‘Recession pop’: Can great music signal an economic downturn?

It's tough to identify if the economy is in a recession. Economists toil over economic data to try to find the most accurate indicators. Gross domestic product and unemployment numbers are great data points, but what does the state of pop music tell us about economic conditions?

Traditionally, two consecutive quarters of negative growth is the preferred method to tell a recession took place. When it comes to unemployment, the Sahm Rule is triggered when the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate is half a percentage point above the 12-month low. The McKelvey Rule is essentially the same but is triggered when the unemployment rate is 0.3 percentage points above the 12-month low. The inverted yield curve , when short-term Treasury yields exceed long-term yields, is also a recession indicator.

There are less-scientific recession indicators as well. If men’s underwear sales decline, it can point to an economic downturn. The same can be said for an uptick in unclaimed corpses at morgues. And then there is the idea of a " vibecession ," a term coined by Kyla Scanlon . That is when economic conditions feel bad even though indicators point to stability.

But then there is the notion that "pop music is brilliant" when the economy is about to face serious problems. That is where the idea of "recession pop" comes into play.

What is recession pop?

In short, recession pop is seen as the Top 40 hits that are released during an economic downturn. The most clear example was during the Great Recession.

"I would define recession pop from the years just leading up to the recession, so the end of 2007 probably at least through 2012," Charlie Harding, an NYU Professor and co-host of the podcast "Switched on Pop," said.

Meanwhile, Joe Bennett, a musicologist and professor at Berklee College of Music, said it's a label that applies "to a particular body of work, which I would broadly describe as super cheerful dance floor bangers that came out sometime between 2008 and 2011."

Since it is not a particularly scientific indicator, Harding said the recession pop label could even go all the way into 2014 because "lots of people were still really feeling that recession well into the early 2010s."

Is recession pop a real thing?

It's hard to officially quantify whether pop music really reflects the economic times, but both Harding and Bennett said the interpretation is often up to the listener.

"You can find what we might say are reflective songs, where the dark times people are experiencing are indeed dealt with within the song lyric," Bennett said. "And we might also find what you might call escapist songs. 'What the heck, let's party.'"

"So songwriters are not necessarily social commenters, but like all of us, everyone who creates popular culture, they are living in that culture at the time they are making the object and the market that is the pop music fans who are buying or streaming the single are also in that social context and liking what they like in the context that they're in," he continued.

"As much intention as a songwriter might have, whatever they might intend, the listener is going to take it and do what they want with it," Harding added. "A great example of listeners completely misusing a song would be 'Hey Ya'  by OutKast, which is one of the most requested songs at weddings, and yet the song is about relationships that never last."

"The recession affected different people very differently," Harding said. "If you lost your home, you're gonna remember what that song is on the radio when you had to pack up and leave. It's really different than maybe someone for whom their family got through it okay, and they're just like, 'I just love my recession pop bops.'"

The history of popular music is littered with songs known as "party anthems." But the recession pop era may have had less economic-based reasons for those hits.

"I think there's ways in which the music was great, and I think there's other ways in which it feels a little bit reductive," Harding told Straight Arrow News. "We're talking about a period in which the digitization of music was fully taking over."

Despite the idea that recession pop is specific to the Great Recession, Bennett points to music that came out amid the Great Depression to illustrate how music reflects the times.

"Bing Crosby's 'Brother Can You Spare a Dime?': it was a big hit in the early '30s, and that's a song about a returning war veteran who's homeless and looking for money," he said. "In 1933, Ginger Rogers has a hit with 'We're in the Money.' Is that sort of an ironic title? It's certainly a very cheerful lyric. Maybe it's a fantasy about having money, because a lot of people wouldn't have in the U.S. in the early 30s."

Nostalgia effect

With all the evidence to support the idea of recession pop, it’s hard to say one era's music is better than another, which can make it a particularly difficult economic indicator to nail down.

"If recession pop is a nostalgic way of looking back and trying to make sense of this period of total dislocation and fragmentation, all the power to listeners to call this stuff recession pop, even if it just happened to be the upbeat, fun thing that was occurring at that time," Harding said. "People are trying to make this connection to music that happened 10 to 15 years ago."

There is good reason for music dubbed recession pop to be resonating with people in their 30s that may have nothing to do with the quality of the tunes or state of the economy.

"It fits with the general cycle of popular music nostalgia," Bennett said.

Bennet added most people believe the best music was released when they were 17 years old.

"A lot of the psychology research into nostalgia suggests that it works on something like a 15-year cycle," Bennet continued.

There is a ton of research on nostalgia and when it really kicks in. Some say it takes 12-15 years ; others suggest it is a 20-year cycle ; some call it the golden 40-year rule .

"It's more of an after-the-fact analysis, which is a fun and useful way of creating playlists: being nostalgic, digging into our memory, perhaps making sense of an era that was really dark and challenging for people and making light of it after the fact," Harding said.

Pop music today

While recession pop is likely just a label put on music after the fact, it gives us an opportunity to look at what makes a hit song and how that has changed in the last 15 years.

"I think what makes a great pop song is accessibility," Bennett said. "Particularly if you're releasing a single, you want it to appeal to millions of people."

"It has to have an amazing concept," Harding added. "[It] has to have a memorable hook, and it has to capture the zeitgeist."

Harding likens making a great pop song to winning the lottery. Many wonder how some artists have been able to hit the jackpot over and over again. But what makes a great pop song has changed over time. Today, more and more records are being discovered on short-form video apps like TikTok and Instagram.

"TikTok is a much faster-moving medium so people need to grab their audience's attention to stop them from vertically scrolling onto the next thing," Bennett said of the app that broke artists like Lil' Nas X . "As we know from TikTok, that sort of meme community will often seize on a particular part of the song, a particular audio excerpt, and use that to make its meme, its dance routine, whatever it is."

But even though artists need to get to the hook quicker than ever before, Harding said they have more to say than ever before.

"There is this expectation that we are more giving of ourselves in our lyrics today," Harding said. "And so I think of an artist like Charlie XCX, who, on 'Brat,' talked about how she wanted to write lyrics that were as if she was just texting a friend. And this is the album that has broken through for her, because some of these lyrics, they don't have these perfect rhymes. They have the perfect imperfections."

And there’s no bigger artist giving themselves to their music than Taylor Swift.

"I think on a lot of metrics, Taylor Swift is the biggest artist to have ever lived, in terms of the longevity of her career; the fact that she is what should be a late-stage career artist, and yet she is at her peak," Harding said. "She has had multiple peaks that just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger."

Meanwhile, Bennett pointed out that Swift herself was not immune to the recession pop movement.

"Her two significant albums at that time would have been 'Fearless,' which came out in 2008 and then 'Speak Now,' which originally came out in 2010," Bennett said. "And of course, both of those contain a whole bunch of songs in that vein: 'Love Story,' 'You Belong with Me,' 'White Horse,' 'The Story of Us.'"

In the end, while there may not be a deliberate intention to make music that makes listeners feel good or sad during tough economic times, it's clear music resonates with people and reminds them of those snapshots in time.

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