Pop Culture Happy Hour - 2025 Pop Culture Predictions

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

Nobody can predict what the future holds, but that doesn't stop us from trying. Trying, that is, to predict what will happen in the world of pop culture in 2025. We do it every year, so we'll look back on our predictions for 2024 and see how things turned out. Subscribe to NPR Plus at plus.npr.org or make a gift at donate.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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And we simply could not do it without you. Thank you again for being a critical part of the public media community. Join nprplus at plus.npr.org. Nobody can predict what the future holds, but that doesn't stop us from trying. Trying, that is, to predict what will happen in the world of pop culture in 2020. We do it every year, so we'll look back on our predictions for 2024 and see how things turned out. I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Linda Holmes. It's predictions time once again on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining us today are our fellow Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts, Aisha Harris. Hello, Aisha. Hello, Linda. And Glenn Weldon, hello, Glenn. Hey, pal. I am so happy to see everybody. This is always one of my favorite days of the year. are doing predictions today, and I am going to start with Stephen. I'm going to start with you. Before I take your prediction for the upcoming year, we are going to look back at your prediction for this year. Yes, we must. We must. We must. This is accountability journalism. All right, go ahead.

So I'm going to say that Oppenheimer wins best picture, basically goes wire to wire. I'm going to say that Taylor Swift's Midnights wins album of the year because the Grammys love Taylor Swift and never change. I am going to say that the 49ers win the Super Bowl over the Ravens. I'm going to say that Rihanna does not put out an album in 2024 because if I'm going to be wrong, I might as well get a new Rihanna album out of it. And I am going to say, I've noticed a trend that I think will continue and accelerate in 2024. And that is the rise of ever shorter hit songs. I think the TikTokification of the pop charts and the rise of artists. and the rise of artists like Pink Pantherists who really specialize in short form songwriting,

I think the line between song and fragment is going to get blurrier and blurrier in 2024 to the point where the metric I'm looking at is that two of the five biggest songs of 2024, as defined by Billboard Magazine, I'm going to say that two of the five biggest songs of 2024 will be shorter than two minutes long. You know what I love about this prediction, bold, Stephen? You made this prediction a year ago, and it was bold and specific. How did it turn out? Okay.

So I got a few of these, right? Rihanna did not put out an album. That's the only one I know about. Our interests in pop culture do not overlap, so that was the only one I was sure got wrong. Well, Oppenheimer did win Best Picture. I think we can agree that was a huge shock and I'm a genius. Nobody saw that one coming. Ditto Midnight's winning album of the year.

No one would ever think to predict a win at the Grammys for Taylor Swift. That never happens. But then you've got the 49ers. They were in the Super Bowl. They lost to the Chiefs, not the Ravens. That's basically three out of four, but mostly layups. And no, two of the five biggest songs of 2024. We're not under two minutes long.

That just flat out did not happen, did not come close to happening. I thought Pink Panther was going to have a huge. huge year. She has a lot of short, kind of fragmented TikTok-friendly songs, and then she basically took 2024 off, which good for her. I want to play a short clip of audio from this past February, and nobody outside NPR has ever heard this clip of audio before. The morning after the Super Bowl, a week after the Grammy Awards, we had Chapel Rhone at the Tiny Desk. So with each Tiny Desk concert, there's a part that viewers at home don't see, where the show's producer gives a quick intro to get people warmed up. And because I booked Chapel Roan's show, literally five months earlier,

by the way, we booked these things ages in advance, I got to introduce her. Now, the sound is not great. We don't air the intros. It's not, you know, mixed or whatever. But I wanted to play this clip of something I said roughly a month, month and a half after we aired our predictions episodes. One thing that I love about having this tiny dust concert on this day right at the end of that sprint is it feels like the 2025 Grammy campaign is kicking off right here in that. I play this clip for two reasons. Three, one is to brag. I think it's mostly that one.

I was going to say 75% A. No, two is to show just how easily on this show I could have simply sat here and predicted Chapel Rhone is going to break big in 2024 to the point where she's going to be a big part of the Grammy conversation. I would have looked like an actual genius. I booked the show in September of 2023. That prediction was right there. The other reason I play this clip is to demonstrate that I have. made one accurate prediction in my entire life.

Okay, but you say you could have picked it, so why didn't you? Yeah, there's that. Like, you put your eggs in like eight million other baskets. And that wasn't one of them. So are you sure? I mean, yes, foresight, yes, you had the finger on the pulse. I will give you that, Stephen. But you didn't, I don't know if this should count.

It's not, I'm not asking for it to count. I'm merely pointing out that I am every once in a while, I am right about something. And so when we. He's not trying to win. He's just self-soothing. Sure. You did great. I think you did great. Honestly, you got several things right. And nobody can fault your oppressions when you booked Chapel Rhone in September of 2020. Come on, man.

This is true. In fact, to be fair to you and to our entire tiny desk team, that tiny desk is part of the reason why she broke so big. So hats off to you. Absolutely. Got to give Olivia Rodrigo an assist. I think opening for Olivia Rodrigo on tour at the same time, she was playing that tiny desk. Take your kudos, man. Take it. Take it.

Take the win. Take the win. All right. Thank you. Stephen, that is last year's prediction. What is this coming up year's prediction? Predictions. What are your six predictions, Stephen?

I'm going to do a little bundle. I always do a little bundle. I'm going to say the Oscars take box office into consideration and give best picture to Wicked. The Grammys always take box office into consideration. I think they're going to give album of the year to neither Taylor Swift nor Beyonce. Instead, the trophy's going to go. go to Hit Me Hard and Soft by Billy Eilish, which will make a lot of people very performatively mad on social media. For the Super Bowl, I'm going to go with Bills over Eagles because Detroit

Lions fans can never be allowed to have nice things. I'm going to say Rihanna will drop a new album because something good has to happen in 2025. And finally, 2024 was quietly a very good year for K-pop music and fans of K-pop music. I'm hereby predicting that K-pop has a very big 2025 as BTS returns from its pre-planned hiatus and releases a song. Now, here comes the metric that tops the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 plus weeks. Bold. I predict that that song's lyrics will be deeply insipid and that I will love that song to the ends of the earth and defend it possibly even here on this show. So every single one of these things is going to happen in 2025.

Ever since Chapel Road and played The Tiny Desk, I've been on a roll. Bold, specific, and probably wrong. This is what I like with my used to. It's absolutely true. You give yourself an actual target to hit. And those of us who are, as you will see, somewhat mushyer in our predictions. I'm all about rigor, my friends. Absolutely appreciate and value your rigor.

All right. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. Aisha Harris, we're going to go to you next. Let us hear about last year's prediction. So for my 2024 prediction, I'm going to be. a little nervy here and actually put a number on this. I'm going to predict that for the first time since 2007, 2020 accepted because 2020 was the year, basically nothing made sense. No movie is going to cross the $1 billion mark worldwide. So I put a number on it. I was not squishy and I was wrong,

which I think we can say is maybe good for movie theaters to some extent. So this is not a prediction I was making in hopes that it didn't happen. I just felt like the winds were changing and that this was possible. And, you know, I was wrong. And you know what? I'm happy I was wrong. Granted, I wasn't like a huge, well, I didn't see one of these movies. And the other one I was, I enjoyed enough, but, you know, sequels, sequels, people. This is all that's in the top, top 10. What, what are they? Joker fully adieu. Oh, God. Oh, God. Actually, no. Surprisingly, Joker was not, it did not make that much money. Inside Out 2 and Deadpool and Wolverine were in the top two spots of this year. They both crossed the $1 billion mark and despicable Me 4 came close. So yeah, I was wrong, but for good reason. I don't know if this bodes well for cinema. I don't know if it bodes well for the art form, but it certainly bodes well for theaters and for IP. And let's, boy, IP's a scrappy little thing. It needs all the help it can get. You know, people are still willing to go to theaters and I think on balance. that's a good thing, although I agree with you that if I was going to pick a bunch of movies to make a billion dollars, I wouldn't make them all sequels. But it is what it is. It is what it is. So, you know, that prediction did not come true. But I think what was in your heart was still preserved, honestly.

Well, and I think there's still a good piece of analysis and idea having what Aisha was saying, which is that this is a struggling industry and that having the occasional kind of Barbenheimer slash the Thanksgiving weekend we just had, sometimes papers. a sense that it is, it's hard out there for original properties and movies that aren't gigantic events or like very, very reliable franchises like an inside out or a despicable me. It's hard out there. Yeah, I agree with that. All right. So that was last year's prediction. What is this year's prediction?

Well, I am going to go cynical here again. Well, somewhat cynical here again. And very, very specific. And I'm going to be completely honest here. I don't know if either of these things will actually happen, but they're predictions. So who cares? I think that in 2025, Bob Eiger is going to extend his CEO contract for Disney. As you may know, he stepped down as CEO and Bob Chepec took over.

And then Iger came back because he just couldn't let go of the reins. But he has his contract extended through to the end of 2026. But I feel as though he's probably going to find a way to extend it past that. The other part of this is that David Zasloff, the Warner Brothers Discovery CEO, is going to be unceremoniously ousted or resign from the company. Now, here are my reasonings. And as we've already noted, Disney had the two biggest movies of 2024. They were Inside Out in Deadpool and Wolverine.

Part because of that, this year turned out better for Disney than they expected on the earnings front. And, you know, in fact, to the point where they actually did something that I've learned is unprecedented. Apparently, like this fall, they made the move to announce its earnings guidance for the next three years. financial people, you can sort out what that means. Basically, it means like they're giving more information than they normally would because they feel confident that they are going to be good for the next few years. And look, you could argue in the next few years, that could mean that they're setting it up and now they feel comfortable passing on the reins to someone else who was not Bobiker. It could also mean Bobiker could be like, hey, we're doing great. Let's not rock the boat.

You may recall that, you know, a few months ago there was a New York Times expose that kind of detailed the entire sort of behind the scenes of the switch. And Bob Eiger, according to that article, did a lot to undermine Bob Chaypec and set him up to fail. It doesn't paint a good picture of Eiger as someone who wants to let go. That's why I think he's going to, you know, stay around. Obviously, there are lots of factors here. Zazlov, I feel like his days are numbered. That's just me.

So those are my predictions there. Again, specific. I like it. Like the specificity. Thank you very much. I feel it is important to save the best for last in this case, which means it will not be me. And that means next is me. And we are going to...

I really didn't see where this was going. Had us in the first half there. We're going to hear my prediction for this past year. My predictions for 2024. I have two. Jesse Armstrong, who created Succession, will announce a new series. I just think with succession over and everybody having loved it so much, it's just hard for me to believe that that guy is not going to get right back to work. So that's one.

The other one is somebody is going to win, by which I mean either get a big verdict or get a big settlement in a reality show lawsuit. Yeah, so I will say this first. My favorite thing about the first prediction, the Jesse Armstrong prediction, is that you can hear Glenn making a little. noises in the background. It's like he knows I'm wrong. It's like he has seen the future and he knows that there's not going to be an announcement of a big Jesse Armstrong show, which there wasn't. The biggest news that I found about Jesse Armstrong this year is that he's going to be an executive producer on the next Michaela Cole show for HBO, which is an interesting thing. I don't know how involved he is, right? Executive producer can mean anything from, you know, heavily involved

to I attached my name. And we don't always know exactly, you know, for support. development and stuff. And we don't always know. But no, there's no new big Jesse Armstrong show. Absolutely wrong. Zero out of 10 on that one. In terms of the reality television business, for much of this year, the show Love is Blind has been mired in a variety of lawsuits and legal issues and things like that. They did settle a class action lawsuit with a bunch of contestants in May, more significantly, just recently, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the contestants on Love is Blind are employees, which means that they are covered by labor law. And that develops a whole other set of obligations and things like that, and is potentially, I think, more significant.

So I give myself definitely credit for the March to try to put some boundaries around what can be done by reality shows. Which is kind of what you were, which is what you were getting at. It's not something where the earth has moved necessarily, especially since you never know what's ultimately going to come of that NLRB ruling and stuff like that. But for the time being, it is true that there has been some movement on this front and I give myself credit for that. This is where specifics get you in trouble because, yeah, the specifics were wrong, but the meaning, the prediction itself was spot on. I think that NLRB ruling is going to be a big, big deal. I think it's going to have repercussions for a long time.

Yeah. Well, we shall see. We shall see. So that was last year's prediction. This year's prediction, you know, you may know if you listen to these episodes that there is a long history of Aisha and I being of one mind when it comes to our predictions and resolutions and of a certain simpatico quality between what Aisha is thinking about and what I am thinking about. My prediction for 2025 is that we are going to start to hear more serious. about Lorne Michael's retiring. S&L is doing its 50th a few years ago in an interview. He said maybe he wanted to stay around until the 50th. That seemed like maybe a good time to retire. He's 80. Now, very often, people say something like that and then they get there and they think, well, I still feel pretty good and I'm actually not going to retire. But as I said, he's 80. Certainly he doesn't have to do it anymore. Certainly he could continue if he wanted to be kind of to have his fingers in all kinds of different pies without doing the job of being in charge of SNL. But I do think you're going to, at the very least in 2025, start to hear about succession plans. Like what is the plan? Because the fact that he's been there for so long, the fact that he started at the beginning of this show in 1975 and has only been gone. for a brief period that is considered to have been calamitous, which a lot of people assume, like, it was calamitous because you have to have him. I don't know if I necessarily agree with that.

I also think the shape of that show has changed a lot in the last little while. There's a discussion of that show in Mo Ryan's book, Burn It Down, that brings up some allegations of workplace issues. It's also kind of, you know, turned into this celebrity impressions kind of thing, even more than it kind of has been in the past. I think they are at a point where they got to figure out when he decides to stop doing this, do we just shut it down? They're not going to do that. Which I can't imagine they will want to do. Or do we figure out what the heck is next and how different is it going to be versus are we just going to try to find somebody else to run it? And he looms so large that I have no idea what that future would look like. But I think they're going to start, you're going to

start to hear that they're trying to figure it out at the very least. I mean, whenever that happens, it's, it's probably going to be very much like a, what I remember, at least, of Johnny Carson leaving, where it's just like, month after month of let's track this and all these, like, all these accolades and these parties and various specials surrounding Lauren and then eventually maybe we finally hear people talk about him maybe in ways that he doesn't want to be talked about. But that seems very far in the future still. But in the meantime, that meddler is just going to follow him around singing wind beneath my wings at him.

Singing one more for the road. As hard as it is to imagine a future without Lauren Michaels, imagine, like, an alternate world where Lauren Michaels never happened. What would the pop culture landscape look like without a Lorne Michaels in it? He just has his finger. in everything. So yeah, great prediction. Solid prediction. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right. I said I wanted to save the best for last. I was purely sucking up to Glenn. Glenn. Okay. This is going to go pear shape. I can tell. Let us hear your prediction from last year. In the year 2024, a novel will be released by a name publisher of literary fiction from a first-time novelist and it will receive critical praise and maybe win a literary award or two. or get nominated at least, and it will later be revealed to have been written by AI.

Okay? It's been a long time since we had a literary hoax. That's my prediction. Now, there's a lot of obstacles here to have this happen because, you know, if it comes from a major publishing house, well, a lot of media companies and PR included have, you know, written up these AI ethics guidelines. But they're guidelines, right? And I think a publishing company will want to drive a discourse, which, granted, will be tiresome. It will be awful. You'll have some critics backtracking on their positive reviews and saying, I knew it all along.

Maybe it won't be a novel. Maybe it'll be like a debut short story in The New Yorker. But we're due for this, right? I mean, it's got to happen eventually. I don't know what's going to happen this year, but it's inevitable. Well, I mean, this kind of happened as long as we're willing to slap a few asterisks on it. We always are. This is predictions.

Yeah. Because in fairness, this didn't happen in 2024. It happened in 2020. It happened between the time we recorded that episode and the end of 2023, a Chinese novel called The Land of Machine Memories won second prize, and let me get this right, the fifth Jungsu popular science and science fiction competition. No bigger in authority. That may not sound like much to us, I'm going to say, but it made national news in China. It was submitted by Shangyang, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It was one of 200 entries. So I think that counts.

Now, if we're looking for a silver lining here, only three of the six judges voted for it, which is why it got second prize. One of the judges said he could tell it was AI because it lacked emotion. This is, you know, this is not a national award with international prestige. It didn't happen in 24. And, you know, it wasn't a major publishing house. You're on the track, though. Yeah. I think you make a fair point.

I think you make a fair point, even if it wasn't like literally exactly what happened. All right. So what is your prediction for 2025? Well, this one I'm going wildly off brand. I'm going to let Aisha be the cynical one because I am going to be downright, naive, Pollyanna, hopeful, wide-eyed. I'm going to be Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm over here. And it also has to do with AI. I think the widespread acceptance of AI of specifically generative AI like ChatGPT is going to hit a roadblock.

I think the thing it has going for right now is its usefulness. I mean, we're all professional writers. We don't use it. But every single one of our friends do every day in their lives. at work. And I think it continues to be used for the kind of writing that I would call task-oriented or functional, you know, cover letters, applications, grant proposals, technical manuals. Any email you have to send that is, you know, has to do with procedures or systems, you know. So the reason people use it is because it's so efficient. They've convinced themselves that there's a kind of writing that is most efficient when it adheres to strict guidelines and formatting, and that's what computers can do, right? I think what's going to happen is the people, are going to begin to acknowledge that kind of writing was never really about adherence to guidelines and formatting that there were always a human voice was behind it and there needs to be. I think what we're doing now is producing final products that are so anodyne, so uniform, so generic, that

its usefulness, AI's usefulness is going to come into question. It's about a kind of writing that goes from being a chore to write to a chore to read. It's so featureless and indistinct. Here's why I think it's going to happen because of money. It's going to cease to offer any kind of of meaningful guidance or distinction. Employers who are really the people who are requiring it are not going to get anything useful from cover letters. They never did. But it's going to be even worse. Well, yeah, I think maybe one of the things you're going to see is people deciding that they don't need those kinds of writing at all. This kind of use of AI for something like a cover letter, if you can produce it by AI and nobody can tell the difference, then you just don't, maybe you don't

need them at all. Especially that gets compounded if it's costing employers time and money. And I realize I sound like I'm going to break into the Brotherhood of Man here, but I think we have to acknowledge that all writing, including technical writing, is a human endeavor. 100%. It's a human skill. It's about communicating from one human mind to another human mind, and we should stop looking to machines to do the stuff that we humans find creative

and satisfying and life-affirming writing and making art. Why are we farming out the fun stuff? That's the fun stuff. We're literally, we're taking all the joy and turning it into a mechanized, oh, get me started. Well, we're ferreting out the fun stuff because historically, the fun stuff, unless you reach a very, very small piece of the 1%, it's not funded well. It's like we don't want to pay for that stuff. It's true.

But I would also say, Glenn, I think the other thing that may become a roadblock is it is hard to tell right now how those things are going to be, how something like chat, GPT or any of the other generative ones are going to be affected. as they start to eat themselves, as they start to devour their own, like, AI is just regurgitating letters that were also written by AI. And at some point, the product degrades. And I've read some interesting stuff about how what you can produce goes down in quality as the thing kind of starts to pollute its own training set, right? So I do think there are some technological limitations that may, you know, go hand in hand with figuring out. It's not that I don't respect a beautiful cover letter. Believe me, I do. The point is, if the way you're using cover letters in your business doesn't recognize the difference

between an AI cover letter and not, then you probably don't need them, you know? I mean, I think what I'm coming away with here is that there is a kind of writing that just checks boxes, right? But it always does more than checks a box. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, and what's the measurement here? What's the metric here? Because this is pretty squishy. I think this is the squishest of all the predictions we've made. I don't think there's going to be something like, you know, in the Dune universe, there's a butlerian jihad where there's a rise up against thinking machines. I think this is going to be not instantaneous, but we're steering a ship here. This is a process. You're going to see some big employer issuing a policy

that discourages the use of AI in a specific situation. And then it likes doing a ship, it's just going to widen out and widen out and widen out. That's what I think you need to look for. I mean, I hope that's true, but I am going to be at a cynic here and say, we are devolving as a species, generally speaking, and I do not have that faith in humanity anymore. I'm not used to this position. I'm not used to being in this position. Glenn Weldon, voice of hope. I tend to agree with Glenn. I choose to believe that people will value something human in art, because I just think I cannot imagine a universe where that doesn't happen. For the sake of our jobs and all the people, all the work we love, I hope that is very true.

Next year's predictions episode is going to be entirely AI, and they're going to play this, and they're going to laugh. They're going to do that. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Boop-a-loop-de-bloop. We'd love to know what your pop culture predictions are for the new year. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook.com slash PCH. And that brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, Glenn Weldon.

Thanks so much for being here and predicting the future. Thank you, buddy. Thank you. Ha-ha-ha-ha. This episode is produced by Hofza Fathema, Lenin Sherburn, and Liz Metzger, and edited by Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all.

Tomorrow, I can definitely predict that.