Hey listen, I just thought of what you could get me for Christmas! Stop talking about recession pop. Stop bringing recession pop up. Stop making recession pop a thing. Stop talking about recession pop coming back.

Recession pop is not real. It is fake. It is an entirely made up trend.

I'm usually fine with letting most bad pieces of music discourse just float and breeze by because it's just harmless at the end of the day, and if it gets more people into a certain artist or certain trend, whatever who cares. This particular topic, however, is vastly inaccurate at best and journalistic malpractice at worst.

Maybe there are some of you in my audience who don't really know what the recession pop discourse thing is, but I will try to lay this very bad theory out as clearly as I possibly can. Basically, go back to a lot of the biggest and most memorable and popular pop bangers of the last major recession era in American economic history, 2007 to 2009, housing crisis and all that. (I'm a millennial. I remember it vividly.)

So these days, you've got people looking back at some of the biggest pop artists and songs of that era: your Black Eyed Peas, your Katy Perry, artists like Kesha (FKA Ke$ha) and Lady Gaga were really starting to make moves during this time period, too. And instead of actually digging into the popular music trends of this time and looking at what was truly influencing them — you know, the anthropological work — people are just attributing how bright, aspirational, and upbeat this music was to the fact that we were in a recession at the time.

And as if that wasn't enough of a correlation over causation, they are then taking prevailing music trends now and saying, "Oh, hey, wow, whoa! We're barreling toward or are maybe in the midst of...I don't know! They won't release the goddamn jobs numbers!" Given that we're likely in a recession right now, people are looking at the current pop trends of the moment and thinking, "Whoa, not only is recession pop back, we're going to get more of it into the near future. Hell yeah!"

Okay, before I explain why, let me just say outright: this is bad, this is wrong, this is not true, this is like...what?!

Let's just start with the fact that for the past 20+ years, the charts have been inundated with blissfully ignorant, aspirational, upbeat music that is also escapist in one way or another. This is even true of times where things are going relatively well economically. If Pitbull was merely popular in the late 2000s because we were all trying to escape how terrible things were, by that logic, how does after the recession in 2012, "Gangnam Style" happen? I mean, as things economically improved past 2009, you could actually make the argument that pop music got dumber and more simplistic and more escapist.

In 2013 alone, you had "Thrift Shop", "Blurred Lines", "Harlem Shake". These songs are so popular and widely accessible, I don't even need to say who they're by. Also, Daft Punk and Pharrell's "Get Lucky"...Things must have been even harder in 2014 if we're looking at the charts. "Happy" by Pharrell, "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry, "All of Me" by John Legend, "Fancy" by Iggy Azalea and Charli xcx, "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic, "All About That Bass" by Meghan Trainor, "Timber" by Pitbull and Kesha.

The fact of the matter is the economy doesn't need to be good or bad for there to be a demand for simple, fun, enjoyable, sugary pop music that, in many cases, we are meant to party to. That is what sold well after the 2008 recession, that is what sold well during it, that's also what sold before it. These people talking about this trend, this massive shift in pop music, discuss it acting as if Madonna and Britney Spears didn't have incredible commercial runs in the early and mid-2000s, as well as Christina Aguilera and many more that I could mention that basically laid the groundwork and set the tone for years of diva pop to come. (Beyoncé, too!)

Obviously, each of these artists have very dense catalogs and versatile arrays of songs that express different emotions. But generally speaking, these are not artists whose music generally felt down in the dumps and depressive. They were just making pop and R&B music, brother.

And also on top of it, talking as if the pop music that we're hearing today is an echo and a repeat of what happened in the late 2000s "because recession pop" totally ignores and, in a lot of ways, is disrespectful of and ignorant toward the uniqueness of a lot of pop artists in today's field. It also ignores a lot of the trends they have started or built up until this point.

For one, Chappell Roan in no way whatsoever is a copy of your typical dance pop, diva pop, late-2000s type of artist. There's nowhere in the pop rubric of the late 2000s that Chappell Roan fits into. Not only that, but while she does have some very popular and upbeat songs, a lot of her most popular cuts are quite introspective, sad, and depressing.

Going further down the list: Sabrina Carpenter, who I've also seen brought up to bolster this argument. And while it is true, her big breakout single "Espresso" isn't a super deep song per se, a lot of Sabrina's catalog actually deals in some pretty profound personal and emotional struggles and actually brings a lot of confrontational gender politics to the table with regards to romance and dating. The idea that her music is just merely escapist doesn't quite make sense since a lot of it speaks to grievances everyday women actually have on a regular basis.

There's also Charli xcx which..."Brat summer" and all that. But I feel like that argument only makes sense if you just only recently heard about Charli xcx. Charli has been making pretty on-the-nose, in-your-face party music for years, but it's only on this most recent album that she's actually gotten quite a bit more introspective and talking about the party as more of a symbol than a literal thing. If really dumbed-down, simple party music was going to be what the mainstream really wanted from Charli, why did her last record Crash not pop off commercially in the way that she wanted it to? Not to outright insult that album — there are highlights on it — but she consciously was making a decision on that record to write more simplified pop music that the mainstream would be more ready to accept as opposed to many of the more experimental and hyperpop-flavored sounds from her previous records and mixtapes prior.

In a lot of these "recession pop" resurgence discussions, I also see Kesha's comeback being cited, which...Sure, Kesha, in a lot of ways, is seen as a relic of that era who has evolved creatively by leaps and bounds and has written a lot of records recently that are quite low-key and also quite ballad-heavy. This new record of hers is definitely a bit of an exception in terms of going back to straight up quirky pop bangers like people used to love her for back in the day. But simply framing Kesha's new record in this way ignores how experimental a lot of the ideas on this album — how campy and over the top and weird — are, like "JOYRIDE." Kesha is not merely writing Pitbull crossovers here.

Another thing that annoys me about this discourse, which is why I want to see it go away, is that it often frames a lot of this recession pop from the late 2000s as being creatively peak: something that we should be looking forward to. I'm sorry, I'm as down for some post-ironic Pitbull love and worship as the next guy, but when Pitbull or Black Eyed Peas hits were so huge, and so popular, and so viral that you couldn't escape them... That fucking sucked! Those songs were fucking ass! We should not hope for that to happen again.

I also feel like this discussion completely ignores broader music trends, like how popular country is on the charts right now, so much so that you got Beyoncé out here making a country record. Not to mention the fact that did we not just have all of this annoying discourse around how there's no song of the summer 2025? Where's the song of the summer? Where's my summer sop? Where's my summer pop anthem? Here it is: Alex Warren, "Ordinary". That's your summer fucking anthem, bitch. Alex Warren is your song of the summer, and you're going to like it!

Actually, if you all had taste, your song of the summer would have been SZA and Kendrick Lamar's "30 for 30", but you were too busy listening to "Luther" instead. Great track, too, but there's no reason we shouldn't have been spinning "30 for 30". I feel like that should go down as one of our biggest Ls as a society in the past year.

The last thing I'll say about discourse is that bringing up this fake, imagined, totally not real, silver lining in this very real, hulking, terrible cloud only waters down the unrest and anger that we should be feeling toward the rich right now and those who run our society and our economy. Because if this current recession and the last one have anything in common, it's that they are entirely man-made, and you and I? We did not create these situations. This is not our fault. The last one was because of the big banks totally screwing us over financially, making a bunch of terrible illegal bets and then basically asking to be saved by us after their bad decision-making. So we paid for it through our taxes, and we paid for it through a shit economy that we didn't ask for.

And now the current recession is also man-made for a myriad of reasons that we did not request or have any decision in. You've got food, housing, and general cost of living expenses skyrocketing beyond what the market should normally be moving at in terms of inflation just because companies are greedy and feel like they can squeeze every penny out of you. You have company after company after company firing people left-and-right in order to be able to save money on the bottom line for shareholders. You have the Trump tariffs, which have only made everything worse. And on top of that, you have untold amounts of capital being flushed into AI right now, not flowing or going into any part of the market or into your pocket. Just this one giant, massive bet that this AI thing will, hopefully for these rich bastards, be profitable and be successful at some point.

To be blunt about it, soulless freaks like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are flushing your economy down the tubes to develop AI chatbots to replace you and leave you unemployed. I need you to be pissed. I need you to be angry. I don't need you to be looking forward to pop music that you were already going to get.

Also, what's the point of all this recession pop if you're so poor that you can't even enjoy it or party to it?! Gen Z doesn't even go out anymore! The least we can do, I think, is hope for, aspire to, and fight for an economy that is more equitable, so then we can have that, and on top of it, the fun, escapist mainstream pop music you were already going to enjoy.

So again, please stop talking about the resurgence of recession pop. It's not a thing. If anything, the reason you may be hearing a lot of popular sounds from the 2000s make a comeback right now in a lot of artists' new records is because nostalgia in popular music tends to move in 15- to 25-year cycles. Because that's when people start going back to those sounds and revisiting them and seeing something in them once again after we've gotten sick of them for a while after being at the top of the charts. Stop forcing this recession pop thing. It's not a thing.