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On "Recession Indicator" Music

On "Recession Indicator" Music

Yesterday at 12:25 PM, the third pillar fell.

Skrillex took all of the goodwill he's gotten from making borderline-tasteful music for the past decade and threw it in the trash. Wait no, sorry, I meant to say that Skrillex surprise-released a new album. It just so happens that within the first six-and-a-half minutes of this album, there are chopped up, pitch-fucked synths that sound like porpoises (1:55), chainsaws (2:47), and Xerox machines (6:26). In other words, dubstep is back. Not cool, understated, 2000s British dubstep. Big, dumb, 2010s American dubstep.

One of the first things you learn about in journalism courses is the "trend": the mythic, fleeting beacon that every aspiring nightlife reporter longs to codify. If you're the first to notice and name a nascent cultural movement, you're in for fame, buddy. Fleeting fame, probably, but fame all the same. Whoa, slow down there, Gay Talese, every professor urges, for a trend is not a trend until you see at least three examples of it. Yeah, just like storytelling, photography, and survival (I guess?), trends have a rule of three. Fool me once: shame on you; fool me twice: shame on me; fool me thrice: a trend you see (this is exactly how I learned it from my 124-year-old Intro to Journalism adjunct professor).

If you've used social media in the past however-long-it's-been-since-January-20th (and god bless you if you haven't), you've seen people talking about "recession indicators." If you already understand what they mean, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't, it means that millennials will never let go of 1) the time that the stock market crashed in 2008 and 2) everything that was cool to them in that era.

Okay, maybe our collective memory of The Great Recession (December 2007-June 2009) is a little fluid, temporally speaking. Unless tweeter #1 is very fond of Adam Driver's appearances in an episode apiece of The Unusuals (2009), Law & Order (2010), or Law & Order: SVU (2012), they were talking about Girls, which debuted in April 2012. Tweeter #2 is right on the money (shout out Gillian): Wavves' first two albums came out in September 2008 and February 2009, respectively. Tweeter #4 is way off, as Ed Sheeran didn't release his debut until September 2011. Also, Ed Sheeran is way off. He was never cool. Tweeter #3? * signal fails *

But back to music, and the gleaming, n'er-shall-it-be-disobeyed rule of threes. The Skrillex album (which by the way, is called F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3) is the third major, majorly blatant callback to the—shall we say Shmecession—that I've noticed in the past month.

The first and most blatant of these is Lady Gaga's March 7 release, Mayhem. It's fun. I like it! But it is telling that this is the thing that introduced me, a nearly 34-year-old straight white man, to the concept of "reheated nachos." Again, if you already understand what this means, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't, here's a Vulture explainer, I guess.

I can draw parallels to Gaga's Shmecession Era work—"Abracadabra" rhymes nonsense syllables with "Gaga," a lot of the production sounds like RedOne trying to make Justice's †, "Garden of Eden" is just "S&M 2.0" (oh wait that was Rihanna)—but none of it hammers home my point more than the ad with the ALSO 2010-ASS music that played when I pulled up the above "Garden of Eden" link on YouTube to embed here. Bro, I felt targeted as hell.

Man, I hate feeling targeted. I'm a millennial and cultural decline is real. They don't make real movies anymore. Remember what they took from us [insert photo of piss-stained Blockbuster circa 2003]. But wait, what's that you say? Playboi Carti has omnipresent tags from Swamp Izzo on his new album? We are so back.

Unlike Gaga and Skrillex, Carti was not making music (that we know about) 16 years ago. His recent album Music is not the predictable "back to basics"/"return to form" ploy that Mayhem and F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 xRAWRx 8=====D are. It's a more surprising acknowledgement of history from a rapper who has been shepherding the cutting edge for about a decade. Most glaringly, there's DJ Swamp Izzo hollering throughout the album, a callback to the dozens of classic mixtapes he hosted for Atlanta artists like Young Thug, Rich Kidz, and Young Scooter (RIP) in the 2010s. But check the sample credits and you'll also notice flips of songs by SpaceGhostPurrp, Bankroll Fresh, and again, Rich Kidz, all released in that era. Alas, poor Kendrick, Carti is no alien. He's a nearly 30-year-old man who is just as prone to nostalgic navel-gazing as the rest of us.

~~

If all this stuff makes you hit the millennial stank face, you're not alone. Most of it slaps. But you'd never mistake any of it for 15-year-old music. For all their callbacks, Skrillex, Gaga, and Carti's Shmecession indicators are newly fluent in the language of their contemporaries—Skrillex's broad taste and semi-tastefulness is apparent in the moments on his album that sound like Rustie and Araabmuzik; Gaga wasn't quite this French leather jacket nü-disco back in 2008; Carti is still making rap music that sounds futuristic, no matter how many 2012 Atlanta prom favorites he's flipping.

The concept of the "recession indicator" may be annoying and often inaccurate, but it does highlight how close the snake of nostalgia-recycling is to eating its own tail. What happens when we run out of bygone trends to reanimate? What will become of trends themselves?

Hey, at least the soundtrack to our impending downfall is gonna kick ass whenever these tariffs actually go into effect.

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Jamie Larson
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