Keshanomics: What the success of “Joyride” tells us about the economy
The year was 2009. The stock market was in turmoil and people kept worrying about something called Quantitative Easing. Occupy Wall Street and Hipsters were culturally relevant and impactful forces. Out of these flames rose a sonic answer to the turmoil, a musical complement to the hopelessness the Western world felt after the prosperity of the early 2000s. This answer was Kesha’s “Tik Tok,” a three-minute and 14-second ode to being broke, young and ready to party.
Well, the youth are still broke and ready to party and Kesha is back for another round with “Joyride,” a spiritual successor to her early career “recession pop” hits. The single marks Kesha’s first release as an independent artist after leaving Dr. Luke’s Kemosabe imprint, and she is clearly ready to celebrate being a free woman. The Kesha presented here is confident and self-assured; she’s “a b*tch,” she’s “already rich,” she’s “earned the right to be like this.” In essence: Kesha is here to reclaim her recession pop crown, with the sort of self-assurance that has been (understandably) missing from Kesha’s more recent releases.
“Joyride” is such a fun listen in part because it recalls Kesha’s roots as everyone’s favorite party girl. Kesha’s early output is strongly in line with the “recession pop” ethos, with songs like “Die Young” and “We R Who We R” effortlessly depicting a party at the end of the world. Having a good time at the club in spite of bad circumstances proved to be a resonant theme during difficult times, illustrating how interlinked cultural and economic forces often are. Indeed, positioning “Joyride” within the wider context of Kesha’s career provides insight into the relationship between the trend of recession pop and business cycles, ultimately revealing that economic forces are less driven by rationality than we might like to imagine.
It might seem like a stretch to try to make those goofy operatic vocals on the chorus and the polka accordion beat fit an all-encompassing theory of the economy, but that’s precisely the beauty of “Joyride” and Kesha’s previous recession pop classics. The economy is at once impersonal and personal; it’s a collection of all of our spending habits and impulses into a collective core. Understanding our own escapist impulses through recession pop provides an additional mechanism for understanding how personal experience translates into something as vast and abstract as “consumer confidence”.
This emotional approach to the economy is not without theoretical precedent. Consumer confidence is an inherently emotional concept that underpins the business cycle. John Maynard Keynes, an economics Nobel laureate, himself described this as “animal spirits,” arguing that there is economic instability “due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation.” In other words, going beyond “mathematical expectation” and simply examining the vibe proves crucial to a full understanding of the business cycle.
“Recession pop” reached its zenith in the early 2010s, only to quickly become buried with the wave of downtempo pop hits which Lorde pioneered with her first hit “Royals.” The question is why this particular sound is being resurrected on “Joyride” and other popular records (brat, What’s Wrong With New York?, Don’t Lie) this summer. While every trend has an expiration date, as Karl Marx once said, “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” That is to say, the trend cycle is equally interested in resurrecting as it is in burying. “Tik Tok” and “Royals” require each other to exist: Kesha’s performance of opulence can’t exist without the contrast of Lorde’s “torn up town.” While recession pop lay dormant for a decade, “Joyride” represents the resurgence of the party at the end of the world.
While the US is not in recession according to traditional economic indicators, the majority of Americans believe the US is in an active recession. The pandemic disproportionately impacted youth employment and accompanying inflation has continued to prevent Millenial and Gen Z wealth creation. This mismatch between numerical projection and lived reality becomes even more prevalent when examining the outlook of young people in particular. Sh*t is depressing right now; the presidential election is contentious, Europe is backsliding into authoritarianism, the climate crisis continues to look dire. And yet, Kesha is just “looking for a good time tonight.” The escapism of a night of partying is a welcome respite from the paycheck-to-paycheck life the majority of Millenials and Gen Z experience.
Cultural commentators have not always been so open to the appeal of this sort of escapism. During the original wave of recession pop, Kesha was unfairly lambasted as a brainless party girl. The Guardian went so far as to call her “an exemplary exercise in marketing” which merely “hoovered up some underground sounds” that ultimately revealed Kesha’s “shallowness.” This review almost feels quaint in its passé approach to pop and authenticity, but is telling of attitudes at the time. Kesha couldn’t have been a master at marketing the underground because the underlying assumption was a party girl couldn’t possess the intellect to have a genuine relationship with music beyond the hyper commercial. This frankly misogynistic understanding of Kesha’s music only intensified when she spoke out against Dr. Luke – a producer who she alleges emotionally abused and sexually assaulted her.
Of course, in 2024, the commercial and the underground are more intertwined than ever. The notion of “selling out” has substantially shifted from the noughties. More than this, our attitude toward femininity and intellect have starkly shifted, due in large part to the success of pop-timism. When “TikTok” was released, popular culture was much less comfortable with the notion of the “intelligent party girl.” Now, “chic philosopher” and “literary it girl” are their own aesthetic archetypes that comfortably coexist. The fact that a piece seriously interrogating the relationship between pop music, consumer confidence and emotional economics even exists is a testament to how far the cultural landscape has shifted regarding these things since Kesha was last a major force in pop culture.
“Joyride” is Kesha’s first song released “as a free woman” and the joy behind it is palpable. While pop culture was warming to the idea of opulent pop and the intellectual party girl, Kesha has finally reached a point in her career where she can garner recognition for a sound that she helped pioneer. While consumer confidence continues to falter, Kesha is more interested in enjoying the party at the end of the world. On “Joyride,” Kesha reminds us that she’s earned her keep and doesn’t want us to forget it.
