Abstract
This article focuses on the aesthetics of European pop music in the aftermath of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Building on the work of Butler (2020), Parivudhiphongs (2020), Yu-Cheong Yeung (2020), Lehman (2021), and Stratton (2022), I will suggest that the pandemic created the perfect conditions for the proliferation of a new kind of pop. Euphoric in tone, post-pandemic pop has been orientated towards the dance floor, nostalgic for 80s sounds and unconcerned with lyrical complexity. However, it is not without pathos. Building on the work of Sierputowski (2021), I will argue that the interpolation of 80s synth-pop sounds is also a symbolic rejoinder to the AIDS crisis. I will suggest that musical codes aestheticize sadness in a way that is both familiar and distant. In this direction, film and television soundtracks are particularly potent. Russel T Davies’ ‘It’s a Sin’ (2021) screened at the height of the pandemic became the lens through which many understood COVID-19, with music a tool for processing loss, longing and tragedy. Rees (2021) argues that the proliferation of disco during this period repositioned the genre as a contemporary form. I will argue that this futuristic sensibility can be attributed to the rehabilitation of Italo sounds, which fit the mood of the post-pandemic perfectly. On the one hand, Italo is a genre with its own melancholic sensibility interwoven with narratives of forfeiture, including loss of future, loss of identity and loss of voice. On the other, hand, it is steeped in a science-fiction aesthetic that chimed with the everyday technological innovations of life during lockdown, suggesting that it is time to turn the lights on the disco and explore the contemporary resonance of a genre that has always existed in the shadows.
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