Towards a Theory of Recession Pop
It was unlike me, but I woke up early on the random Tuesday morning that I got laid off.
I had gotten into a bad habit of staying up at night and not using an alarm in the morning because work had become particularly slow. This was my first job out of college, and I had a difficult time distinguishing whether the languorous pace of my entry-level corporate gig was a common symptom of white-collar marketing work or an omen.
I didn’t know what to expect when my former coworker texted me before work hours and told me to check my personal email. The offensively capitalized “CONFIDENTIAL” and “EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY” in the subject line should have given it away, but I read the whole message from the CEO to let it really sink in.
There were “organizational changes” that would “directly impact” the company, and my role was “affected.” It was impressive to me how poetically they managed to say absolutely nothing.
My job loss was part of a larger wave of layoffs that had been hitting the tech industry for the better part of the last year. It’s clear: we are in an economic recession. Well, we might be. Or, it might be coming. Or, it’s already passed. Either way, tech companies, job markets, housing markets, food prices, supply chains, wages, crypto, and the government are all responding to an economic contraction—or, at least, the idea of one.
In her essay about the “vibecession,” commentator Kyla Scanlon argues that the negative economic mood is easier to explain in terms of our feelings rather than concrete economic theory. Breaking down how consumer sentiment can ripple across key economic indicators, Scanlon explains how the threat of recession becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy:
If people have an experience (say, living through the 2008 recession) and evidence (home prices skyrocketing) that might shape some of their expectations—“wow, another unprecedented event to live through” which shapes their perception (things suck) and their interpretation of the future (things will continue to suck)—that shapes their narrative, which can shape reality.
Out of the many ways that the current economic conditions have been explained to me, a vibe-based approach to our economic conditions is ultimately the most coherent. It’s not hard for me to be convinced that a “recession” is a contested idea that we created by and for ourselves—a side effect of a system that is designed to prioritize money over people.
The collective vibes that manifest our economic reality are complex and multifaceted, often obscured by the institutions that govern it. Perhaps this is why economic anxieties so easily translate into our popular culture, as these are the terms in which we can comprehend a reality that seems so far out of our control. In this way, pop music is the perfect canvas for economic recession, primarily because of how sensitive the genre is to commercial and consumer sensibilities. Manufacturing pop music is, after all, a business risk that seeks to maximize its return and mass appeal more than any other music industry.
In their book Gendering the Recession, authors Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker centrally position popular culture in the “cultural storytelling” of recession, “[helping] to mobilize emotion and to allocate blame [and] frequently redirecting resentment and anger at structural problems.” Crisis-points like economic recession create a recurring dissonance in popular culture because of how these economic stress fractures shake our vision of autonomy and agency. As banks collapse, markets contract, and inequality deepens, our connection to economic agency falters, even as media companies try to compensate for it. Pop music, then, becomes just one part of mass media’s overall neoliberal response to recession.
As music executives, producers, and artists are often responding to their idea of the vibes in moments of economic recession, my theory of recession pop is rooted in the power of the individual to find pleasure and autonomy amidst structural economic downturn. In a world where most people are powerless against economic circumstance, adapting the products of popular culture for personal use is an imperfect means of simulating some sense of control against larger forces. This process is accelerated because of rapidly globalizing cultural fluency and new communication technologies that younger generations can use to seek meaning and remix popular culture to create new messages.
Some of the usual thematic suspects of recession pop include consumerist anthems that assure us we can spend our way to a new reality, sexless songs about sex that reduce physical intimacy to its mechanical attractions and rote motions, and vague empowerment chants that try to lifelessly propel us up off the ground. The theory of recession pop, then, speaks to this contrast between pop music’s many “reassuring vignettes of individual agency” and the actual economic precarity that defines so much of human life (Negra and Tasker).
I want to distinguish recession pop from escapist pleasure, however, as recession pop is much more about being present and aware of pop music’s context. This is to say that recession pop is often pleasurable, even if (or maybe especially when) the music itself isn’t particularly groundbreaking or good. My interest in recession pop centers around finding meaning in dissonance and exploring the politics of letting yourself fall into it facefirst, as I repeatedly do myself. It’s a theory of pop music, hearing the cultural disconnect and acknowledging the pleasure that can come from engaging with it.
By design, true economic agency will always be out of reach for many of us. A theory of recession pop is about settling into that reality and reworking it into pleasure. This is the contradictory mechanism inherent in recession pop, as its mass-produced pleasures are simultaneously a symptom of capitalism and also one of the methods we use to alleviate its fallout.
I think my favorite subcategory of recession pop contains the songs that promise us everything will be okay, as long as we just keep dancing. There’s something so thrilling and unifying about obeying a pop star’s demand to just dance or keep partying until the world ends that can only sharpen with the brutality of economic recession.
I’ve started looking for jobs again, but it’s a long process, made even more difficult by the influx of applicants by the many layoffs that have occurred since my own. In the meantime, I listen to the recession pop of the late 2000s/early 2010s that sparked my love for pop music.
In other words, I think I’m coping well.