Pop songs are becoming darker and hedonism can no longer be sold. What’s wrong in pop culture?
So the following things are still floating around in my head in the last throes of the year:
“Lush Life” and the romanticized 10s
1. It’s been ten years since 2015 and we should start treating songs from that year as evergreens. Like the kids on TikTok already do! The 10s are currently being completely romanticized there; apparently something was still okay back then and people were drinking Starbucks coffee and looking towards a more optimistic future. This explains the nostalgia and joy surrounding the 2015 hit “Lush Life” by Zara Larsson. Of course, he also owes his hype to Julia’s great co-performance:
Well, and then there would be something like Bruno Mars “Uptown Funk”. A real oldie! But more on that in a moment.
Negative pop and the end of hedonism
2. Now it’s getting stressful: Fittingly, I read on “Deutschlandfunk” that a study from Austria found that songs these days are no longer so positive. The Billboard charts have been looked at since 1973, checked for stress terms and lo and behold: the pop songs are more negative today. AND since 2015 they have become more complex again. Well, what can I say, we lost Avicii, who’s going to care about our serotonin levels? Maybe Bruno Mars, who could please release another album?
But can you really just say that people are worse off now than they used to be? Or have capitalist amusements, which are often accompanied by big pop songs – the good old large-scale disse, the bowling center, the cinema palace, fairground, fair, trade fair, spring break, you name it – simply become a bit worn out? Can you still sell hedonism like my generation? Tonight we are young, there’s no tomorrow, fuck the university, light the Bengalos, smooch me behind the toilet, guest list, wasted youth, tomorrow I’ll wake up and think I look like Kesha?
Actually, back in the 00s and 10s, there was a narrative that everything was going down the drain, and to cope with it, capitalist culture gave us glow bracelets, smoke machines, foam parties, glitter powder, Holi colored powder, Pueblo tobacco, and binge drinking. Many of us were clouded in so many ways that it’s hard for me to get upset about young people’s use of nitrous oxide. Just because we already had laughing gas.
The prevailing pop culture also told us that the 90s were carefree, just as people have recently said about the 10s. Of course both are not true. Things looked shitty enough in the east of this country alone and for such assessments you have to ignore everything that isn’t very great (north) west. The 10s were economic crisis, climate crisis, “refugee crisis”, housing crisis, people losing their homes for various reasons. But what is true is that there was more escapism in pop. People are no longer able to make fun of themselves and each other so well, so maybe that’s a good thing. Or as another 2015 classic says: “I was told, when I got older, all my fears would shrink. But now I’m insecure, and I care what people think.”
The end of the charity songs
3. Speaking of making fun and what people think – what also no longer exists are charity songs. I’m writing this column in a café where “Do They Know It’s Christmas” has been playing for the fifth time. Not only because of the problematic lines of text that have already been discussed many times, it all seems completely out of date. Nowadays, there are petitions, there are people who pass on the proceeds of a song, there are political shout-outs on stages, but one can no longer imagine a group song that points out the suffering of people in “distant”, “poor”, “underdeveloped” countries.
On the one hand, hardly anyone falls for it anymore: rich and famous people who act as if it’s the natural order of things that they are rich, as if money was an innate body part and as if it wasn’t the fans who gave them the money. Poor people in the charity narrative, on the other hand, are always poor and you can give them something every now and then so that they have a nice Christmas, for example. But who deserves the good life remains clear. Then no one wants to hear pleas from people asking WE to do more while they sit in their villas. Maybe this is a corona consequence. There were still such collective charity attempts. But they sent these people out of their palaces drinking celery juice while we were balancing home offices, children, relationships, work and psychology in our one-and-a-half-room apartments.
It couldn’t have been more obvious. I keep thinking about my old friend F. and how, at a concert for which we had been saving for a long time, he shouted to the singer after he asked us all to please donate something: JUST DONATE YOUR FEE, YOU ASSHOLE.
What also no longer works is that artists see themselves as part of a collective that is at the top. They no longer have any class consciousness! They don’t even brag anymore. The current pop stars act modest, act as if they are like us, of course they also have their own problems and know therapyspeak. Basically, of course, it wouldn’t matter what they do if we had a system that didn’t rely on charity. If there were state (re)distribution, if everyone got what they need. But au contraire, more and more social institutions and political projects are dependent on donations because government funding is being withdrawn. A well-known example went through social networks these days.
In this case, the work of these people was initially made possible through donations! be saved. But in the shadow of this are countless projects that will no longer exist. Of course the pressure comes from the right. In the meantime, the police are preferred. Berlin now has more police officers per resident than New York City, as the ND reported. The budget for the police is “higher than the entire budget for labor, social affairs, equality, integration, diversity and anti-discrimination, and more than twice as large as the budget for culture and social cohesion.” More and more social problems, which actually always arise from poverty, are being left to the police and thus to arbitrary violence. This is called policing. In concrete terms, for example, it often means: homeless people are not cared for, given psychological support, placed in permanent housing, but instead are cleared away or even worse. And you can only hope that the police mean well for you, maybe because it’s Christmas or something.
Now I’m talking as negatively as Gen-Z…
Maybe Bruno Mars can do something again. Happy song, hedonism and maybe something against the police… I would buy it!
What happened so far? Here is an overview of all the pop column texts.
