Soundtracking Meltdown

Stray thoughts on recession pop

Last week, I learned that Yahoo still exists read an article about “recession pop” that suggested the return of Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry in 2025 is not-so-coincidentally coinciding with the recession that is either already here or immanent, depending on your point of view. Either way, it seems that the “psychological state” generated by recessions is proliferating into our media, reflecting back to us some kind of affect capable of both accurately capturing collective anxiety while also remaining marketable enough to sell, and resulting in the kind of slick dystopia characteristic of Black Mirror and White Lotus; despite their differences, both shows arguably engage with end-times anxieties, or the behavior that results when people feel they’re about to lose it all.

In hindsight, the consensus about popular music during the last (major) recession—during which many of the above-named figures first came to prominence—is that it only indirectly addressed the crisis, providing an escapist reprieve from the real world by allowing us to blow off steam. “It was a very cheerful time in popular music,” says Joe Bennett in the Yahoo piece. And while there surely were proliferating, glibly upbeat pop tunes at the top of the charts from 2008–2012, I have argued that what we might today call “recession pop” constitutes a narrower, more specific subset of this kind of music. In my view, recession pop isn’t about total escapism if escapism implies that we forget our troubles; rather, we run to the club from an acute awareness of our troubles, lending much of this music, as my friend and colleague Paula describes in the same article, an emphatically nihilistic inflection.¹

When I wrote about this back in 2019, I called the phenomenon “post-crash party pop,” (PCPP) and what characterized it for me more than anything else was exactly that kind of nihilism, the desperation oozing from repeated exhortations to “party all the time,” “dance til the world ends,” the demands “don’t stop,” or “never stop,” intensifying as the years went by until ultimately, Miley Cyrus wondered whether we would be capable of stopping even if we wanted to. This is what I described as “manic/cathartic punishment-therapy” induced by music that demands we remain in the present (“right now, forever”) because the future is so bleak. Considered in this way, recession pop doesn’t provide escapism, in my view, as much as a necessary but ultimately ineffective coping mechanism: The world is falling apart and I know it. I’m not dancing because I’m running away from something; I’m dancing because what else are you supposed to do during an apocalypse?

So there are a few problems with the formulation of recession pop as a general concept. First, treating new albums by Ke$ha and Katy Perry as indicative of distinct ‘economic depression vibes’ only works if you forget that they’ve been producing records pretty much all the way along—it’s been a while since any of them have broken through to people, but that’s a separate question.

That said, if we accept the premise that enjoyment of music like this is at least in some ways predicated on worsening economic conditions, what this indicates to me, if anything, is that recession is always hovering in the background of a capitalist economy without strict political limits imposed to mitigate its insatiable growth imperatives. As David Harvey describes in this quick 2008 explainer, a fundamental principle of Marx’s diagnosis is that “capital never solves its crisis problems; it moves them around geographically.” Thus, the possibility of recession attends any heating up of economic indicators like GDP and stock buybacks, any “hot market” that could become a bubble ready burst. These dynamics haven’t gone away since 2008, and neither have these artists.

Second, insofar as recession pop exists, I’d argue that we should think about it not as EDM-influenced pop music that happens to be popular during periods of economic hardship, but rather, the specific strain of EDM-influenced pop music that happens to be popular during periods of economic hardship and discloses that fact, however subtly. From the cataclysmic imagery in Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends” to the music-as-viral-contagion depicted by LMFAO’s “Party Rock,” the feel-good bubble produced by recession pop/PCPP is always contaminated to some degree or another with the anxiety informing our cathartic, aggressive flight from the real world—and it makes that contamination clear.

Conditions of capitalist labor produce alienation and therefore incentivize escapism on a daily basis—how else do we describe the feeling of a need to “decompress” after work, usually by tapping the I.V. drip of streaming platforms and in effect by going right back to (a different kind of) work for a different kind of company? But when our alienation isn’t even providing us with the stable lifestyle that we sold our labor power in order to achieve, escapism takes on an energetic desperation—the parties have to get longer and we have to go that much harder, since the easy escapism of everyday life isn’t any longer enough to help us pretend that things are going to be fine.

Even the most ostensibly innocent of PCPP anthems take on this nihilistic energy. In “Tik Tok,” Ke$ha both begins the video and ends it in a bathtub, implying the cyclical and never-ending temporality indexed by the lyric “the party don’t stop, no,” a time-space that precludes real life from ever taking hold. Consider too the cartoonishly stereotypical white/hetero/nuclear family scene in the beginning, where Ke$ha’s “mom” drops a plate of overly-perfect pancakes on the floor after seeing with her own eyes just how thoroughly Ke$ha doesn’t—can’t—fit into that white picket fence of a lifestyle.

While listeners could take this as more of the same “I’m not like you, dad” attitude that has characterized all youth-oriented popular music since the emergence of rock n’ roll, millennial listeners in 2010 will have recognized something structural in this alienation—many of us, as Anne Helen Petersen writes, aspired to that lifestyle; rather than rejecting it, we worked our asses off to get it, only to find that it wasn’t waiting for us on the other end of all our college degrees. This is the alienation Ke$ha experiences in the video, which drives her right back to the club while visual cues (the American flag at :55, the “money” street sign at :56) and lyrics alike (“Ain’t got no money in my pocket, but I’m already here”) clue us in to the conditions informing her behavior. This might be escapist music in one sense. But in another, it drives themes of alienation and negativity right to the forefront.

This is the kind of despair that I’ve never heard in Katy Perry’s music, for example, which her recent trip to space helps us understand as actually escapist—i.e., a fantasy in which you’re so white and wealthy that you don’t actually have to think about the economy at all. While the world burns, you can go get a bird’s eye view, spewing carbon emissions along the way. To me, that’s not recession pop as much as it’s more tone-deaf music with no sense of our moment. Same as it ever was.

What’s interesting to me about this go-around is whether or not recession pop will take any cues from or start to intersect in a meaningful way with the other major development in EDM-adjacent pop music in the past few years: sapphic pop. As I’ve written before (and am trying to develop²), I view the sapphic pop phenomenon as at least in part about a critique of normative femininity, suggesting that its massive popularity (at least across 2024 as represented by the PowerPop Girls) tells us something about listeners hungry for more nuanced visions of womanhood than (again) whatever Perry is trying to say.³

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case, given how economic hardship—like everything else—affects different people differently, skewing worse for minoritized folks, and certainly women, who just as a general reality at minimum earn less than men doing the same work. Ditto the attendant mental/physical fallout and the consequences of hardship on our health. That is to say that if white-male aesthetics seem incapable of saying anything meaningful in contemporary pop music, it is in part because the attitude imbued into their work has reflected an overriding material reality for their majority: It’s all gonna work out somehow. When things go from bad to worse, it’s women, queer people, and other outsiders who are most equipped to render those difficulties with a perspective that’s meaningful to people, informed by real experiences no matter how famous a given artist has become. In that sense, I fear we have much good music to anticipate.

Cry hard.

1. “I would expect to see, I think, a little bit more of just a nihilistic bend. It’s not just a kind of like, ‘I’m having fun and I don’t care,’ but ‘The world is ending and I can’t care.’”

2. I am morbidly excited about this Sabrina Carpenter article I’m working on, but I’m not sure if it has what it needs just yet.

3. Sorry to keep harping on this, but truly, I can’t get over the timing of all of this, where Perry’s biggest flop ever exactly coincided with brat summer, demonstrating two totally contrasting views of femininity in pop music, one of which was dominant even ten years earlier, but by 2024 had become hopelessly inadequate for the moment that Charli XCX was slamming her forehead into, breaking glass.