The wackiest cultural moments of 2024, ranked
From the influx of celebrity lookalike contests to Moo Deng’s viral fame and some baffling movie press tours, Louis Chilton and Katie Rosseinsky look back at the year in pop culture
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Your support makes all the difference.How do we sum up 2024? It was a year of historic elections, devastating conflict and skyrocketing living costs. No wonder, then, that we seemed to seek respite – or at least a few moments’ distraction – from it all by embracing the weirder side of pop culture.
We were enthralled by tales from a disastrous Willy Wonka-themed immersive event. We pondered how exactly one might “hold space” for the lyrics of musical theatre banger “Defying Gravity” from Wicked. And we diverted our attention from the US presidential race by discovering that Take That’s own Gary Barlow has a very, very tall son. (If you hadn’t already guessed, our screen time went through the roof too.)
The release of Charli XCX’s album Brat prompted us to embrace our inner 365 party girl, we collectively fell for Adam Brody in Nobody Wants This and were alternately impressed and shocked by some truly Machiavellian behaviour on The Traitors. Oh, and we seriously started to ponder whether we’d have a shot at 15 seconds of viral fame by entering one of the endless succession of celebrity lookalike competitions that seemed to spring up around the globe in the final quarter of the year.
Here’s our countdown of the 15 most chaotic, baffling and downright odd pop cultural moments of the past 12 months…
15. ‘It Ends With Us’ ended with press tour drama
Not since the circus surrounding the release of 2022’s Don’t Worry Darling has a film’s press tour been the subject of so much scrutiny. It Ends With Us is an adaptation of a novel by BookTok sensation Colleen Hoover, which deals with an abusive relationship and stars Blake Lively as the protagonist, Lily Blossom Bloom (you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Lily opens a flower shop over the course of the narrative). Before its release, though, fans noticed that Lively and some of the cast seemed to have unfollowed the film’s director Justin Baldoni, who also plays Lily’s abusive partner Ryle. Then, as the cast started doing the media rounds, Baldoni tended to appear alone, and his co-stars awkwardly shrugged off questions about working with him. The whiff of a rift inevitably prompted social media users to start speculating about a potential feud; Lively then garnered criticism when some fans claimed she wasn’t discussing the film’s weighty emotional topics with enough seriousness. It was, in other words, a bit of a PR disaster, but one that we couldn’t look away from.
14. Michael J Fox at Glastonbury
There have been a number of unexpected guests to grace Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in recent years, but none so bizarre as this. Towards the end of their polarising fifth headline set at Worthy Farm, “Viva la Vida” pop-rockers Coldplay brought on Back to the Future star Michael J Fox, to accompany them on guitar during renditions of “Humankind” and “Fix You”. Paying tribute to Fox on stage, Chris Martin explained: “The main reason why we’re in a band is because of watching Back to the Future.” Left field or not, Fox’s cameo was a heartwarming moment – an earnest homage to a great performer.
13. Everybody fell for the ‘hot rabbi’
Back in the mid-Noughties, millennials fell for Adam Brody as The OC’s sarcastic, nerdy Seth Cohen. Fast-forward 20 years, and those very same viewers (now several decades older and hopefully a bit wiser) reignited their obsession with Brody when he appeared as progressive rabbi Noah in Netflix’s romcom series Nobody Wants This, an odd couple story about his fledging relationship with Kristen Bell’s Joanne, a sex podcaster who also happens to be totally agnostic. Just as Andrew Scott was christened “hot priest” for his role in Fleabag a few years back, Brody’s character was branded “hot rabbi” (why do we get so obsessed with these religious characters? Discuss...). Safe to say, nearly everybody wanted a slice of the show’s escapism – a couple who meet in real life, and seem relatively well adjusted, emotionally speaking? – and another season is already in the works.
12. Gary Barlow’s gigantic son
When Take That singer Gary Barlow shared a prosaic family photograph on Instagram in June to mark Father’s Day, it’s unlikely he would have expected it to go viral. And it didn’t – until November, when people began sharing it on social media en masse, so moved were they by the height of Barlow’s “massive son”, Daniel. While it is reported that Daniel is in fact only 6ft 2in (1.88m), he visibly dwarfs Gary (5ft 8in/1.72m) and the rest of the Barlow family in the image, an apparent loftiness that prompted an avalanche of memes. One widely shared post, for instance, included a photo of Gary being showered in golden confetti, alongside the caption: “Gary Barlow standing next to his son eating a croissant.” Families of celebrities should, of course, usually be off limits when it comes to public ridicule, but the flash-in-pan fixation on Barlow Jr was wholly celebratory. Social media simply seemed in awe of him – a giant among men.
11. Hawk Tuah
Seldom has the arc of 21st-century viral fame been painted quite so starkly as with Haliey Welch, the 22-year-old Tennessee woman better known by her catchphrase “Hawk Tuah”. Welch uttered the phrase – a crude sexual onomatopoeia – during a vox pop interview and the clip propelled her to immediate online fame. Before tuah long, she had launched her own podcast (Talk Tuah), a dating advice app, and a controversial cryptocurrency. It’s now been half a year since the “Hawk Tuah” trend began, and that 15 minutes of fame just keeps on going.
10. Celeb lookalike competitions
On 27 October, an unofficial Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest was staged in a park in New York City. Hundreds of people attended – including the Wonka star himself – causing police to show up and issue a dispersal order. The seal, however, had been broken, and a spate of copycat events sprung up across the globe. Lookalikes of Paul Mescal, Harry Styles, Jeremy Allen White and Dev Patel assembled in various public forums to compare likenesses; Glen Powell even offered the winner of his competition the chance to cameo in his forthcoming movie. What made the phenomenon all the more baffling was how few contestants bore anything more than a faint passing resemblance to their supposed doppelgangers. Lookalikes? Hardly!
9. Harry and Mollie had a ‘Traitors’ showdown
Twenty-two-year-old Harry played an absolute blinder on the second season of The Traitors, managing to lull the “faithfuls” into a false sense of security with his cheery little brother energy – then gleefully deciding which of them should be killed off. He seemed to strike up a genuinely solid friendship with fellow Gen-Z contestant Mollie, whose stalwart conviction that her new bestie was on the same side as her reached Shakespearean levels of dramatic irony as the season went on. Finally, during the last ever roundtable, when Mollie had one last chance to see the light and send Harry packing, we saw her start to write the letter H on her board, only to erase it after her pal promised her that he was being honest. Her good faith ensured that Harry landed £95,000 in prize money, and she walked away with nothing. It was solid gold watch-through-your-fingers reality TV (and our hearts broke for Mollie).
8. Dua Lipa makes a new friend
Fox wasn’t the only surprise at Glastonbury 2024 – at least not in the case of Dua Lipa. The Albanian-British pop star was accosted by a ukulele-strumming musician while strolling around the festival site – said musician then proceeded to give her a live rendition of a half-sung, half-rapped ditty of his own making (complete, of course, with plenty of uke). The excruciating clip went viral on social media, as did stills of Lipa’s facial reaction – a look of mortified awkwardness combined with a smile that might be described as generously polite.
7. ‘Demure’ became a buzzword
We probably didn’t need more evidence that everyone is spending far, far too much time scrolling social media (the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of 2024 wasn’t “brainrot” for nothing) but the speedy rise of the “very demure” catchphrase provided yet further proof. In August, TikTok creator Jools Lebron shared a video in which she explained why her work makeup look was “very demure, very mindful”. The tongue-in-cheek clip, which satirised the stereotypical trappings of femininity, then became a TikTok hit. Soon everyone was borrowing Lebron’s phrase, even brands and big organisations – Nasa got in on the act when it posted a message on Twitter/X which read: “You see how Earth looks in space? It’s very demure, very mindful. Earth looks very cutesy in the solar system.” Some people started reading a little too deeply into the whole thing, claiming it was a corrective to the chaos of “brat summer”; some adopted it unironically as a sort of trad-wife mantra. Lebron’s viral fame did change her life offline, though, earning her money to finance her gender transition.
6. Moo Deng mania took hold
We weren’t exactly overwhelmed with reasons to be cheerful this year, so the arrival of Moo Deng felt like a much-needed ray of sunshine. This very tiny, very shiny pygmy hippo, whose name roughly translates as “bouncy pork”, was born at a Thai zoo in July. She found viral fame when zoo staff uploaded videos of her playful antics – including, erm, biting her handlers and blowing bubbles of snot – and her screaming reaction face proved to be a real hit on social media. Soon there were memes, merch and even makeup tutorials promising to recreate her dewy glow. Today Show host Hoda Kotb put it best when she described the hippo as “the hottest, hottest new It-girl on the planet. She’s redefining beauty standards. She’s got chubby pink cheeks, a distinct potato shape.” And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
5. ‘Holding space’
The uber-earnest ex-theatre-kid energy of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo was there throughout the entirety of the Wicked press tour but came to a boil when confronted with one of the most opaque interview questions you’re likely to hear. “I’ve seen, this week, people are taking the lyrics of [Wicked showstopper] ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space with that, and feeling power in that,” journalist Tracey E Gilchrist told the actors. Erivo is seen growing visibly emotional, responding: “I didn’t know that was happening.” Grande reaches out to hold Erivo’s hand but ends up kind of holding onto one of Erivo’s fingers. The whole clip is almost impossible to decipher, and viewers were equal parts amused and flummoxed.
4. Oasis made a long-awaited comeback
Band reunions aren’t exactly few and far between in our nostalgia-obsessed era but the reunion between Liam and Noel Gallagher, announced in August, did feel genuinely surprising. After all, they’d spent the best part of 30 years reminding us how much they hate one another, and that animosity had only stepped up since Oasis went on hiatus in 2009 (and since Liam got hold of a social media account, allowing him to post photos of his older sibling captioned with the word “potato”). Did the rumoured £50m payday play a part in thawing the frosty relations between the Gallagher brothers? Who can say! Anyway, news that they’d be getting the band back together for a string of stadium dates in 2025 prompted many of us to cancel our weekend plans to spend a frustrating Saturday railing against Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system. Expect parka sales and mod haircuts to spike next summer.
3. “Kamala is Brat”
For millions of pop music fans, 2024 will always be the Year of Brat, such was the zeitgeist-snorting resonance of Charli XCX’s sixth studio album. Part of the genius of Brat is the sheer nebulousness of the term; Charli herself has defined it as evoking “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”. It was to some bemusement, nevertheless, that Charli tweeted her famous words, shortly after Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the US presidential election: “Kamala IS brat.” Kamala Harris’s team took the compliment and ran with it, altering her social media pages to reflect the brat-green aesthetic of Charli’s chic, stimulant-giddy album, prompting a thousand think pieces and explainers in the process. Even if Harris hadn’t lost the election several months later, the statement would still have been bizarre – no, Kamala isn’t brat. What are we doing here, exactly?
2. Kendrick vs Drake
Kendrick Lamar vs Drake. Depending on your point of view, it’s either two rap giants squaring off – the hip-hop equivalent of Godzilla taking on Mothra – or else the real-life manifestation of the “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” meme. Whatever your stance, the feud between the two best-selling artists undoubtedly kicked up a notch this year, with both Drake and Kendrick releasing multiple diss tracks within a short space of time. The most controversial of these proved to be “Not Like Us”, a track in which Kendrick accuses his rival of being a “certified pedophile”. (Drake has denied the allegation.) The unrepentantly pugnacious track went on to break chart records and earn five Grammy nominations, also provoking a lawsuit from team Drake. The whole affair has taken rap beefs into uncharted territory – and fans are absolutely loving it.
1. The Willy Wonka Experience became the new Fyre Festival
On 24 February, families headed to a warehouse in an industrial area of Glasgow, hoping to step into a world of pure imagination. They’d paid £35 for a ticket to an immersive experience inspired by Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory (an event, we should note, that wasn’t remotely affiliated with Roald Dahl or the film studio behind Wonka). What greeted them was underwhelming to say the least: a few plastic candy cane decorations, a bouncy castle, a handful of actors tasked with reading out a script seemingly generated by AI and a glum looking Oompa Loompa. Police were eventually called to the warehouse after receiving complaints from disgruntled customers. The whole thing was rudimentary enough to make an escape room from an Apprentice task look like a Punchdrunk theatrical production – and naturally, social media users lapped up the whole debacle, obsessing over each new eyewitness testimony from visitors and hired performers. It will surely go down in meme history as Britain’s low-budget answer to Fyre Festival.
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