u/penguinpilates

Saw it on Facebook. Did a reverse image search and found t was from the comic strip Brevity by Dan Thompson.

I was perhaps the opposite of the target demographic of recession-era pop. I was a goodie-two-shoes who spent her days in a cookie cutter suburb. I had never been clubbing, never gotten drunk, never even kissed a boy, and oh yeah, I was 11.

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But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to any of us in Mr. G's class. We claimed it as our own. We sang Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream as we did our vocabulary worksheets. We wore Kanye West shutter shades to field day. We argued the merits of Kesha vs. Lady Gaga as we pumped our legs on the swing set. And to this day, the proudest moment of my life was winning the Pi Day song contest with my best friend with a geometric parody we wrote to the tune of Nothin’ on You by B.O.B. and Bruno Mars.

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Now, everyone is nostalgic about the music from their childhood. But there is something special about recession-era pop, even though, ironically, from above, all of the songs sound the same.

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Now, you can’t understand recession-era pop without understanding the Great Recession. The story goes like this. In the early 2000s, a bunch of banks made some criminally irresponsible lending decisions that destroyed the housing market, then the stock market, and the economy as a whole. As big banks started to careen off the cliff, the U.S. government swooped in to save them. As the everyday American people surveyed the wreckage, the message from the elite was to tighten your belts and settle for less. For many millennials, this was the first confrontation with the fact that the American Dream that they had been promised had been reneged. There was a lot of anger at this unequal economy. Protestors spent months picketing Wall Street, fighting against unequal income and opportunities. But “We are the 99%.” was not the only rebel cry. Louder and backed by the beat of an 808 drum was a cry to dance like it was the last night of your life.

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People often interpret recession-era pop as escapism. And to a large extent, it was. When you put on a Pitbull song, you were no longer a minimum-wage worker. You were a party animal ordering bottle service for your menagerie of gorgeous lady friends. You were the HBIC, having to swat guys away like flies after Fire Burnin’ to close the sun on the dance floor. At least for about 3 minutes and 30 seconds, the club is bumping, the alcohol is flowing, everybody looks good. There is much pain in the world, but not in this room.

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And there was acknowledgment of the economic pain and that we shouldn’t have to feel it. Pitbull dedicating his song to “everybody going through tough times.” Ne-Yo “working his ass off but still getting paid low.” Lil Wayne telling us he was “down like the economy.” Bruno Mars and Travie McCoy wanting to be billionaires so they could do “a lot more than FEMA did.”

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But the real political message was its full-throated rejection of tight belts for our Apple Bottom jeans. We would not be the ones to sacrifice the little we had left. We would drink, we would dance. We would fuck. We would keep living, actually living, not just drudging through the days. Because we were more than the rent we could pay. We were Rocketeers, Fireworks, and Starships. WE were “meant to fly”.

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And fly we did, with every drop in employment we dropped the bass lower, with every shot at lazy millennials in the press we took more shots. By living like there was no tomorrow, we made it through to tomorrow.

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And slowly but surely, things did get better. Household wealth recovered in 2013. Unemployment fell to pre-recession levels in 2016. And by 2017, Top 40 pop returned to its regular schedule of songs about love, longing, and breakups.

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But now it's 2026, I’m the same age as those millennials were when the Great Recession hit, staring down another emaciated job market and another group of fatcats telling me that I am the one who needs to do better. I am angry, I am terrified, I am depressed, I am exhausted. Every morning, it is so difficult to get out of bed.

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So I press play. I listen to Pound the Alarm while I turn off mine. I let Kesha serenade me about brushing her teeth with a bottle of jack as I brush mine. Dare I say sing along to the Pretty Girl Rock while I put on my socks.

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Because when the world seems this bleak, what choice do we have but to replace every day I'm suffering with “every day I’m shuffling”

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Albert Camus proposited that in the face of hopelessness, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” But sometimes even happy is too hard to muster.

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So I propose a new paradigm. We must imagine Sisyphus' party rocking. We must imagine him in his homemade duct tape toga, pushing the boulder up the hill. Maybe he’s happy, maybe he feels like death, hell maybe he’s even feeling “fly like a G6”. But the important thing is that he keeps on dancing through it all. His hill is actually a bumpin club. His boulder, a giant bottle of Patrón. His iPod, stuck on Replay.

The hamster wheel represents my current state, the negative racing looping thoughts that I have trouble escaping. The stream represents how I want my thoughts to flow, logically and productively from one end to another. The bends and rocks are to acknowlege that there will still be curves and obstacle in my way sometimes but I'll still be able to move through them.