graphic by kayleigh woltal
Last week I was scrolling through live coverage of the Supreme Court’s arguments on Idaho’s abortion ban, Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon” blasting through my MacBook speakers. Something about it felt dystopian, and in the moment, I had to pause at the absolute absurdity of forcing these two pieces of politics and culture to interact.
Lately there’s been an odd sense of incongruity for anyone paying attention to the flow of popular culture, a sense of the world falling apart yet again to the soundtrack of euphoric pop music. Recently it seems American listeners have been flocking toward a subset of pop music infused with a joyful femininity like Roan’s. Is there something beyond the merits of this music itself that makes it so attractive to us right now?
Take a quick look around, and it becomes clear that the era of the pop princess has returned. There’s a cohort of artists bringing that aesthetic and “it girl” aura back, smacking of the early aughts but with modern twists. We have these wonderful music moments that take over the charts and feeds across the nation: Reneé Rapp bringing Kesha out on stage at Coachella to perform “Tik Tok” to a screaming crowd of thousands; Julia Fox chanting “I’m a bitch, I’m a girl, I’m a mother, I’m a whore” onstage at Charli XCX’s Boiler Room set; Chappell Roan shooting to stardom with her ultra-catchy, ’80s-inspired “Good Luck, Babe,” gaining 10 million Spotify listeners in just one month.
These are not isolated viral moments. Female artists are the overwhelming creative presence in pop music right now, which has a watershed effect on who listens to and pays for that music. Women as consumers were a major force in the entertainment economy last summer, driving ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie. Summer 2023 was decidedly “for the girls,” and this year, it probably will be too — the lineup of “songs of the summer” is promised to feature mostly women. If you take this sampling of American culture as the whole, it looks like women are winning. Messages of female empowerment, the celebration of queer women, and the uplifting of multifaceted expressions of femininity abound. But is that the reality?
Open the pages of a newspaper, and women’s rights and safety are under siege, a backslide made more slippery by the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which has opened the door for many more attacks on reproductive rights. The Supreme Court continues to hear impactful cases on abortion rights with the potential to make decisions that restrict these rights even further, putting women across the nation at medical risk. Women also face increased violence both online and in the streets, with six in 10 women worldwide reporting they felt sexual harassment in public spaces has increased over the past few years. I won’t belabor this point, because I don’t need to: If you identify as a woman, you know. There’s an ambiguous miasma of misogynist sentiment that has begun to manifest in very real and terrifying ways, and this climate has not promised to improve anytime soon.
This is the shadowy backdrop to the increased demand and triumph of the hyper-feminine, joyful yet rebellious, female-led pop music that reigns the airwaves right now. When our world is under threat, music and pop culture tends to be the pressure release valve for the frustration, which is what gives us a cultural narrative that is so diametrically opposed to what is actually going on. I actually think we’ve seen this curious effect before, in the fondly remembered micro genre “recession pop.”
In his essay “Towards a Theory of Recession Pop,” Akhil Vaidya identifies recession pop as “mass media’s overall neoliberal response to recession.” Times of socioeconomic turmoil create a complex web of emotions and anxieties, and in the consumerist era we turn to popular culture to tell us how to feel. In the case of the 2008 recession, loss of economic agency generated a feeling of helplessness, which caused us as a culture to lean into energetic, somewhat shallow anthems that promised good times and stressed the importance of enjoying the here and now. Lady Gaga urged us to “Just dance, it’ll be okay,” while the Black Eyed Peas declared “Tonight’s gonna be a good night.” By leaning into the music and throwing our hands up, we live for a short while in the world we wish to be true rather than the one that’s real.
Like recession pop, listeners revel in the bliss of what I’ll call hyper-feminine pop. Of Dua Lipa’s recently released album “Radical Optimism,” X user @alexxmalloy counters industry criticism, saying “Think pieces already on the Dua Lipa album. Her music is not for thinking, it’s for being on rooftops with your friends drinking cocktails.” Other artists similarly invite us into their own realities. In Chappell Roan’s music, boys are “super-mega bummer boys,” and girls are undoubtedly superior. Anthems like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” make us feel desirable and dominant. Charli XCX’s club rat singles like “Von Dutch” (especially with the girly-girl touch of Addison Rae on the remix) make us feel like we’re living the perfect life everyone wants.
The popularity of feminine pop today is due less to the concrete events threatening womanhood and more to the general feelings that are elicited from knowing and living in this reality. In 2008, many of Gen Zers’ families may have been impacted by the recession, but even those who were not affected viscerally remember it as a time of cultural depression. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, our day to day lives may not have changed dramatically, but the way we feel about our country and the world at large has. It is these anxieties that prevail when we seek refuge in music.
However, the gravitational pull of this music is made of more than simple escapism. Vaidya also points out that enjoyment can be found in cognitive dissonance. In a weird way, engaging in media that’s out of step with our reality helps us better process our feelings about the world and find our own meaning. Hyper-feminine pop assures us that it’s actually hot to be the crazy ex. It’s fine to live your life without men at all! It’s celebrated to be cocky, be slutty, be in control and to be a woman. It tells us we are creating and enjoying things that men will never understand and making a superior culture of our own. Even if these things are not the current truth by society’s measures, they can be true to us when we engage with this music and with these communities. That is the magic of hyper-feminine pop.
In a divergence from the conditions that created recession pop, the environment that triggered the popularization of hyper-feminine pop delineates a clear conflict where there are sides to be taken. There is a sense of defiance evident in the music and untamed personas of these stars. As a result, and unlike the consumption of recession pop, hyper-feminine pop can be enjoyed with a sense of higher purpose toward solidarity and empowerment. This music is successful in spite of tangible threats to womanhood. We enjoy it in the face of the dread and fear we experience. By leaning into it as a culture, we are seeking to understand something about ourselves and to assert that we are still here. When we dance to this music, we live in a world where women win.
Maybe in a few years, we’ll look back like we do on recession pop and mourn the days of hyper-feminine pop, bemoaning that music just doesn’t “hit” like that anymore. What may be glossed over is the way it felt to read headlines that made our stomachs turn, the episodes of violence, the fear of the future. For now though, we can recognize this music as the balm — the release, the movement that it is — and sing along.