It’s Will Smith announcing a new album. It’s “Mamma Mia!” returning to Broadway. It’s the uptick in law school applications.
And it’s absolutely spring breaking in Houston.
In recent weeks, as the finance world has been nervously watching the S&P 500 fall, nonexperts and the chronically online are seeing signs of a possible recession in daily activities and choices. To them, a recession looks like visiting the Asian elephant exhibit at the Houston Zoo nearby instead of traveling to Asia. Or the rising interest in torts law and a decrease in creative movies.
Posts on X and TikTok with the hashtag #recessionindicator are mostly jokes or even cheeky insults about activities seen as cheap. But they also reflect public interest in how pop culture and trends might be affected by economic uncertainty, experts say.
Sequels are an easy target for the label of “recession indicator.” For some, the announcement of a fourth season of “Ted Lasso” or a sequel to “Freaky Friday” signaled that studios were tightening purse strings instead of greenlighting risky, innovative material.
“It is kind of funny to think that Jason Sudeikis is having trouble paying off his third pool, so he’s like, ‘Time to put the mustache back on!’” Rob McRae, 39, a podcast producer, said referring to the actor who plays the show’s title character.
Of course, movies, television shows and albums are pitched and planned well before they are announced, making them lagging indicators of the economy. If anything, the songs and movies released down the line could reflect today’s economic situation.
“We may be booming in two years, but you will see the scarring effects of this,” Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard, said in an interview. “You’re kind of seeing now decisions that were made a few years ago.”
A better gauge of consumers’ concerns could be their habits. “If you bring liquor to the get-together, are yall taking the remainder of yall liquor at the end?” asked one X user. The question immediately became fodder for the trend and circulated widely. One popular reply was “Yes & even before the recession.”
Professor Rogoff chuckled at the hypothetical, though he found this scenario unlikely (an indication that he has never partied with journalists). But the nugget of truth is that people tend to eat out less and spend less on gifts when they are concerned about a recession.
The #recessionindicator meme is, in many ways, a repackaging of well-known academic theories. Take the “hemline index,” which posits that skirts get longer as the economy slows. Hair length and chocolate sales have also been analyzed as possible reflections of consumer sentiment.
Terry F. Pettijohn II, a professor of psychology at Coastal Carolina University, has spent more than two decades studying how the economy affects people’s decision-making.
“When social and economic times are more difficult, we prefer music that is slower, more romantic, more meaningful lyrics,” Professor Pettijohn said in an interview this month. “And when times are good, we prefer music that is more upbeat, fun, with less meaningful lyrics.”
It is not a perfect system. The top song of 2008 was the dance party anthem “Low” by Flo Rida. Maybe listeners heard “Stock market got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low”?
Sometimes, even the upbeat music incorporates themes of the moment, such as Timbaland’s 2007 song “The Way I Are,” which starts with the line “I ain’t got no money.”
Today’s music charts are filled with slower, more meaningful songs and ballads, reflecting the economic strain, Professor Pettijohn argued.
He named Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” and “Wildflower,” as well as “Die With a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, as examples. Indeed, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars are wildly popular artists and their song might have spent 30 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart regardless of the economic backdrop.
But an overall mood shift has become clearer.
This month, a Doechii song initially released in 2019 landed on the Billboard Hot 100. The title? “Anxiety.” The beat? Sampled from the 2011 hit song “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Well, that’s basically a sequel. #recessionindicator.