The Top 10 Wildest Music Moments That Defined Pop Culture in 2025

Kendrick Lamar‘s record-breaking Super Bowl Halftime Show was memorable for a variety of reasons, but no moment from his 10-minute show at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans in February took off online and in pop culture quite as much as his delivery of, “Say, Drake …” during “Not Like Us,” staring straight into the camera with a s–t-eating grin and his now-iconic bootcut jeans flaring at his ankles.

Weeks later, Drake’s lawyers added the performance to Drizzy’s defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group regarding the lyrics on Dot’s Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper. Lamar, however, would go on after the Super Bowl to win song and record of the year at the Grammys for “Not Like Us.”

At long last, Beyoncé finally won album of the year at the Grammys when her Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter took home album of the year. It was one of the biggest moments in the making in Recording Academy history, as the superstar’s lack of recognition in the major categories continued even as she became the institution’s winningest artist of all time in 2023.

But while the AOTY win was certainly Bey’s biggest feat of the night, her shocked reaction to hearing her name read off as the winner of best country album ended up being the most viral moment — one that remains a frequently used meme online as 2025 draws to a close.

In April, Katy Perry joined Blue Origin’s very first all-woman flight crew, launching into space alongside Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez and more for a mission that lasted just 11 minutes or so. Their craft reached approximately 62 miles above Earth to fly through an area called the “Kármán line,” aka the imaginary boundary that divides our planet’s atmosphere and outer space.

The idea of a pop star traveling to the final frontier was wild enough on its own for the internet to go crazy over the mission, but Perry unveiling her Lifetimes Tour setlist in zero gravity and dramatically kissing the ground once she landed also fueled many posts and memes for weeks after the fact.

It seemed that Morgan Wallen was eager to leave New York City after serving as musical guest on a spring episode of Saturday Night Live. The country star abruptly exited the final shot before cameras even cut, then proceeded to share a photo of his private plane with “Get me to God’s country” written over it shortly after his sudden departure.

The phrase spread rapidly through posts online from bemused onlookers and meme-makers alike, a cultural phenomenon Wallen quickly capitalized on by releasing a line of “God’s country” merch.

In telling off a group of paparazzi, Justin Bieber created one of the biggest memes of the year. “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?” he says in a clip that went crazy viral in June, aggressively tapping his temple to show he wasn’t messing around.

The phrase immediately became a staple in the 2025 lexicon, with the singer’s wife, Rhode founder Hailey Bieber, writing on Instagram Stories after the release of Justin’s Daisies album, “Is it finally clocking to you f–king losers?”

When Sabrina Carpenter announced less than a year after dropping Short n’ Sweet that she’d be releasing another album, Man’s Best Friend, in August 2025, one element of the project quickly temporarily overshadowed the rest: its cover. The image of the pop star down on all fours with a man grasping her by the hair polarized audiences, sparking dramatic debate as to whether the image was empowering, degrading, or simply not that deep.

“I was actually shocked, because I think between me and my friends and my family and the people that I always share my music and my art with first, it just wasn’t even a conversation,” she later told CBS Mornings of the backlash. “For what the album is, [the cover is] perfect for what it represents, and everything about it to me just felt so opposite of, like, the world ending.”

One of the most inescapable moments on the internet this year was when two Coldplay concertgoers were caught on video reacting quite suspiciously to a kiss cam showing them looking cozy on the big screens at Gillette Stadium in Boston. After the pair turned away and ducked out of sight once their image flashed in front of the entire crowd, frontman Chris Martin joked, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”

Turns out, the two individuals were Astronomer CEO Andy Byron — who has since resigned — and his company’s then-HR executive, Kristin Cabot, both of whom were married to other people at the time. In a New York Times piece published many months after the fact, Cabot explained that she had already been separated from her husband by then, and that nothing physical had gone on between herself and her boss before the concert.

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she told the publication. “And it’s not nothing. And I took accountability and I gave up my career for that.”

After years of writing love songs, Taylor Swift finally got her own happy ending when Travis Kelce proposed to her in August. “Your English teacher and gym teacher are getting married,” the couple wrote on Instagram while announcing the news, leaving Swifties everywhere overjoyed.

As we learned later, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end popped the question right after he and Swift recorded their record-breaking New Heights podcast episode, during which the pop star had no idea a team of people was setting up their rose garden proposal backdrop right outside their house while she was discussing her The Life of a Showgirl album on the show.

Nothing could have prepared the world — or the Billboard charts — for KPop Demon Hunters, the animated Netflix children’s film that absolutely took over with its music. In addition to its corresponding album becoming the first movie soundtrack to ever have four songs simultaneously chart in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, “Golden” ruled atop the ranking for two weeks and spent 18 at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200.

Plus, “Golden” earned a historic Grammy nomination for song of the year and closed out 2025 as Billboard staff’s No. 1 song of the past 12 months, while KPop Demon Hunters remains the most-streamed flick of all time on Netflix.

The backlash to the announcement of Bad Bunny as 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show was absolutely bonkers, infuriating people who weren’t keen on having a predominantly Spanish-speaking musician headline the gig. Even President Donald Trump had something to say about the choice, which he called “absolutely ridiculous,” and Turning Point USA announced plans to host an alternative halftime show featuring “anything in English.”

Benito, however, has remained unfazed ahead of his showcase on Feb. 8, 2026. “I’m very happy,” he said in his opening monologue when hosting Saturday Night Live in October. “Especially for all the Latinos and Latinas in the whole world and here in the United States. The people who have worked to open doors. More than my accomplishment, it’s an accomplishment of all of us, demonstrating that our mark and our input in this country cannot be thrown out or erased.”