Here’s a picture of what life looked like at the turn of the millennium: We couldn’t stop gossiping about the extramarital affairs of the scandal-ridden president of the United States; we rented movies from Blockbuster and showed off our vast CD collections; we waited patiently for modems to connect us to the internet (and hoped that no one had to use the phone at the same time). We had no idea what the future would bring — how could we?
Now that it’s 2025, it seems like a good moment to take stock of what the last 25 years have actually wrought. And what a dizzying era it’s been, encompassing five US presidencies, one global financial collapse, major wars, the rise of algorithms, and a wholesale transformation of media and technology. All along, the culture we devoured and engaged with reflected this ever-changing world: our hopes, fears, ambitions, delights, compulsions, and values.
At Vox, we set out to identify the 25 pieces of culture that best explain the great sweep of the last quarter-century. We limited our focus to tangible cultural artifacts that illuminated something fundamental about their moment in time. We not only looked at traditional art forms like movies, music, TV shows, and books, but also hashtags, apps, viral food trends, and in one instance, a revolutionary pharmaceutical drug. These entries aren’t necessarily firsts or even bests, but they represent the zenith of the larger tides and trends of the 21st century so far.
Read on to find out how The Fellowship of the Ring embodied the post-9/11 Bush years, how RuPaul’s Drag Race mainstreamed LGBTQ+ acceptance, and how The Joe Rogan Experience mirrors a newly paranoid nation.
The Fellowship of the Ring
When Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring debuted on December 10, 2001, it was considered a likely boondoggle. Hollywood hadn’t launched a truly successful fantasy film franchise since the first Star Wars trilogy in the 1970s. If it was going to create one now, the savvy take was that the Harry Potter movies were a better bet, with a more active fan base and a simpler, more movie-friendly plot structure than that boasted by JRR Tolkien’s labyrinthine Lord of the Rings trilogy. What’s more, Peter Jackson’s last major film, 1996’s The Frighteners, was a flop. Jackson, Variety wrote at the time, with slight incredulity, “must have convinced someone that he would do it right.”
Yet The Fellowship of the Ring was a hit. It opened at $47 million domestically, the top of the box office by a record-breaking margin, and went on to gross $889 million worldwide. It was nominated for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture. “By the end,” declared the Wall Street Journal in a rave review opening weekend, “you know you’ve been visiting a world truly governed by magic.”
Fellowship and its sequels became a template for what Hollywood success would look like over the next two decades. It showed executives that people were eager to see expensive, high-production-value adaptations of intellectual property they already knew and loved, and that they would pay well for the privilege. It showed that audiences were willing to put up with a certain amount of lore — even labyrinthine lore — in exchange for high-stakes battles with a little artful CGI to make them look all the more epic.
Read the rest from senior correspondent Constance Grady here.
Call of Duty
The choice of perspective is one of the most important decisions any artist can make in any medium — and that goes for video games as well. From the 2D, side-scrolling layout of Super Mario Bros. to the god’s-eye, overhead view of The Legend of Zelda, how a designer positions their character within a virtual world sets up everything that follows. Which is why it matters that Call of Duty, one of the bestselling and most influential video game franchises of all time, sets its perspective at the point of a gun.
From its maiden entry in 2003, which put players in the boots of Allied soldiers in World War II, to 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 — yes, 6 — the 20-plus games in the franchise have been united by the fact that they solely show the world with a weapon pointed at it.
Such first-person shooters existed before Call of Duty, but they learned toward the cartoony, like the demon-killing space marines of the Doom games or the Bond movie caricatures of GoldenEye 007. Call of Duty brought the weapons-eye view to the modern age, at the exact moment in the 2000s when US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were fighting the country’s bloodiest wars in decades. And the more realistic the Call of Duty games became — black hole projectors notwithstanding — the harder it became to tell the difference with real life, even as attention on those real wars began to wane. There are soldiers today who grew up playing Call of Duty before they ever picked up a real weapon.
With over $30 billion in total revenue, Call of Duty is on par with mega-franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Harry Potter world. But its real legacy is the way it taught a generation of gamers to view the world through a target’s sights.
—Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director
Ramen
“Did you know you’re supposed to slurp?” Around 2004, this question was inevitable in ramen shops, as the Japanese dish with roots in Chinese cuisine became the inescapable “it” food.
Everyone already knew the instant stuff was delicious (there are even some restaurants dedicated to serving it), but the boom, spearheaded by David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar and its cohort like Ippudo and Ivan Ramen, was about reintroducing the bowl of noodles to Americans as a soul-nourishing, salty, deliciously unctuous experience. The demand for ramen kept these restaurants booked and busy, and even reached a point where food Frankensteins were creating ramen burgers with noodles taking the place of the traditional bun.
At the same time, ramen symbolizes the peak of the foodie, the proudly self-proclaimed creature with a wonkish obsession with the food we, and perhaps more pertinently, people around the world, eat. Foodies reminded us that delicious meals can tell a story about the people and places they come from, and helped break down ideas about superiority and class often embedded in food (e.g., that you can celebrate Mexican food for its complexity and technique as much as “fancy” French cuisine). But sometimes that enthusiasm could wander into pretentious snobbery or even cultural appropriation — hence the inevitable backlash.
No matter what foodies say, and no matter how you feel about them, a good bowl of ramen (instant or not) will always be delicious.
—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent
Harry Potter
Before JK Rowling was known for overt anti-trans rhetoric, she was simply the author of the biggest literary pop culture phenomenon in decades. First published in 1997, the Harry Potter books and the reading they inspired led to a full-on cultural obsession through the 2000s, yielding eight movies, a hit Broadway play, and three Orlando theme parks. As of 2023, it’s the bestselling book series in history, with a staggering 600 million copies sold.
The story of a young boy who finds himself invited to attend a fantastical British wizarding school landed at a moment when geeks and fans were coming into their own. Suddenly books were cool, dressing up as your favorite character for a midnight release was totally acceptable, and the internet was the perfect place to connect about all of it. Readers gathered online, and in the long wait between HP books, clamored for more children’s and young adult literature, which buoyed the industry for years.
This set the stage for subsequent reader excitement from Twilight to TikTok-era hits like Fourth Wing. Its in-world “sorting hat” easily mapped onto a burgeoning real-world cultural obsession with personality tests, and identifying as your Hogwarts house became ubiquitous. Well into the ’10s, as our cultural interests irrevocably fractured, Harry Potter remained a household topic, one of the last remnants of the monoculture.
Perhaps the most outsize influence Harry Potter had on the real world was political. In many ways, although the books started publishing during the Clinton years, they were the ultimate Obama-era text: In 2016, Harry Potter readers were more likely to dislike Donald Trump, more likely to embrace diversity, and more likely to vote for Democrats. Fans seemed to embrace difference and look out for opportunities to stand up for the little guy.
Following Rowling’s mask-off descent into virulent anti-trans sentiment in 2019, though, they’ve begun to feel like so much of the faded optimism of the “hope and change” years: shallow performances of progressivism that failed to outlast the longstanding criticisms of their weaknesses. Still, with a series reboot set to air on HBO in 2027, we could be discussing The Boy Who Lived for many years to come.
—Aja Romano, senior culture writer
“In Da Club”
The power of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” is that it can make you wistful for an experience you’ve never had. Have you had the kind of money, champagne, Bacardi, sex, friends, or ecstasy that 50 Cent had in 2003? Almost certainly not. But when this blaring, enveloping tune starts, you can’t help but remember one night that felt just as good. It’s thumpingly boastful and braggy, yet earnestly addictive, with a twist of humor. That it’s sung by a man who survived being shot nine times makes it even more legendary.
It’s a song that so perfectly encapsulates the early 2000s, before millennials knew what a global financial collapse would feel like.
Perhaps only someone that familiar with death and pain could make a song about the beauty, and treasure, of celebrating life like it’s a birthday, but not literally a birthday (“you know we don’t give a fuck it’s not your birthday”). Who, exactly, would dare to tell him his music wasn’t authentic?
It’s a song that so perfectly encapsulates the early 2000s, before millennials knew what a global financial collapse would feel like. Given what we’ve lived through and how jaded we’ve become, the song, which was an instant smash hit, can’t help but feel more and more like a fantasy. It’s not incidental that the hit might be the moment hip-hop fully melded with capitalism.
50 held an unusual place in the culture in 2003: a rapper and for-real tough guy being played on every pop station, hitting true market saturation; a street-smart man who quickly ascended to moguldom thanks to his minority ownership of Vitamin Water. (This model of early investment — instead of a simple endorsement deal — was followed by other celebs like Ashton Kutcher, Snoop Dogg, and Ryan Reynolds.) Julianne Escobedo Shepherd might have summed up his seemingly at-odds persona best when she wrote in Pitchfork: “He was the perfect pop star for the Bush era. He was a rampant capitalist. There was a certain level of nihilism to his work, but he was also escapist, despite having a lot of very kind of dark, street narratives in his music. It just took over.”
Twenty-two years after its release, the song still feels like it’s bigger than life, bigger than anyone listening, bigger than all of the clubs it’s outlasted.
—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent
The Apprentice
The Apprentice, a largely forgettable entry in the mid-2000s reality TV boom, would probably have faded away like so many episodes of Ballroom Bootcamp if it weren’t for its dark, damning legacy. The Apprentice starred Donald Trump as host, fixer, and supposed billionaire Svengali, and in so doing fashioned a persona for Trump so powerful that he could use it to win two presidential elections. Yet what gets overlooked, the real reason it was able to give Trump such a potent star image, is how effectively it channeled the ethos of the mid-2000s at its height.
The show featured a team of business hopefuls competing to win the chance to work at one of Trump’s companies for one year. In the world of The Apprentice, as in the America of 2004, the value system is simple and straightforward. Glitz is good, money is better, a little playful misogyny is no big deal. (A lot of the first season challenges hinge on the women being willing to hike up their pencil skirts for the camera.) And the boss, always, reigns supreme.
Trump is shot from below so that he dominates the frame, bullying the camera into submission.
Trump is shot from below so that he dominates the frame, bullying the camera into submission. His contestants scramble around busy, dirty, chaotic Manhattan streets, but Trump, ensconced in his leather-cushioned limo, his wood-paneled board room, his gilded apartment, is a point of stillness. It was all smoke and mirrors, a TV set slapped together in an unused retail space because his real office was too ramshackle to film, but the brute logic of the story it told was clear.
In this world, the boss is the ultimate arbiter of justice and dispenser of wisdom. He is to be courted, flattered, cajoled, and entreated. There is no standing up to him, and there is no disobedience. Fair labor practices are for suckers, anyway.
The Apprentice is where Trump developed the persona that would carry him to unimaginable heights over the next 20 years. Well into his presidency, whenever he worked with camera people, he knew what to tell them: shoot him like they did on The Apprentice.
—Constance Grady, senior correspondent
PerezHilton.com
The thing about 2000s pop culture was: It was obsessed with celebrities, and it was mean. It was all about pointing and laughing at upskirt pictures and rehab visits and gay rumors. The person who pointed and laughed the loudest of all was Perez Hilton.
Hilton (whose real name is Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr.) was the first truly huge blogger of the 2000s, and he had a simple formula. He would rip an unflattering paparazzi photo of a star off a wire service and then crudely mark it up, in what appeared to be a ploy to skirt copyright law and avoid paying the wire. With a digital white marker tool in Microsoft Paint, he would scribble penises or cocaine or semen next to the faces of starlets, and scrawl the words “slut,” “whore,” and “whoreanus” (for “heinous”) across their bodies. He then posted the pictures onto his site with a giggly couple of paragraphs about the sins of whichever celebrity this was, and waited for the clicks to come in.
And the clicks came. In 2008, the Miami New Times reported that Hilton’s blog was one of the 10 most popular entertainment news sites online, attracting 2.6 million unique visitors and hawking ad packages for up to $45,000.
When we gossip about famous people, we’re usually trying to set the norms for how the rest of us should behave: be beautiful and kind by following the rules like this beloved star, but don’t be annoying or trashy by breaking the rules like that one. In the 2000s, as gossip blogs and tabloids alike aimed to outdo each other with their gleefully nasty coverage, it seemed to be hard for anyone — least of all women, whether normie or celebrity — to exist without breaking some rule or other. Hilton went after Jennifer Aniston for being boring with just as much glee as he went after Lindsay Lohan for being messy. For the rest of us, also pointing and laughing along, celebrities became cautionary tales. We knew it wasn’t safe for us to put a foot out of line in any direction — because look what happened if you did.
—Constance Grady, senior correspondent
Facebook Wall
The first posts on my Facebook Wall, circa 2005, are some of the most embarrassing content I’ve ever produced online. They’re remarkably sincere, positive, and clearly excited about this new thing called Facebook. But looking back at those snapshots in internet time — you can still see them if you know where to look — it’s refreshing to remember how social media once fulfilled its promise to connect us. The Facebook Wall was an encapsulation of the internet culture of the time, which was, for lack of a better term, naive. The ability to put things online without knowing how to code was novel, and young people marveled at how the world was shrinking. Viral links on people’s Facebook walls were goofy, not yet political or divisive.
In case you’ve forgotten, the Facebook Wall was one of the first features of the website that Mark Zuckerberg launched from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Kind of like a digital version of the whiteboards college students hung on their doors, the Wall provided an empty text box where your friends could leave you messages, post a link, paste some ASCII art, or ask you out on a date.
But it quickly became much more than that. The Facebook Wall eventually evolved into News Feed, a constantly updated, scrollable list of your friends’ activity across Facebook — one of the earliest examples of an algorithmically sorted feed that’s infinitely long and, many would argue, the source of brain rot.
But before all that, there was the simplicity of the Facebook Wall. If I had known what it would become, I might’ve paid closer attention to it. Instead, I was busy telling my crushes they got “hit by the beautiful truck” with a jumbled but discernible collection of @ signs and underscores. How could I have known that posting like this would one day lead to the downfall of American democracy? It was so nice.
—Adam Clark Estes, senior correspondent
RuPaul’s Drag Race
While the “point” of RuPaul’s Drag Race is to crown a winner — the best drag queen in the competition — its cultural impact is exponentially more than a coronation. There is no show that has done more to mainstream LGBTQ culture and destigmatize queer lives than Drag Race.
Before there were political meltdowns about drag story hour (or even legalized marriage for same-sex couples nationwide), there were people of all ages, genders, and sexualities watching and enjoying RuPaul Charles and his queens.
There is no show that has done more to mainstream LGBTQ culture and destigmatize queer lives than Drag Race.
Since premiering in 2009, season after season, the show has spotlighted gay, queer, and eventually trans people (initially, RuPaul said transgender competitors would “probably not” be considered for the show), allowing contestants — many of whom are queer people of color — to tell their own stories. Drag is one of those things where everyone kinda sorta knows what it is: a performance where (historically) cis men dress as overtly feminine, even caricature-level women. It’s a world better illuminated, though, when you learn about the lives and culture behind the costumes and makeup.
Drag Race gave us the opportunity to see a queer person talk about the love of their life, or how the stigma of living with HIV makes it hard to fit into the community, or even how they think their fellow competitor has back rolls. Drag Race allows its contestants to share the joy, tragedy, triumph, failures, and comedy — the humanity — of their lives and invites its audience to smile, cry, celebrate, commiserate, and laugh along with them.
This year, RuPaul’s Drag Race celebrated its 17th installment. It still surprises every season.
—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent
“The Decision”
I still remember nervously pacing the Las Vegas Sun’s newsroom on July 8, 2010, as I watched basketball phenom LeBron James, the star of my beloved Cleveland Cavaliers, and sportscaster Jim Gray chit-chat before getting to the big reveal: Where was James going to play next season?
Fifteen years earlier, Michael Jordan (to whom James is often compared as the greatest basketball player of all time) had announced his own career decision in a two-word press release. This 75-minute TV special, dubbed “The Decision,” was a pageant dedicated to the free agency choice of one player, and nearly 10 million people tuned in. It was a garish spectacle in a time when we couldn’t look away from garish spectacles. “The Decision” borrowed from the reality TV playbook, and as a piece of pop culture, pushed the limits of what “sports as entertainment” could really mean.
Then we came to the tense and thrilling finale: “I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” James said. I slumped in my office chair at work.
Many critics objected to the way James made his choice known to the world, in a sit-down interview that was widely promoted by one of the most self-promoting brands on the planet (ESPN). Choosing a sunny locale with a glamorous team of stars over the Rust Belt only added to the distaste.
It all seems a bit silly now. James has since won four titles — including one for Cleveland in 2016. He is perhaps the defining American athlete of the century, and the player empowerment he was exercising on that fateful night in 2010 has become the norm.
But the free agency TV special itself would never be repeated. “The Decision” was an audacious experiment — and a spectacular failure.
—Dylan Scott, senior correspondent
Lean In
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In barely had time to hit the shelves before the takes started coming.
It was the kind of book that shortly thereafter became a genre unto itself: based on a viral TED Talk, espousing a corporate-friendly version of some liberal idea or other. The formula was nearly irresistible to a pop culture ecosystem newly enchanted with the liberal ethos of the Obamas, and simultaneously ready to embrace tech elites, as long as they said approximately the right things. The TED Talk-to-office book club pipeline was at its peak, and the proto girlboss was its bestselling protagonist.
Lean In set the formula. It was a “women can have it all” manifesto of sorts, explaining how Sandberg was able to have two kids and still be COO at Facebook, entreating other women to do the same. The think pieces were immediate and forceful.
For some readers, Sandberg’s ideas about how women could push back against the wage gap through the force of their own ambition felt urgent, practical, and deeply needed. For others, her focus on white-collar career women was myopic at best and classist at worst, and her offer of personal solutions to systemic problems was downright anti-feminist. Then there was the backlash to the backlash, arguing that business books for men were never asked to talk to working-class men, and that Sandberg was unfairly pilloried because of her gender.
Today, in the wake of massive reputational loss at Meta and a damning memoir that accuses Sandberg of some seriously weird workplace behavior, Lean In is remembered mostly as a symbol of the worst excesses of toxic girlbossery. Part of its legacy, though, might just be as an avatar of the take economy. Lean In emerged before the digital media bubble popped, when every new event was fodder for waves upon waves of discourse. If Lean In became a symbol of many things to many people, it’s in part because discourse made it so.
—Constance Grady, senior correspondent
Beyoncé’s self-titled album
When Beyoncé declared that she “changed the game with that digital drop” on Nicki Minaj’s “Feeling Myself,” it wasn’t just the usual hyperbole you hear in a rap song. Her 2013 self-titled album marked the start of her reputation as pop music’s biggest rule-breaker — and not just because she released an album on a Friday instead of Tuesday. By surprise-releasing a complete visual album online in the middle of the night, she modeled what pop stardom would look like in the streaming age, with artists seizing new levels of control over their careers.
With Beyoncé, she skipped the usual promotional cycle before an album release, including singles, press interviews, and televised performances. In a statement following the self-titled album’s release, she said she wanted to “speak directly” to her fans. “There’s so much that gets between the music, the artist and the fans,” she said. Seemingly, “so much” meant the press. Even with a clean track record in the public eye, Beyoncé felt it was necessary to control any possible narratives that could emerge, letting her music and the album’s lavish music videos depict the state of her marriage and new motherhood. Ironically, a few months after the release, she experienced a rare lack of control in public, when a video of an elevator fight between her husband Jay-Z and her sister Solange was leaked.
Still, this level of image control has defined the latter half of Beyoncé’s career, from self-submitted Vogue interviews to completely avoiding talk shows. Other musicians, from Drake to Taylor Swift, have followed suit in circumventing the standard avenues of self-promotion over the past decade. If a pop star is being interviewed nowadays, it’s often by another celebrity. Traditional album rollouts are now considered a lost art, although it seems like younger artists, including Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter, are relearning the value of eagerly marketing their music. It turns out this sort of defiance only really works when you’re Beyoncé.
—Kyndall Cunningham, staff reporter
Justine Sacco’s ill-fated tweet
For many people, the moment that begat “cancel culture” occurred on December 20, 2013, when Justine Sacco, a PR exec, tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” just before taking off on an 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town.
Besides outrage at its glib racism, Sacco’s tweet embodied the peak era for social media virality. In 2013, the Twitter hashtag was still mainly used for audience commentary and trending topics rather than protest organization and advocacy. Onlookers watching her tweet go viral created the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet — a schadenfreudian response to what seemed certain to be Sacco’s inevitable firing, one that articulated the tension in the air (no pun intended) with her temporarily disconnected from social media, making the moment even more viral. The hashtag was the top non-promoted hashtag on the site for hours while her tweet bounced around the platform. Before her plane landed, her company, media conglomerate IAC, swept in to do damage control, and she was swiftly fired.
The idea that one’s life could be destroyed over something as minor (yet loud) as a tweet provided the kernel of paranoia that burnished hysteria at the idea of “getting canceled.”
In retrospect, Sacco’s trajectory reflected the culture war narrative to come. Many felt sympathy for Sacco as a victim of public shaming, while others saw the incident as a cautionary tale about unprofessional social media use. Writing about Sacco in his 2015 bestseller So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson compared her to a car crash victim and the apparatus of social media to an automobile instantly transformed into “a jagged weapon of torture.”
The idea that one’s life could be destroyed over something as minor (yet loud) as a tweet provided the kernel of paranoia that burnished hysteria at the idea of “getting canceled.” The concept swiftly morphed from a half-joking social media admonishment into a worst-case scenario of public retaliation that could happen to anyone, frequently envisioned as a tool of “woke” leftist culture.
For all the furor, rarely does the public shaming actually take root; even Sacco’s employer eventually rehired her.
—Aja Romano, senior writer
Kim and Kanye’s Vogue Cover
It’s rare that Anna Wintour is lauded for having her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, let alone seeing into the future. But in 2014, whenVogue’s editor-in-chief unveiled the magazine’s April issue featuring rapper and fashion designer Kanye West embracing his then-fiancé, reality star Kim Kardashian, she seemed to know exactly where culture was headed. The cover served as a preview for their forthcoming nuptials while, more controversially, announcing their status as one of the world’s most powerful couples.
It was a move that exasperated the internet, from fashion media to regular Twitter users. While West (now known as Ye) was continuing to establish his dominance as an artist and entrepreneur, Kardashian was still filming a reality show and selling waist trainers on Instagram. The Vogue cover heralded Kim’s entry into a more rarefied rung of celebrity, finally embraced by the media and fashion’s usual gatekeepers. Ironically, Vogue may have needed the couple more to prove its continued relevance than the other way around.
The anger around the cover was ultimately a panic about fame in a post-social media landscape, a war that was waged throughout the decade. What did celebrity even mean if a Kardashian could land on the world’s most prestigious magazine? Did we really have to pay this much attention to influencers and reality stars? For many reasons, including the election of a certain president, it turns out we did.
Now, the Vogue cover feels like a weird artifact, given the polar-opposite fates of Kardashian and Ye’s celebrity and their former marriage. Ye is now best known for his rampant antisemitism, while Kardashian is a billionaire thanks in large part to her own fashion line. It turns out seeing a reality star on the cover of Vogue wasn’t nearly as bizarre as things could get.
—Kyndall Cunningham, staff reporter
Hamilton
Few cultural phenomena hit as hard as Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical about the once-underrated founding father who established America’s banking system and was killed by political rival Aaron Burr during a duel. You might not look at that logline and think, “rap battles, with race-swapped actors as patriots,” but these key ingredients infused energy and excitement into a tired history lesson. First unveiled in 2009, for the White House Poetry Jam, the show’s connection with Obama-era feel-good, sometimes superficial progressivism was clinched from the start.
Through Hamilton, hip-hop truly went mainstream, entering the playlists of NPR listeners who might have been encountering seminal rappers like Mos Def or Biggie Smalls for the first time through their onstage counterparts. When Hamilton debuted in 2015, everything about it seemed massive, from its artistic ambitions to the size of its fandom, to its ticket sales — from its cultural omnipresence to the scope of its reframing of history and the scale of debate about whether it was good or not. (It was.) You were not allowed to have mild feelings about Hamilton.
By mid-2016, Hamilton’s cultural importance was firmly established, but its political importance soon eclipsed everything else. In June, the Pulse nightclub shooting prompted Miranda’s Tony acceptance speech, including the oft-quoted phrase, “Love is love is love is love.” Vice-President-elect Mike Pence’s attendance at Hamilton just nine days after the 2016 election, and the cast’s onstage response, kicked off a heady era of theatre as political protest. The moment pitted Trump against both Hamilton the show and theatre itself in an escalating back-and-forth that’s still playing out nearly 10 years later.
Yet by the time Hamilton finally premiered on Disney+ in 2020, its influence seemed nearly over — a fall that was arguably a byproduct of its deep cultural oversaturation as well as the fact that, by 2020, the country was mired in far more consequential debates. Ultimately, the show was both a driver of Obamacore and a victim of the era’s rosy poptimism — in retrospect, both hopelessly naive and deeply cringe.
—Aja Romano, senior writer
Get Out
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