The Best of 2025 In Popular Culture

As readers of my Swift Report 2025 will see, when it is posted, this was not what I'd consider a "great year" - for me personally, or for the world, ecologically and politically. However, just as 1941 WAS a great year for movies from Hollywood, in the depths of WWII, so too, 2025 offered some of the best popular/indie music, TV shows, and movies of the century so far. I won't be discussing theatre, opera, art, orchestral, or other works here, nor books.

As a publisher that always seems awkward. Though I am on record as praising the posthumous collection by Irish poet Kevin Higgins from Salmon as a necessary book. And I found If anyone builds it, everyone dies a brilliant and thrilling propaganda work, sort of like The Communist Manifesto meets Terminator:2. If it is even 25% true, as the authors put it, the world will likely be destroyed by superintelligent AI (ASI) by 2047, maybe even in the next 3 years. If accurate, the book is maybe the most important one ever written by humans since the Middle Ages.

Anyway... here is a for now rough first draft, as you will see.

Best Songs of 2025

This year it would be entirely plausible to present a top ten list of albums and/or songs by only women performers, or bands with women as the singers and main songwriters for their groups. But the top two, tied are:

Lily Allen, 'Pussy Palace' - a work of brilliant savage satire, mixing dark humour and sadness perfectly.

Florence + The Machine, 'One of The Greats' - a performative song that establishes the singer Florence Welch as precisely that - confession, dark raw power, and wit converge with tremendous memorable potency.

It's a measure of the greatness of these songs that they beat also brilliant tracks by, in no order, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Little Simz, Rosalia, Wolf Alice, Alison Goldfrapp, CMAT, Tate McRae, Bria Salmena, Sharon Van Etten, Debbii Dawson, Robyn, Addison Rae, Yonaka, Wet Leg, Olivia Dean, Annahstasia, Hayley Williams, among others (basically the top women performers I mentioned above, kif you wanted a top 20 of the year).

I may type out later a few of my other favourite songs of the year.

Best TV of 2025

While some may prefer Adolescence, or The Pitt, or Stranger Things, or Such Brave Girls - all superb in their way, there seemed to me to be five frontrunners for the best TV series of the year:

1. Pluribus, season 1 - great concept, superb acting, taut direction, from a master creator, Vince Gilligan.

2. White Lotus, season 3 - as funny and suspenseful and satirical as ever, with Parker Posey stealing the show, perhaps.

3. Severance, season 2 - hard to imagine the perfect first season could be bettered, but it was, with a final episode of sheer genius.

4. I Love LA!, season 1 - no show is more attuned to the influencer-age and what it's like to be a Gen-Z-er (one supposes) with sitcom situations as absurd as I Love Lucy's - except now they can be far more sexually indiscreet.

5. The Last of Us, season 2 - Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal - acting giants - Ellie and Joel - amidst the fear and violence there was so much love and hate to work out; drama of the highest order.

Best Film of 2025

I need to see a few more before I can say for sure, but the current front runners seem overrated to me at this time, based on what I have seen... to be continued.

A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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