Recession Pop:
Music in the Ruins of Neoliberalism

Session convenor
Dr Jacob Downs
jacob.downs@music.ox.ac.uk

What happens to commercial music when economies collapse? To speak of music ‘in the ruins of neoliberalism’ (Brown 2019) is to register a contemporary world in which the economic and cultural project of neoliberal capitalism has buckled but not fallen. While the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath certainly exposed neoliberalism’s contradictions, its familiar infrastructures—precarious labour, financial volatility, and austerity—endure: too broken to function, yet too entrenched to dismantle. We might say that neoliberalism persists today as a cultural wasteland of hollowed-out futures, littered with the debris of capitalist realism (Fisher 2009).

Pop music made during and soon after the crash often registered these conditions. Hits such as Kesha’s ‘TiK ToK’, Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’, and the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’ offered alcohol-drenched anthems of excess—songs of abandon launched into a world of foreclosures and lay-offs. A decade later, a second wave has emerged: Gaga and Kesha have returned with an updated sound, joined by newcomers: Charli XCX, flaunting hedonism edged with exhaustion; PinkPantheress, pulling hooks from the vestiges of UK garage; Chappell Roan, staging extravagance as both mask and release; and many more. This new wave is haunted by Y2K aesthetics—shiny surfaces and millennial optimism recycled just as their promises of prosperity ring most hollow. Why this return, and why now? What futures, if any, can pop sound in these ruins?

This session positions recession pop as a category demanding conceptual labour in the form of interventions that mobilize continental philosophy, critical theory, and related traditions to interrogate its aesthetics and politics. What is recession pop? What does it mean for pop music to aestheticize austerity, to recycle its past, or to imagine futurity from within collapse? How might we grasp the contradictory pleasures and anxieties encoded in recession pop? And what, if anything, can this music tell us about the possibility of survival, critique, and speculative futures in the ruins of neoliberalism?

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The MPSG committee and the session convenors invite proposals for 20-minute (in person).

To propose a paper, please send the following to the session convenor Dr Jacob Downs jacob.downs@music.ox.ac.uk

• paper title
• abstract (350 words maximum)
• short biographical note (100 words maximum)

Deadline: Friday 31st October

The decision regarding the acceptance of proposals will be communicated in December.