The ‘Tap In’ 20 for ’25 List Is Here

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.

It’s been a somewhat tepid year as far as pop culture goes—flashes of brilliance punctuated by long stretches of mid. Here are the TV shows, albums, songs, films, scenes, verses, bars and everything else in between that thrilled me without reservation in 2025—ranked the Tap In way.

20. This one specific bar on Drake’s “What Did I Miss”

Such is the [still] compelling dichotomy of Drake that he can start a verse as roughly as he does here—with a tortured, cringe attempt at wordplay (“some TLC shit ‘cause you gon need a chilly ice pack for your left eye,” get it??)—and then fall into the pocket and start absolutely skating like he is by the time he gets to “Y’all been on that type of timing for too long/Iceman, Tiffany-blue stones/I done made plenty shit right outta two wrongs.” Real heads know sometimes it’s deeper than just obsessing over a good verse; you can get as insular as being really into one very brief run on a song even if it barely lasts 30 seconds. As much as I actually dig “What Did I Miss” as a whole (and even if my critique sent the most sensitive Stan group on social media into a tizzy), a lot of the play I’ve given it has been on the strength of that one line, to be honest.

19. Nas’s whole 2025 run

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