Recession Pop: are we being amused to death by feel-good music?
I hate the fact that I’m about to say this, because I’m 22 years old yet feel about 85, but what a load of shit the kids are listening to these days.
Having a quick glance through the top 20 in the charts, I can confidently say I like about five of the songs, and three of those are by Oasis. I wouldn’t like to think I’m being snobbish, nor a misery boots, but something about the wall-to-wall sunshine of today’s top recession pop hits just somehow makes me more depressed.
Don’t get me wrong, as a product of growing up in the 2010s, I’m not denying that I haven’t enjoyed my fair share of garbage in my time. It’s all part of maturing that you look back on some of your previous musical choices and cringe – because trust me, while you wouldn’t catch me dead listening to Justin Bieber now, back in 2011, I was a diehard fan. Yet even between the scores of bubblegum pop and boy bands, somewhere music used to have some kind of depth, which has all but been lost to it now.
It seems the bleaker the world gets, the rosier and more naïve the charts are forced to become, in order to provide the true escapism in music that the masses crave. While, on the face of it, you wouldn’t think there is anything wrong with this, the increasingly irritating Benson Boone-ification of the pop sphere that has come with it should have you begging otherwise. If only there were less backflipping and more soul-bearing, and things could be so different.
Of course, while you can hardly criticise music largely marketed at teenagers for being slightly out of touch, it’s almost as if the industry has become a tennis ball and the audience a pack of bright-eyed puppy dogs excitedly chasing after it. There’s nothing except the prize in sight – no nuance, no melancholy, no artistic tangents – to break up the sea of TikTok soundbites and the next 30 seconds of a viral song.
All the sentiments of dancing, drinking, clubbing, feeling on top of the world and forgetting about your problems are, of course, indicative of previous recession pop fads that we have seen before, particularly in the late 2000s. Yet now we also have musical contributions from the likes of Hollywood figures like Margaret Qualley having a go, all in an attempt to cash in on the feel-good. It becomes a bit sickly sweet.
Of course, the political events of the late 2000s also line up with now, with the recession of 2008 mirroring the current cost-of-living crisis in that respect. Back then, pop music was the ultimate escape, not just of childhood naivety but for everyone, as a method of turning a blind eye to the seemingly burning world around them. While you can’t blame anyone for indulging in it, putting the blinkers on ultimately causes more problems than it’s worth.
In this sense, it eerily reminds me of the sentiment of the Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’, as if we’re all dancing towards oblivion and blindly choosing to ignore the world around us. Sure, Donald Trump might be trying to end the world, Israel is destroying Gaza, but have you heard Ed Sheeran’s latest tune? It’s a banger.
If it wasn’t already obvious, Sheeran’s most recent offering is, in fact, anything but a banger, the same as most of the songs in the current charts. They’re undeniably palatable and hugely joyous, hence their massive commercial success, but is any of it really communicating a thing of substance? The definitive answer is no.
Of course, you do get some bright spots – artists like Sam Fender, Olivia Dean, The Last Dinner Party, and CMAT all provide an alternative edge but still break into the charts fairly successfully, so not all hope is lost. But while wars explode all over the world, the economy suffers, and recessions head into a spike, as long as you have Alex Warren telling you everything’s going to be alright, why shouldn’t we believe him?
Pop snobbery is its own different matter, and none of this is to say that there is no value in the current state of the genre in general, but sometimes it’s more toxic to pretend that everything’s all sunshine and rainbows than it is to acknowledge it. Maybe we should all start treating the pop canon like a kid at a birthday party – they can run around gorging on a sugar rush all they want, but we all know at some point, if you don’t sit them down and force them to take a sip of water, they’re going to be sick.
As such, the same applies to us – we all like burying our heads in the sand, but maybe once in a while it might be useful to allow chart pop to actually acknowledge some real-world issues, and let in a bit of light and shade to the top ten. You never know, it might genuinely achieve more than you first think.
