Lady Gaga’s “Applause” at the 2013 VMAs

Sometimes, when slogging through yet another forgettable awards show, I wonder whether Lady Gaga getting fake booed while peeking through a white square represents the last bit of wonderful nonsense that mega-scale pop will ever cough up. The “Applause” performance was not her greatest TV concert, but it was a great one, as well as a self-aware eulogy for her career to date. She seemed to realize that 2013’s Artpop might mark the endpoint for her supernaturally bombastic shtick, but it’s unclear whether she knew that James Parker’s prophecy in The Atlantic—“The Last Pop Star”—would come to pass. Gaga spent the rest of the 2010s shedding her masks to show her “real” self grappling with anxiety and trauma sans glitter or EDM. Her peers and descendants did something similar, and the results involve a more relatable kind of dazzlement. But pop doesn’t feel like fantasy anymore.

Shirley Li, staff writer



The Bling Ring (2013)

Sofia Coppola’s account of the real-life robberies committed by a gang of celeb-obsessed California teens isn’t really a crime drama. It’s more of a beautifully shot anthropological study of late-2000s, early-2010s pop culture. This was a time when reality TV and a lineup of tabloid-friendly “stars” (namely the Hiltons and Lohans and Simpsons) started closing the gap between the A-listers and everyone else, while paving the way for the influencer era to come. Never one to shy away from a story about the desires of detached young women, Coppola turned the ripped-from-the-headlines scandal into an intoxicating and unnerving ode to indulgence. “I wanna robbbb,” whimpers Emma Watson’s scene-stealing Valley girl just before the crew, well, robbbbs. Call the tale shallow, condemn its characters, it doesn’t matter; whenever I watch, I almost want to join her quest. Almost.

Lorde’s Melodrama (2017)

It’s all there in the title: Lorde’s sophomore album hits like a sonic tsunami of exaggerated emotions, covering the soaring highs and tragic lows of obsessive young love. Given the amount of times I’ve hit the replay button on “Supercut,” I debated whether to spotlight only a single track, but in truth, Melodrama’s scope as an album—from the furious ecstasy of “Perfect Places” to the gut-wrenching devastation of “Liability”—deserves its own entry. Along with her tightly controlled, breathy-breathless vocals, Lorde proves herself the lyrical poet laureate of the 2010s. She’s the patron saint of youthful angst, opening doors for the Billie Eilishes and Alessia Caras to come, and the type of artist whose work deserves a place in the Louvre. Down the back, of course, but who cares? Still the Louvre.

House of Cards (2013–18)

Looking back, it’s almost scary how much viewers obsessed over such a cruel show, but 2013 was a different time. When Netflix debuted its second original series, the cast’s star power, the creative pedigree (with the director David Fincher among the executive producers), and the subject matter—that of Washington, D.C., power plays—were too addicting not to binge. An American spin on a British import, the show about a bloodthirsty congressman clawing his way to the White House was tautly told and well acted, not to mention shocking: In its first few seasons, it delivered some of the most watercooler-y moments of the golden age of TV’s waning years. So thanks, House of Cards, for ushering in an age of binge-watching anchored by major movie stars and timely plots. Too bad that, in the end, it all collapsed under the weight of the real world, in more ways than one.