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.
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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.”
Super cheerful dance floor bangers that came out sometime between 2008 and 2011.
Musicologist Joe Bennett describing recession pop
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.”
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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.
Tags: Berklee College of Music, Black Eyed Peas, Carly Rae Jepsen, Charlie Harding, Charlie XCX, claudia Sahm, Economy, GDP, Great Depression, Great Recession, inverted yield curve, Jobs, Jobs Report, joe bennett, Katy Perry, Kyla Scanlon, McKelvey Rule, Music, Outkast, Pop Music, Recession, recession pop, Reels, Sahm Rule, Shop Boyz, Taylor Swift, TikTok, Unemployment, Unemployment rate
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
Are we headed toward a recession or already in one? Well, there are a lot of ways to tell…
Traditionally two consecutive quarters of negative growth say we’re in it.
You can look at unemployment. The Sahm Rule triggers when the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate is half a percentage point above the 12-month low. Or the McKelvey Rule, which says basically the same thing but with 0.3 percentage points.
There’s also the dreaded inverted yield curve when short-term Treasury yields exceed long-term Treasury yields.
Still with me?
Here’s where it gets interesting. The less scientific indicators.
Like when the vibes are all wrong even though economic indicators are doing alright. That’s what Kyla Scanlon calls a Vibecession.
Slowing men’s underwear sales can also point to economic concerns, apparently, you guys wear tattered boxers when times are tough? And, more morbidly, the number of unclaimed corpses at morgues goes up in tough times.
I promise, I’m not going to count that today. We’re going to go in a more “lively” direction.
JOE E FOSTER:
“A wise man once told me that two signs that we are headed into financial ruin is No. 1, all of the strip clubs are empty No. 2, the pop music is brilliant.”
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
So, we should start getting familiar with the Perry rule, the Gaga rule or even the Peas rule?
BLACK EYED PEAS:
“Gotta get that-that-that-that boom boom boom.”
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
This is where “recession pop” comes in. Can music tell us where the country’s economy is headed?
CHARLIE HARDING:
I would define recession pop probably from, like, the years just leading up to the recession. So, like, you know, end of 2007 probably at least through 2012
JOE BENNETT:
so it’s a retrospective label that we’re using today in 2024 to apply to a particular body of work, which I would broadly describe as super cheerful dance floor bangers that came out some time between 2008 and 2011.
CHARLIE HARDING:
if not all the way to like 2014 because I think of the euro crisis that was happening in 2012 as part of that recession era, and lots of people were still really feeling that recession well into the early 2010s.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
OK so in short, “recession pop” is Top 40 bangers that come out during an economic downturn. The most clear example happened leading into the Great Recession: a pop music soundtrack that stands out above the rest.
So is it really a thing? And more importantly, do today’s hits slap enough that you have to worry about another financial crisis?
To dig into whether there is any credence to the phenomenon, we didn’t interview some economists, we went to the real experts.
CHARLIE HARDING:
I’m Charlie Harding. I’m the co-host of the podcast, switched on pop and a professor of music at NYU.
JOE BENNETT:
My name is Joe Bennett. I’m a forensic musicologist and a professor at Berklee College of Music, and my particular area of specialism is popular song analysis.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
Every music fan can identify the songs that scored their core memories.
I can feel it. Summer of ‘07, windows down, diesel truck purring, open road, and RiRi on the radio.
RIHANNA:
“You can stand under my Umbrella. Ella Ella eh eh.”
CHARLIE HARDING:
The recession affected different people very differently, like if you lost your home, you’re gonna remember what that song is on the radio when you had to pack up and leave is 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.
JOE BENNETT:
You can find what we might say are reflective songs where the dark times people are experiencing are indeed dealt within the song lyric. And we might also find what you might call escapist songs. What the heck, let’s party.
SHOP BOYZ:
“Party like a rock, party like a rockstar”
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
While recession pop is generally seen as exclusive to the Great Recession, music often reflects the times.
JOE BENNETT:
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.
In 1933 Ginger Rogers has a hit with we’re in the money. Is that a 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 US in the early 30s.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
So, there could be something here…
CHARLIE HARDING:
If recession Pop is a nostalgic way of looking back and trying to make sense of this period of total dislocation and fragmentation, like 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.
LADY GAGA:
“Can’t read my… Can’t read my, no you can’t read my Poker Face.”
CHARLIE HARDING:
People are trying to make this connection to music that happened 10 to 15 years ago as a almost like detective with their red wire behind the board. And they’re trying to, like, make all of these connections that are probably a little bit forced, right?
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
And you know what… There are a lot of good reasons the term recession pop is resonating with 30-somethings today that may have less to do with the quality of the music or economic conditions.
JOE BENNETT:
it fits with the general cycle of popular music, nostalgia. A lot of the psychology research into nostalgia suggests that it works on something like a 15-year cycle.
there’s a phenomenon in pop music that suggests that all the best pop music was released in the same year, and it was the year you were 17.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
It’s not just Bennett’s opinion. 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.
The only thing you can be sure of is that eventually, at some point, you will think fondly of your younger days. Did we really know at the time how good the pop was in 2007?
CHARLIE HARDING:
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.
JOE BENNETT:
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.
CHARLIE HARDING:
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.
Like, a great example of listeners completely misusing a song would be like, hey, ya, by OutKast,
OUTKAST:
“Thank god for mom and dad for sticking two together cause we don’t know how. Hey ya!”
CHARLIE HARDING:
which is one of the most requested songs at weddings, and yet the song is about relationships that never last.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
In many ways, the look back at so-called recession pop allows us to look at what makes a great pop song and why it sticks with us.
JOE BENNETT:
I think what makes a great pop song is accessibility. You know, particularly if you’re releasing a single, you want it to appeal to millions of people.
CHARLIE HARDING:
Well, It has to have an amazing concept. Has to have a memorable hook, and it has to capture the zeitgeist.
CARLY RAE JEPSEN:
“Hey, I just met you. And this is crazy. But here’s my number. Call me maybe.
JOE BENNETT:
people talk about songs, as, you know, being instantly exciting.
Immediacy in a song is one of the most important characteristics.
CHARLIE HARDING:
A pop song, [a] great pop song is elusive, right? It’s like trying to play the Powerball
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
And what makes a great song has changed over the years. Today, more and more tracks are being discovered on short-form video apps like TikTok and Instagram.
JOE BENNETT:
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.
LIL NAS X:
“I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road. I’m gonna ride (Kio, Kio) ’til I can’t no more. I got the horses in the back. Horse tack is attached.”
JOE BENNETT:
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 did, whatever it is.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
While TikTok users need musicians to get to the meat early, pop songs have more to say in 2024 than ever before.
CHARLIE HARDING:
there is this expectation that we are more giving of ourselves in our lyrics today. 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
CHARLIE XCX:
Yeah, 360. When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see? When you’re in the mirror, you’re just looking at me.
CHARLIE HARDING:
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.
JOE BENNETT:
So it’s an introspective form a lot of the time, but still, a lot of singer-songwriter material deals with the classic themes of songwriting that is romantic relationships and dancing. Most pop songs are about one of those two things.
ED SHEERAN:
Well, come on now, follow my lead. Come, come on now, follow my lead, mm. I’m in love with the shape of you
[JOE BENNETT:
Singer-songwriters in contemporary pop are having big mainstream hits, often with similar themes. You know, a lot of Ed Sheeran song themes are simply about getting together romantically or dancing.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
Look… I know you didn’t see a story about recession indicators turning into a commentary on the state of pop music but here we are. And we can’t end the conversation without the biggest name in music, let alone pop culture today.
JOE BENNETT:
Of course, even the great Taylor Swift was not immune to the cheerfulness of recession pop. 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 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.
TAYLOR SWIFT:
“You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess. It’s a love story, baby, just say, “Yes”
CHARLIE HARDING:
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. She has had multiple peaks that just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
Will we look back on The Tortured Poets Department as a recession anthem?
TAYLOR SWIFT:
“I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day.”
SIMONE DEL ROSARIO:
For Straight Arrow News, I’m Simone Del Rosario. If you liked this story, search the Straight Arrow News app for our story on the death of music journalism.
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