The 8-Count: 2025 Edition
It's been a weird, weird year, Charlie Brown.
Hey, readers: The 8-Count is changing its format!
You can still expect a monthly newsletter—an eight-item digest of pop cultural topics—but from a different perspective. Instead of a “Coming Attractions” preview of the upcoming month (which is fun, but a little restrictive when you can’t see the future), I’ll be using it in a more free-form and reflective way.
The 8-Count will now drop at the close of each month, as a mix between new and existing pop culture: reviews of new releases & events, plus thoughts about older works & stories that are speaking to me at the time.
I’m thinking of it as a space for cultural connective tissue, to process, speculate, review, and yap about what flavors are emerging on our collective palate. Eight pieces of media, entertainment, and culture driving our strange little worlds.
I don’t know if anyone’s put it to you quite like this yet, but… congratulations on making it a quarter-century into the new millennium. (Your complimentary pimp-style walking cane will be shipped shortly. Pewter, brass, or rose gold?)
Genuinely hoping everyone’s been hanging in there as the year skids to a close. You’ll notice Pop Deco has been quiet for several months; mostly because “hanging in there” for me has meant being in survival mode. I know I’m not the only one; it kind of steamrolls your time and energy, doesn’t it?
Part of the unflattening process is to do what we can, though—and I’m more than happy to recap the eight pieces of pop culture that have kept my brain & nerves quivering throughout an otherwise debilitating year.
It’s hard to whittle down exactly what pop culture was in 2025, but I think most of us agree it was a transitional year. The themes, styles, and formats of our media & entertainment are either awkwardly stalling out, eradicating themselves, or slow-churning into something unfamiliar.
The way we relate to popular culture is mutating. There’s a heightened awareness in mainstream media that I’m not sure was there even in January. We’re collectively asking ourselves questions that haven’t been part of common discourse for a very long time: Why am I consuming this? Who made it? Who (or what) is paying the price for it to exist? Who’s putting it in front of me to watch? Does it have value to me? What was it influenced by, and what else does it influence?
We’re a long way from where I think public media literacy should be (no snobbery intended), but things are palpably changing. I think the pivots we’re seeing in creative & commercial work are making even the most detached consumer’s ears perk up a little.
Here are the things that have kept me all-ears this year:
Kendrick Gave Us a Demo of the Great American Game
“The revolution ‘bout to be televised, you picked the right time, but the wrong guy!”
I will never shut up about this halftime show. In the post-election dread, I think we all knew that Kendrick—the West Coast chameleon, the conquerer of Canadian colonizers, the Pulitzer Prize-winner, the fucking Gemini—was bound to deliver a message. He gave us his specialty: a culture and history lesson, where both expose each other’s deficiencies. Using his own hits, he embodied a life in America where your identity & behavior are constantly under scrutiny from Uncle Sam. (Casting Sam Jackson in that role is so brilliant it deserves its own essay.) Even if you watched the whole show on mute, the stage & choreography still told the tale, morphing between a neighborhood street, a torn American flag, a prison yard, a factory cadence, and finally a game controller.
Assimilation, masking, and code-switching have always been force-fed into the story of Black Americans, the same way they’ve also become means of survival and success within our country’s capitalist and white supremacist framework. The choice to wrap his set with the one-two punch of “Not Like Us” and “TV Off,” with a beaming Kendrick clicking the remote at us and GAME OVER looming in the crowd, was a pretty clear bookended nod to Gil Scott-Heron. Stop waiting for instructions. Flip the gameboard.
Screw it, let’s watch again. (Bonus: T-Pain’s live reaction. You’re welcome.)
Rosalía’s LUX Became the Crossover Crown Jewel of 2025
Speaking of flipping the gameboard, how about 14 languages on a commercial album?
I’d heard Rosalía’s name mentioned in pop music discussions for years, but as is the case with Bad Bunny, I hadn’t listened to her work yet. I don’t always reach for music in other languages, but as soon as I queued LUX for my Thanksgiving drive to Alabama, I knew I’d waited too damn long. This album is an exercise in musical escapism as a means to enlightenment. There are full orchestrations and cinematic refrains; tiny cadences of pop & hip-hop that chase strings up and down each track. Rosalía is a native speaker of Catalan and Spanish, but sings (sometimes entire songs) in 12 other languages on this project: Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian, and Ukrainian. The result is an opus that unites years of her own studies and philosophical questions.
It’s a project that operates entirely outside of every other mainstream pop channel: elevated, indulgent, spiritually adept, culturally boundless, and an entirely unique experience.
Let the album bless your eardrums: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music
Heated Rivalry Delivered the Yearning We’ve All Been Missing
Come for the queer sex. Stay for the best-told love story of the year.
Admittedly, I don’t read fiction often anymore. Had no idea Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series existed… and when HBO Max picked up Canadian streamer Crave’s TV adaptation, I have to wonder if they expected the mammoth overnight response that happened in the dead of holiday season. Anyone who enjoys a smutty book was drawn in to Heated Rivalry for obvious reasons, but series creator-writer-director Jacob Tierney gave us a lot more than fit guys ogling each other on the ice and in hotel rooms.
Shot in less than 40 days with a teeny budget, Heated Rivalry offers a queer love story that doesn’t lean on social tragedy, tropes, or the historical need to “kill your gays” to drive the stakes forward. Instead, it leaves room for character choices and feelings to develop their own stakes—and thus, a totally organic and delicious layer of tension, progression, and romance that none of us are seeing elsewhere. I don’t know where Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie have been hiding, but WOW. Both are the kind of transformative actors that amplified an already-solid project to an undeniable level of authenticity.
Hollywood should be embarrassed. They’re not in a position to turn down “risky” projects that aren’t massive IP—especially more complex love stories they pretend don’t exist. They should be taking notes.
Robert Wun Showed Us the Glamorously Frail Nature of Identity
Ever feel like you’re carrying a different version of yourself to work?
People ask us to tell them about ourselves all the time, but has anyone ever asked you, “Who are you becoming?” or, “Who do you want to become?” Could you even answer? It requires a certain degree of imagination: a process of elimination, a playing dress-up sort of deal. Fittingly, designer Robert Wun answered that question with his entire Fall/Winter 25-26 haute couture collection, “Becoming”—a showcase of the endless parts of pieces of ourselves being remade, disguised, exhumed, detached, or optioned off in our uncertainty.
Some models carry bags formed like blazers and bras, suggesting a performance of professionalism or femininity. Some are adorned with beaded “char” marks or stains, an emotional baggage parade. My favorite look is this half-armed vixen. The hem of her sumptuous black evening gown is stained with metal pleats, and while she’s got an armored mask on, she’s not wearing the plates meant for her torso; they’ve been made into her purse. Is she someone who actually considers her life a battle, or was she taught to prepare herself that way? Is she opting out of taking the fight seriously, or is she warning others that she was born ready? I love it when couture goes conceptual, and Robert Wun is one of the best thinkers in the industry.
Sinners Was This Year’s Barbenheimer
And every entertainment rag that left it off their year-end list is a bonafide hater.
Ryan Coogler, we were all familiar with your game, but you managed to surprise and delight even the nerdiest of film fans. Sinners was one of this year’s most rewarding and organic pop culture discussions, occupying the center of a rarely-filled Venn diagram: on one side, mass appeal and easy entertainment for casual moviegoers; on the other side, a stylish, nuanced, deeply-felt conjunction of classic cinema and American history.
Can’t wait for the cast and crew to own awards season. I still maintain that the cross-generational “I Lied To You” / ”Sugar Shack” dance scene is one of the best things put on film this century. That’s how you do visual storytelling. There’s not much else to say that I didn’t already rave about in my April review:
Perfume Genius Released Glory and Instantly Made Me Jealous
Or: This album called me a shitty writer in like 5 fonts.
When was the last time you heard a truly, nakedly introspective album? In the dust-shimmering tones of Glory, Perfume Genius (aka: Michael Hadreas) delivered the best self-reflective work I’ve heard in a long time. Some tracks examine the wearing of grief like layers of clothing; some describe not seeing a vessel for your true self, feeling like you’re a kidnapped passenger in your own body. Vivid, wandering, wistful, gay, and literary. Jackpot.
I mean, there isn’t a more painfully elegant manner of writing, “I’m tired of getting in my own way,” than this:
It’s a mirror, holy terror
Taking focus off the horizon
It’s a chorus reaching for us
Swarming locusts wherever you go
It’s a siren, muffled crying
Breaking me down soft and slow
It’s a diamond, my whole life is
Open just outside the door
Go get amazed and listen here: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Music
Lady Gaga Gave Us a Supremely Gothic World of Wonder
I would like to take her stage design team out for a steak dinner.
Sadly, I didn’t make it to the Mayhem Ball this year. I’ve seen Gaga live four times, each better than the last, but there’s one jaw-dropping piece from her latest tour that I wish I’d gotten to experience in person: that stage and set design.
We first saw it when the videos started coming in from her Coachella set in April: a gilded, sprawling, multi-floor opera palace that doubled as a party warehouse, complete with drapery, pillars, and balconies. Only Lady Gaga could build a Phantom-style rave in the middle of the desert, entering the stage dozens of feet high in a wide-skirted gown that housed a flock of dancers underneath. I know there’s a discussion to be had about the ridiculous scope (and cost) of modern pop tours, but my god, isn’t the fantasy worth it sometimes?
For a similar look at this incredible set, here’s her full show at Rio’s Copacabana.
TikTok Was Forced into Its Last Hurrah in the U.S.
PSA: It’s a propaganda machine now. Perhaps let’s relocate.
This has been a slow-burn bummer for years now. We knew American interests were keen on seizing the TikTok algorithm for the sake of controlling public narratives, even if they stalled a bumpy buyout with a couple of failed “bans” of the app earlier in the year. As of January 22nd, the main managing interests in TikTok will be Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle, and the 6th richest person in the world; his son just took over Paramount and lost Warner Bros. to Netflix), Silver Lake (a private equity firm), and a Middle Eastern investment firm called MGX (a Trump-sympathetic product of the Abu Dhabi government that’s been throwing AI money at Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA to build their bots).
The truth is this: no other social app has been such a nimble, far-reaching, user-friendly, culturally relevant tool for individual success than TikTok. And that’s exactly why U.S. leadership has spent years trying to rob China’s ByteDance of its insanely useful algorithm. The plan now, apparently, is still for Oracle to handle data security, to “replicate” the OG algorithm and spin it off into a separate app, and for new company TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC to manage all operational aspects of the U.S. app, including content moderation.
As with the destruction of Twitter, we’re losing an incredibly valuable way to quickly organize, discuss, connect, and learn from each other. If anyone has recommendations for an alternative, give ‘em to me. Otherwise, pour one out for the clock app this evening, and let’s hope for newer, freer ways to mass communicate.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be donning my ‘80s garb and joining thousands of other nerds at the movie theaters for the final episode of Stranger Things. 🤓
Happy New Year, friends. May we see each other more, support each other often, and create better opportunities all around. 🥂