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The 2025 Grammys celebrated pop being back to its agenda-setting best | Alexis Petridis

It was heartening – if expected – to see Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Charli xcx and Chappell Roan all grab gongs, while an award for the Beatles suggests confidence in AI

Its once-central defining role within broader popular culture is held to have been vastly diminished by social media, and yet Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us wasn’t just a huge commercial success, it influenced everything, from US sports to the campaign messaging of the American presidential election to sales of the fashion brands featured in its video: if you were going to dub anything the song of the year, it was obviously going to be that. It featured Shaboozey – ahead of his single A Bar Song (Tipsy) spending a record-setting 19 weeks at the top of the US chart – and it was part of the ongoing vogue for pop artists shifting their sound towards something more country-adjacent, unencumbered by the kind of this-isn’t-country dismissal from Nashville that famously dogged Lil Nas X’s similarly successful Old Town Road five years ago. You could view that as merely an act of sentiment – Now and Then was, after all, dubbed “the last Beatles single”, a final leave-taking from the biggest band of all time – but there’s no getting around the fact that it was a rock performance that required AI to make it happen, previous attempts at extracting a usable vocal from John Lennon’s unfinished 1977 demo having failed because the equipment wasn’t up to it.

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