The Thing About Pop Culture Lists

It's the most wonderful time of the year. Beyond the traditions of the holiday season, this is the moment when editors, critics, and content creators across the media landscape engage in an annual tradition of their own: cultural stock-taking.

From TikTok trends to Billboard hits, viral moments, and blockbuster films, writers compile and rank the phenomena that captured our collective attention most over the past twelve months in hopes of contextualizing our shared lived experiences. However, this practice of inventorying the year's most significant cultural moments is hamstrung by our superficial understanding of culture. But with a better understanding, we can make a better list.

We refer to these happenings as "cultural" because they consist of cultural productions like music, art, film, and dance. Yet, the yardstick by which they are measured, analyzed, and sorted as the "year's defining pop culture moments" is disproportionately based on popularity, not culture.

And that's the red herring: we often mistake popularity for culture, but they are not analogous, though often erroneously used interchangeably. The writer Charles Bukowski refers to popularity as the state of being well-known or well-regarded by many people. This is fitting considering its etymology. "popular" is derived from the Latin word "populus," meaning people, so popular is concerned with the prevalence of something within the general public.

Culture, on the other hand, is something altogether different. Culture is a meaning-making system that helps us translate the world and establish a set of conventions and expectations for people like us. Is the rug décor, a souvenir, or a place of worship? Well, that depends. The object's meaning is predicated on who you are and how you see the world as a result of your cultural subscription—and, as a result, you engage the rug accordingly.

The difference between popularity and culture is material. Popularity is the extent to which something is known. Culture is the system by which meaning is made and manifested. One is based on prevalence (popularity), and the other is rooted in meaning (culture). The variance between the two is sizeable, necessitating the need to distinguish one from the other and combat the colloquial shorthand traditionally used to conjure one with the other.

Culture is not a codeword for popularity, and what's popular isn't necessarily significantly cultural. You may know the ending to this phrase, "800-588-2300 __________," (you may have even sung the jingle in your head) but it likely doesn't have much meaning in your mind beyond being a carpet company's commercial mnemonic. However, pop culture is the extent to which something is well-known and full of meaning. Juxtapose the aforementioned Empire commercial with Nike's "Just Do It," you'll realize that the differences are far more than just hairsplitting. One is well-known (Empire), and the other is both prevalent and meaningful (Nike).

This reframing requires reevaluating how we assess the biggest pop cultural moments of the year. Instead of identifying the most popular events of the past twelve months, we should be ranking the moments that were (1) the most prevalent and (2) the most meaningful. It's not a popularity contest; it's a meaning-making contest, where the most meaningful happenings were also the most widespread wins.

For instance, both Billboard and Spotify crowned Taylor Swift as the top artist of 2024, largely because of her sold-out Eras tour and high volume of streams. Yet, with the launch of her genre-defying country album, Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé's impact in 2024 was more impactful. Taylor is extremely popular, no doubt, but Beyoncé has both prevalence and richer meaning—one that defined the year and gave context to a broader discourse around gatekeeping and appropriation.

Similarly, consider Sabrina Carpenter and her hit record "Espresso." This was the most streamed song in the country this year, and to no surprise, it was everywhere. Shopping malls, TikTok videos, commercials, and just about every teenage girl's playlist had this song on repeat since it dropped in April this year. But when we compare "Espresso" to Kendrick Lamar's "They Not Like Us," we see a significant difference. "They Not Like Us" wasn't just a popular record; it was a catalyst that ignited a conversation about race, belonging, and what it means to be hip-hop.

Beyoncé and Kendrick produced cultural work that extended popularity; they helped us make meaning of the world around us. They influenced the cultural conventions of society—our beliefs, artifacts, behaviors, and language. It's phenomena like these that define a year. They change us, both how we see social life and how we navigate through it. Poor Drake knows this better than most.

This proposed rubric of assessment (the combination of prevalence and meaning) not only helps to reduce the seemingly arbitrary and reductive nature of these "year in review" lists but also provides a better criterion by which we evaluate the moments that best defined us. While some may roll their eyes at this annual ritual of cultural accounting, these lists serve as more than just content filler for a slow news season. They are mirrors reflecting our collective journey through time, helping us understand not just what we watched, listened to, or talked about but also who we were as a society during these twelve months.

Watching Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese elevate from college basketball to the WNBA wasn’t merely a career transition; it was category transcendence. The discourse surrounding their ascendence moved beyond sports commentary to become a national dialogue that forced us to reevaluate gender stereotypes and the subsequent barriers they impose. Likewise, this happening moved beyond mere ubiquity to something far more meaningful than the commercial observation of organized athleticism.

Consider the prevalence of Brat Summer. “Brat” was a colloquialism introduced by Charlie XCX that represented a state of being that exuded confidence and a desire to be the center of attention. This was not your average TikTok trend, “brat” was a cultural state of being that encouraged people to put themselves “out there” despite any perceived imperfections. Brat occupied the collective consciousness and became a shorthand to describe people daring enough to be bold in the face of potential scrutiny, as ascribed to Kamala Harris’ unexpected presidential run after President Biden dropped out of the race.

Like most cultural happenings, brat catalyzed a dialogue in the zeitgeist that gave rise to another culture-defining moment, the demure meme. Demure was a response to brat’s extroverted display, one that favored modesty over flamboyance. It gave language to signify a cultural shift in self-expression and a subversion to the brat aesthetic. The spread of “demure” was more than the adoption of the latest buzzword; it was the demarcation of one shared identity project to another, socially constructed through derivative works.

These moments are all cloaked in meaning to help us make sense of the phenomenal social world in which we co-habitat. From the shooting of UnitedHealth’s CEO Brian Thompson to the reelection of Donald Trump, the biggest cultural moments of the year aren’t just the most widespread; they are the ones that change us—they change our beliefs, artifacts, behaviors, and language. They spark conversations about corporate responsibility, as in the case of Thompson’s killing, and challenge our morality and our faith in government institutions, as in the case of Trump. We experience these events together and collaboratively engage in discourse to make sense of what it means for us and says about us. This practice is the construction of culture.

When you scratch beneath the surface, these year-end summaries are themselves cultural artifacts—metatext, if you will, that help us establish a shared cultural narrative. They transform the chaos of countless individual moments into a coherent story of who we were and what mattered to us during a particular year.

For instance, a surge in bible sales might signal our collective anxiety about societal uncertainties. Similarly, the rise in the male makeup market might reveal changing attitudes toward gender or masculinity. Chronicling these phenomena allows us to participate in a larger conversation about our collective values and interests—what's important for people "like us."