The Recession Will Be Sober

Bear markets are usually bull markets in electronic music and party culture, but the looming economic downturn will likely be more tame.

Archival footage of Hong Kong in 2008 tells the same story: in the middle of the financial crisis, the people went to party. In one video, you see sweaty bodies glued together, packed like sardines on the main slope of the city’s party district, Lan Kwai Fong. It’s far more crowded than on my own weekend nights out.

There are similar stories, I hear, in other financial hubs: In New York, the “Young Broke and Beautiful” drank their “financial woes away” in dingy Manhattan venues, while Londoners popped champagne in Mayfair nightclubs as the economy crashed and unemployment rose.

2007-2009 may have been a bear market for stocks, for jobs, for global GDP, but it was a bull market in party culture, electronic music, and alcohol consumption.

It was in 2008 that Hong Kong’s liquor consumption hit a new peak and spending in bars had one of the sharpest increases in recorded history, according to official data. This was the era of “Recession pop”: the high-BPM, feel-good music that emerged during the global financial crisis and dominated international music charts. Records like Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feelin’” and Ke$ha’s “Tik ToK” swept culture with lyrics of carefree escapism that urged the young to party their financial troubles away.

There are other times in history when great music came out of economic slumps. Techno was created in the 1980s by freshly laid-off workers in deindustrialized Detroit. Jazz came out of the Great Depression. Both genres are now global phenomena.

Times like these might soon return. Fears about a coming economic slump have been commonplace for a while now. Jobs are scarce. Prices are higher. But a new spate of reports and articles published in the last two weeks might finally validate these concerns — The New Yorker: “Recession Indicators are Everywhere.” J.P. Morgan: “The probability of a recession … at 60%.” Bloomberg: “Asian Stocks Tumble Most Since 2008.”

If the bear market continues, will history repeat itself? Will the bull market in escapist party culture and electronic music begin?

There are signs that a future recession culture will be different. As contemporary tastes shift away from alcohol and nightlife, the next recession will be sober.

On March 27th, the Hong Kong-based bar, Mostly Harmless, one of Asia’s 50 Best Bars in 2024, announced that it would no longer be selling alcoholic drinks. The decision shocked the local food and beverage community, and crowned the venue as the first non-alcoholic cocktail bar in the city. But to Ezra Star, the owner of Mostly Harmless, the change simply reflected how tastes were evolving into 2025.

“People are really [rethinking] what they’re doing when it comes to alcohol, because the younger generation isn’t drinking as much,” Star told THE CHOW over the phone. “ Even when people come in and order alcohol, they’ll often switch to having something non-alcoholic in between to cut back their experience.”

Around the world, young adults are consuming less alcohol. Star is witnessing this shift firsthand in her guest bartender shifts at international bars. “In other places, especially Mainland China, non-alcoholic [cocktails] have sold out faster than the regular ones,” she said.

Mostly Harmless is optimistic about how trends might be shifting in their favor. Star added that, “ The people who don’t drink love it, and they’re very excited to have a place where they don’t feel obligated to do so.”

The pivot that Star described might be here to stay; nightclubs and bars around the world are facing closures at alarming rates. In Hong Kong, two renowned venues closed their doors after operating for decades, and the city’s alcohol sales reached a 20-year low in 2023 (data is not yet available for 2024).

But while behavior has become more sober, music has become more hedonistic, and the electronic sounds that once dominated the recession-era are chiming a possible revival. Since last year, YouTubers and magazines have been asking “Is recession pop making a comeback?” And last week, THE FADER released a list of “songs of recession pop” — “When the markets go down, pop goes up,” reads the article’s subhead.

Charli XCX’s brat, FKA Twigs’ Eusexua, and Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM are all recent, successful club-pop records echoing the same escapist party ethos that Ke$ha and the Black Eyed Peas once did in the late 2000s. The messaging is intensely carefree, blaring the desire to overcompensate for the world’s troubles loud and clear. But it also feels incongruous with a global culture that is more sober, more stay-at-home. People can’t run to parties or clubs if they weren’t going to them in the first place, or if clubs are shutting down at alarming rates.

Last summer, the mismatch between the ethos of popular club music and the behaviors of its listeners was already impossible to deny: Many online didn’t believe that “365 partygirl” Charli XCX was partying the way she had described in brat. “People couldn’t believe she was outside for real,” observes anonymous blogger Tell The Bees. “When a video surfaced of her doing drugs at a rave, Gen Z melted down. How could she?” When culture is sober, escapist music becomes transgressive.

If the analysts and journalists are correct — that we are tipping towards a recession — then whatever economic crisis we are inching towards will be a sober one. People will not be drinking or dancing their financial anxieties away. “Recession pop” is not back, because the infrastructure that once let it thrive is now dying. We will try to escape our pains and our realities, as humans often have through history, and maybe we will do that through music.

But the recession will not sound like a party. Our glasses will be empty, and our throats very, very dry.