By Cory Alpert
The nature of celebrity is changing, and we should pay attention.
You may have noticed this in the past few years. Clubs are full again – and have a new life, thanks to dance music that actually makes people want to dance. Modern culture has been overtaken by the hedonism of brat summer. Even the modern Vaudeville of TikTok – where everyone is striving for a glimpse of digital fame that is probably not even worth having – reflects the kind of emotional world we live in.
(From left) Kesha in 2009, Lady Gaga rocks out the meat suit in 2010 and Beyonce during a recent Cowboy Carter show. Credit:
Relatability is out, fantasy to the point of mythology is what we’re seeing now.
To me, this seems the point of what’s happening in culture around the world. If the prevailing feeling of the 2010s was despair, which might be absolved on the dance floor, the prevailing feeling of the mid-2020s is that of anger, blown up on the dance floor, opening the possibility of redemption and restitution. Recession pop is back.
It’s the hooky, jaunty music that uses camp, sequins and bright lights to make vulnerability seem less scary. In a world beset by crisis, this kind of overwrought art is what draws people in. Unsurprisingly, it emerged at the height of the global financial crisis. It’s hedonism, pure and simple. When the world is burning down, we might as well have a hell of a party at the end.
Late last month, I went to Kesha’s sold-out stop at Madison Square Garden, where she is touring for the first time as a performer who owns the rights to her own music, after a decade-long court battle ended in 2023.
In her banger Red Flag, Kesha sings “I want emotions that are overflowing” – emblematic of the world she helped to usher in on first taking the global stage in the middle of an economic downturn, with a sound and vibe that would come to define the era.
The last time this cultural shift happened was about 2008, as the financial crisis was biting and stars such as Kesha and Lady Gaga, and their imitators, ruled the airwaves.
There was a sense that a future was no longer possible, and art shifted towards the possibility of the next few minutes of pleasure. It borrowed from the inaccessibility of 2000s-era It Girls such as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and became something people could disappear into, letting the fantasy and glamour of such artists, who presented a vision of a world entirely separated from their own, drench them.
Paris Hilton (left) and Nicole Richie at the height of their “It Girl” fame. Drenching ourselves in their glamour helped us avoid thinking about real-world problems.Credit: WireImage
Glitter isn’t exactly a substitute for hope in a better future, but the two resemble one another, and maybe that’s all that matters sometimes.
Think for a moment of the media, the celebrities, of the past decade. The dominant feeling of the time was earnestness. Relatability. People (including, especially) me flocked to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour because she is the greatest lyricist of the time, a poet who draws from her own diaries and makes you feel like you could be her closest friend. The tour was an experience of community building.
I also had the fortune to see Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter tour recently. I’ve been trying to piece together why the two tours felt so different, and I think it’s because at Eras I spent half the time talking to people around me, reflecting on what the songs have meant in my life. At Cowboy Carter, I and the other 80,000 people were transfixed by the greatest living performer at her best. It’s not that subtle a difference. What we look for in celebrity has changed. It’s no longer ways to reflect on ourselves, but to take shows as a way of escaping the world. Recession pop is back.
This hasn’t escaped politics, either. Beyond Australia, the famously laid-back island with tall poppy syndrome almost worse than the UV rating, politicians have become celebrities in the same way.
Perhaps this is what US President Donald Trump understood before and better than anyone else: that Americans weren’t looking for a relatable politician who could be imagined as a regular at the local bar. No, Trump went in the other direction, knowing people wanted a feeling, looking to fill him up with all their own grief and anger and fear.
For a brief moment last year, Kamala Harris was brat and got to have a similar moment in the sun – someone unknowable, unattainable; the fantasy of it all is the point.
Recession pop is intimately aware of the collapse around it, too. Gaga in 2010 didn’t wear a meat dress to the MTV Video Music Awards because she was hungry – she did it to make a statement. The hyperreal party music of the recession knew how people just wanted to escape their everyday life and live in another world for a while.
These cycles aren’t new. In the 1980s, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, the common refrain was that gay men would watch friends die in the morning, attend their funerals in the afternoon, and dance all night. In the 1960s, in a world flinging itself to pieces at the height of the Cold War and the civil rights protests, disaffected young people became hippies, trying to find emotional escape in the stories and lies that added up to something like the truth.
For people who are most under pressure in a society, when crisis comes, this oversaturated media and celebrity landscape is a symptom of wanting to dive into something entirely new.
This time, it feels like it has something of a political punch in the heightened political tension of 2025. There’s a sense of reclamation, especially by women and queer people, that has a tinge of anger to it.
For this, we have Taylor Swift (and Kelly Clarkson) to thank for igniting the possibility of artists breaking the studio system to own their own work. Kesha is reclaiming herself after years of litigation, and with her country music shift, Beyonce is reclaiming entire genres.
This new version of culture, and the celebrities who are emerging and re-emerging, has a sense of well-placed rage that something has been stolen, and also a sense of joy in the act of taking back what belongs.
You might think it’s frivolous to read this much into some pop stars coming back and re-emerging, but these stars are some of the most famous people on the planet, especially among women and queer people, and they are fighting for a place at the table decades after seats should have been pulled up.
The anger of the far right at a changing world is matched by people who are doing the changing, and it’s beautiful to see.
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration for three years.