait as a political strategy
I think this is how videos like this are explained: The dissonance between the music – Biggie with his rather divided relationship to state power -, the military action, the humiliation of a head of state (even if he ruled in a dictatorial manner and his power was probably no longer democratically legitimized), all in the context of major world politics, is simply too absurd and blows up our collective brains. Click numbers and shares are exploding, people like me are writing think pieces about it, the reach justifies the means. It’s no surprise that a former member of the Trump administration, Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s key adviser Stephen Miller, is sharing a map of Greenland colored in the US flag on social media. Ragebait is everything, and it works. A post like this works just like a hook that is as catchy as possible and is designed to go viral on TikTok.
But: Will this work forever? Politics didn’t just become a pop culture attention business yesterday, but since 2025 it’s no longer hiding it. But I think at some point we as an audience will tire, the same provocation mechanisms will provoke less and less reaction, because one day we’ve already seen it all. It’s like the other big horror trend of last year, AI music: you can always pour more of the same thing into the audience. But at some point it won’t stick anymore. We’re already seeing the counter-trend in pop music: Not every pop song that’s perfected for TikTok is a success; instead, this year we celebrated unwieldy music like Rosalía’s “Lux”, Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico elegy “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOtoS” or Geese’s “Getting Killed”.
What do I want for 2026? That we collectively let this ragebait game come to nothing. That we take time for nuances. And I want subversion instead of mediocrity. That’s why I’m listening to Geese again.