Conference Paper Abstracts

Sorbonne University, June 26-27, 2025

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Gender, Race, and Depression in Hip-Hop

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“‘Bad Bitches Have Bad Days Too’: Megan Thee Stallion, Doechii, and Black Women’s Expressions of Anxiety and Depression in Hip Hop” (Lauron J. Kehrer, Smith College)

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Hip hop has long featured discussions of psychological and emotional health, from one of the genre’s earliest canonical examples, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982) to The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Suicidal Thoughts” (1994). Studies have shown that in the last twenty-five years, however, the number of rap songs addressing mental health issues has increased.1 With mental health discourse becoming a more integrated aspect of American culture, several high profile rappers, such as Kid Cudi, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, and others have disclosed their own struggles with depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and addiction, whether in interviews and/or in their music. These disclosures have largely been met with appreciation from fans. While this discourse tends to praise Black men specifically for addressing mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, and addiction honestly in the genre, Black women, who according to a recent study, experience depression symptoms at a much higher rate than almost any other population subgroup, have not been given the same consideration. Megan Thee Stallion and Doechii are among the few women rappers who have openly addressed these topics in their recent music.

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Megan Thee Stallion’s 2022 Traumazine album, especially the track “Anxiety,” specifically addresses, among other topics, the rapper’s experiences with mental illness, and her 2024 hit “Cobra” further details her experiences of suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety. Doechii’s breakthrough mixtape/album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, traces a narrative of personal, professional, and mental struggles and success with the fourth track, “Denial Is a River” explicitly addressing mental illness and addiction. However, unlike Black men rappers or white women pop stars, these artists deflect the vulnerability that typically accompanies such musical disclosures. Rather than engaging in the “sad girl music” explored by scholars such as Jessica A. Holmes, Doechii and Megan Thee Stallion engage with humor and hardness respectively to both articulate their lived experiences of trauma and response, and to distance themselves from any perceived weaknesses that might accompany such exposure. This paper explores the lyrical, musical, and contextual approaches of these two rappers in addressing their specific experiences of anxiety, depression, and trauma through hip hop.

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“Survivor’s Guilt: Navigations of Masculinity, Depressive Disdain and Mental Health in Black-British Rap Music” (Lizzie Bowes, University of Bristol)

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Over a stripped back beat, Black-British rapper Dave closes his sophomore album with a confessional entitled Survivor’s Guilt: “The truth is, I got really bad anxiety, I’m on the motorway, cryin’ in the driver’s seat…”

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He grapples with the knowledge that money and status cannot reckon with the systems of institutionalised oppression that continue to marginalise his loved ones (“I feel the worst at my happiest/’Cause I miss all my niggas that couldn’t be in this life I built”). His pain intermingles with anger, at both the government (“the government ain’t gonna help with all the issues that I’m tacklin’”) and his peers, who deride discussions of men’s mental health (“[S]eein’ them laugh at me, cah I’m vulnerable”). This bubbling over of depressive disdain is echoed by similar admissions from rapper Stormzy, who takes jabs at far-right nationalism (“Tell the EDL we didn’t come to march”), before delving into more personal struggles (“The last time I linked depression was a while back…”). These are only a few examples of Black-British rappers using their work not as a call to political action, but to make space for themselves to be disabled by their mental health conditions, and disillusioned into an anxious sense of stasis by the British political landscape. Drawing on concepts such as Xine Yao’s Disaffectedness, and building on the work of Black-British music scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Richard Bramwell, this paper will consider Black-British rap as a self-contained space in which Black men give themselves permission to feel: to feel depressed, anxious, and helpless. I ultimately argue that these admissions of mental adversity act as an effort to request for and reimagine institutions of care amongst Black men, whilst concurrently processing the reality of the politicised and racialised systems of oppression that continue to fail them.

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“‘There’s a War Going on Inside, No Man is Safe From’: Representations of Depression through Autosonic and Allosonic Quotation in a Critically Acclaimed Rap Album: An Artist’s Perspective” (Paul Adey, Nottingham Trent University)

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Rap music continues to be an essential vehicle for the artistic expression of an ongoing global mental health crisis (Jefferson, et al. 2024). Adding to this discourse, the S.T.A.R.V.E. LP (Adey, 2024) is a sonic-literary journey into the mind of a young working-class man from the Midlands, UK, suffering from an undiagnosed mental health condition. 

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This paper takes the form of an autoethnographic exploration of depression within the context of contemporary British hip hop culture, focusing on how methods of autosonic and allosonic quotation (Lacasse, 2000) and ‘borrowing’ (Williams, 2013) in spoken word and rap lyricism can be used to articulate specific emotional states relating to an ancient artistic trope of isolation amongst the multitudes. Drawing on previous perspectives of socio-political and technological inequality that lead to depressive states (Fisher, 2009), S.T.A.R.V.E. contributes to an ideology of nihilism in rap music (West, 1994), and a narrative tradition of psychological downfall (Hamsun, 1890, Plath, 1963, Notorious B.I.G., 1994) in wider society, through a multifaceted intertextual engagement with various forms of art and literature. Works addressed include Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990) in visual response to the paintings of Francis Bacon, the poetry of Robert Frost (‘Acquainted with the Night’, 1928) and Kendrick Lamar (‘Conflicted’, To Pimp a Butterfly, 2015), and Roger Waters’ ‘One of the Few’ (The Final Cut, 1983). 

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In addition to aiding scholarly enquiry through utilising a semiotic framework of lyrical analysis (Kristeva, 1981), and answering the call for a ‘different register of analytic concepts’ when addressing black artistic expression’ (Gilroy, 1993), this paper demonstrates how S.T.A.R.V.E. makes a significant contribution to cultural and ideological debates on depression in popular music by translating this issue to a wider, more public audience, as evidenced by the LP’s placement within the top 50 albums of 2024 in The Wire Magazine (see also The Conversation). Being located in the oft-cited hypermasculine world of rap, S.T.A.R.V.E. adds to an ongoing commitment by its author and contemporaries to make hip hop culture a space that enables freedom of expression regarding subjects of vulnerability (Adey, 2023).

Indie Rock’s Big (Bad) Feelings

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“‘Real Pain’: Trauma, Depression, and ‘Good Non-Sovereignty’ in Contemporary Indie Rock” (Dan DiPiero, Boston University)

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This paper first introduces depressive affects in contemporary queer-feminist indie rock through a brief discussion of one of the scene’s leading figures: Soccer Mommy. In foregrounding close-mic singing, lyrics describing clinical depressive states, and multifaceted invocations of 1990s guitar-pop, Soccer Mommy paradigmatically performs the kind of brokenhearted nostalgia that has come to symbolize, for some, a “sad girl” subgenre of indie music. To complicate this picture, however, I turn subsequently to Indigo De Souza’s 2021 track “Real Pain,” bringing its musical structures into conversation with ethnographic accounts of De Souza’s live performances to show how both work together to create spaces of queer care in performance, facilitating what Lauren Berlant calls a “good non-sovereignty.”

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For Berlant, good non-sovereignty is the very promise of the political: it only happens when we can afford to be swept up in something, when we can trust the communities in which we are enmeshed enough to give up our fantasies of control. Indigo De Souza creates good non-sovereignty in performance by asking her listeners to take care of one another, and then by manipulating their emotional-affective responses through sound. In contrast to the riot grrrl’s polemical “girls to the front” praxis, De Souza asks fans to make space for one another, both expanding and softening the register of address so that all of her listeners can participate in the musical catharsis to come.

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To demonstrate what this looks, sounds, and feels like, I trace my own concert experience—as well as those of fellow fans—with a focus on “Real Pain,” which features the layered screams of De Souza’s fans, who sent recordings of themselves at the artist’s request. Hailing the young and marginalized listeners disproportionately affected by climate grief, attacks on reproductive freedom, and more, De Souza’s fans, hearing their own screams reflected back at them, willingly surrender control over their own emotions in the space of a concert in order to be with others who experience similar genres of pain. In doing so, they move beyond “sadness” into a more nuanced experience of depression and subsistence, collective grief and healing and at once.

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“Weeping Men and Vocal Embodiment in Early 21st-Century Indie Rock Listening: Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (Jillian Rogers, University of Florida)

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Although Neutral Milk Hotel’s second EP, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998), received mixed reviews at the time of its release, by the mid-2000s the album began receiving critical acclaim. Pitchfork, for example, pulled its initial review and replaced it with one that gave the album a 10/10. This shift in reception is especially notable for how listeners—mostly men—zeroed in on the emotional and cathartic qualities of the voice of the band’s lead singer, Jeff Mangum, who underlined that the album had his reading of The Diary of Anne Frank as its inspiration. While one fan reported that the album helped him process his brother’s suicide, another confessed that “there’s three times in a row where I saw them live and I started crying…The music was really beautiful, and the lyrics might have been obtuse and not something you could directly relate to, but there was something in Jeff’s voice, just the sound of his voice, that encapsulated so many different feelings at the same time.” Scholarship on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has sidestepped not only the album’s reception, but also the centrality of vocal timbre, gendered expressional aesthetics, and grief to the album’s popularity.

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In this paper, I trace the reception of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea from its release through the present, focusing on how Mangum’s voice became a cathartic locus of meaning for listeners. In addition to contextualizing the album and its reception within early 2000s indie rock aesthetics and gender politics, I turn to theorists of voice and musical embodiment such as Nina Eidsheim, Arnie Cox, Andrew Mead, and Marc Leman, and to psychological, therapeutic concepts of psychodrama, to consider how the construction of this album created opportunities for mourning via an imagined and yet powerful vocal-corporeal empathy on the part of white, male, US-based listeners. Finally, I situate the gendered reception of this album within the specific cultural moment of the post-9/11, liberal, United States, when national mourning and the promises of a “post-racial” and “post-feminist” society facilitated musical performances of male grieving.

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“Boy-tlemania: Depressive Hedonia and boygenius Superfandom” (Natalie Farrell, University of Chicago)

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In 2023, indie rock supergroup boygenius (Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus) played a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden to support their chart-topping debut album, The Record. From the group’s start in 2018 until more recently, to be a fan of the canonically depressed musicians was to be a part of an underground scene. But, in the months leading up to the show, boygenius fandom became increasingly rabid as supporters queued for hours before shows and turned to the internet to discuss whether or not non-queer-identifying people should be allowed to attend. Bridgers reflected, “We have the kind of superfans that John Lennon had, but some of our relatives don’t think we make any money.” How did a band of singer- songwriters known for their quiet, slow, sad music cultivate such a ferocious fanbase?

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We argue that the incongruence between the aesthetics of boygenius’s songs and its vociferous fan reception challenges the prevailing notion of so-called “depressing” singer-songwriter music as a form of soothing, sonic sedative. We draw upon Mark Fisher’s concept of “depressive hedonia” as we situate boygenius’ brand of introspective indie rock as a site not for passivity but for activity: for listeners to engage with the artists’ works and with other like-minded fans who have expressed that boygenius songs allow them to experience melancholy in a collective, cathartic, and joyful way. We first examine how the music of boygenius evinces particular aesthetic markers of depression—moderate tempos, hushed vocals, pensive lyrics—and, as the “boys” account themselves, relates to their real-life experiences with mental health. Then, we trace the dynamics of the relationship between the aestheticized depression of boygenius’s music and the affects that it may generate or complement in its listeners as observed in our ethnographic encounters with boygenius fans (both online and in real-world interactions at concerts). While challenging traditional notions of depression as a state of passivity, the boygenius superfan community’s invigorated tendencies toward gatekeeping and parasocial relationships has created a tension between the musicians and their fans, as well as among fans themselves, that has yet to be resolved.

Musicalizing the Affects and Effects of Political Turmoil

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“‘May This World Sink’: Politics of Affect in Turkish Popular Music” (Ceyda Çekmeci, UC Berkeley)

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When Orhan Gencebay’s song “May This World Sink” was released in 1973, it arrived at the height of “arabesk,” the popular music genre that emerged in Turkey during the 1960s and resonated deeply with rural-to-urban migrants living on the outskirts of Istanbul. Arabesk, as famously explored by ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes (1992), was marked by its tragic themes —poverty, exploitation, alienation, and unrequited love—and was often linked to a sense of passive fatalism, pessimism, and even suicide. Despite its pessimistic fatalism, this working-class musical subculture also carried a subversive potential, as explored by Turkish sociologist Meral Özbek (1991). The slogan “May This World Sink,” she observed, “had a resistance that could not be accepted by the dominant ideology” (139). And yet, the genre became increasingly associated with the new conservatism in the power bloc in the 1980s and the 1990s, and was further embraced by the right-wing Islamist political regime following Erdoğan’s ascent to power in 2002. While the affective qualities of arabesk remained unchanged, its politics shifted radically over the past few decades. This paper traces the changing politics of arabesk, from its early subversive undercurrents to its eventual “articulation” (Hall, 1986) to the hegemonic ideology. Through the history of the changing political associations of a genre that was long associated with depressed emotional states, the paper explores how the affective power of popular music can both resist and be co-opted by political regimes.s who experience similar genres of pain. In doing so, they move beyond “sadness” into a more nuanced experience of depression and subsistence, collective grief and healing and at once.

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“‘Fake It Till You Make It’: (Western) Performance of Madness in Ukrainian Women’s Music of the 1990s” (Iuliana Matasova, Displaced Ukrainian Independent Scholar, Partner of Oxford-Ukraine Hub)

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In 1994, Iryna Bilyk, singer-songwriter and Ukraine’s first major pop star, sang: “No one to blame for this but myself / Mad / Free” in the refrain to her song “Mad.” Two years later, she sported ugly makeup and a straitjacket in the video to “I’m Going to War”—a song that she called “philosophical” and too challenging for mass consumption. Tori Amos, American singer-songwriter whose presence is tangible in some of Bilyk’s oeuvre, once defined her performances as too raw for larger audiences. Ironically, “I’m Going to War” became one of the major hits in Ukrainian pop music. In 2003, Bilyk impersonated Ukraine’s deranged condition on “Don’t Cry Marichko” off her last Ukrainian-language album, in which she collaborated with Marusia Churai, the 17th century demonized composer-singer.

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In 1996, Maryna Odolska, another prominent figure from the group of the 1990s women musicians, sang only one word—“Mad”—in the refrain to her song of the same name. Other musicians, like Sestrychka Vika, Katya Chilly, or Yulia Lord, employed the subversive performance of madness throughout the 1990s. They often westernized, referencing the subversive operation of artists like Courtney Love or Sneaker Pimps. In an ‘unsound’ gesture, this paper places (minor) Ukrainian artists into an imaginary dialogue with (major) Western musicians. Grounding in Sedgwick’s (2003) conceptuality, this critique offers a reparative reading of Ukrainian singers’ derivative operation.

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Following Jameson (1991) in his insistence on studying “both the ideological and … transcendent functions of mass culture,” this analysis aims to explore post-1990 Ukrainian cultural production through attending to the (bipolar) event of post-Sovietness. To do so, this paper brings together Hundorova’s (2019) view of the Ukrainian 1990s as the “new openness to the West” and Suchland’s (2011) observation that the ‘first’ world lacked “room to let a whole new (second) world into conversation”. This critique then interprets a distressing conundrum of the unacknowledged ‘second-world’ difference as it registered in the 1990s Ukrainian women’s music and aligned with the intensities of the 1990s in the global context.

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“‘É Preciso Dar um Jeito, Meu Amigo‘: Popular Music and the “Culture of Depression” in Brazil during the ‘Years of Lead’ (1969-1974)” (Sheyla Castro Diniz, University of São Paulo)

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I”É preciso dar um jeito, meu amigo” (“We Need to Find a Way, My Friend”) is the most emblematic song on the soundtrack of I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), a Brazilian film by Walter Salles that, at the time of writing, is competing in three categories at the 2025 Oscars. With an urgent chorus and striking guitar, the rock-blues by Roberto and Erasmo Carlos accompanies crucial scenes in the film, which is based on the true story of Eunice Paiva. She fought to raise her children and hold the Brazilian state accountable for the death of her husband, former congressman Rubens Paiva, who was tortured and killed by agents of the military dictatorship in Rio de Janeiro in January 1971. Released in the same year as Rubens Paiva’s death, “É preciso dar um jeito, meu amigo”is part of a wave of songs produced at the height of the “Years of Lead” (1969-1974), a period in which Brazilian counterculture, partly in response to the intensification of repression and censorship, distanced itself to some extent from utopian ideals. According to many analysts, Brazilian popular music during this period was largely expressed through “nocturnal themes.” The sound of electric guitars served as a backdrop for lyrics about despair, failure, loneliness, and madness—standing in stark contrast to both California’s Summer of Love and the “solar counterculture” of Tropicalismo, which was dismantled in 1969 with the imprisonment and exile of its most prominent icons, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. The concept of a “culture of depression” has been widely used to describe an alleged atmosphere of generalized despondency that permeated Brazilian music during the “Years of Lead.” According to this perspective, censorship encouraged the production of songs marked by nonsense, mystical, and escapist themes, thereby draining popular music of its critical potential. This presentation aims to challenge these interpretations, contextualizing their limitations and demonstrating how, in many cases, the apparent “depression” in Brazilian popular music during the “Years of Lead” functioned as a coded form of contestation and resistance against the military dictatorship.

Mental Health in the Popular Music Industry Pt. 1

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“Keeping Your Head Above Water: Coping Strategies of Independent Musicians in Light of Gender, Sex, Race and Class” (Jeremy Vachet, Audencia Business School)

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In recent decades, a growing body of research on cultural labour (see, for instance, Banks, 2017; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011; McRobbie, 2004) has highlighted the pervasive and intense precarity that characterizes the working conditions of most individuals in the field. Too often caught between the ‘deferred economy thesis’ and ‘grandiose fantasies of future stardom or illusory projections of autonomous, passionate labour’ (Alacovska, 2019), existing research has struggled to fully assess the psychosocial impact of these precarious conditions. Only recently has mental health in popular music become a subject of academic inquiry (Gross & Musgrave, 2019; Help Musicians UK, 2014; Vachet et al., 2022), with studies beginning to explore the coping strategies musicians develop (Vachet, 2022).

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Building upon critical approaches in popular music studies and employing a psychosocial conceptual framework, this presentation examines the strategies musicians use to ‘keep their head above water’ and mitigate paralyzing anxiety, depression, and burnout in a context of extreme precarity that threatens their ontological security (Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011; R. D. Laing, 1990; Vachet, 2022). Drawing on critiques of the pathologization of mental health, including bio-reductionism (Rogers & Pilgrim, 2014), this presentation underscores the importance of considering mental health and coping strategies in relation to social variables such as class, gender, and race. These factors significantly shape an individual’s self-esteem, sense of recognition, and mental well-being (Reay, 2005; Rogers & Pilgrim, 2014; Sayer, 2009; Skeggs, 1997), as well as their ways of coping (Vachet, 2022, 2024).

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Employing participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this presentation draws on over a decade of fieldwork among ‘average’ independent musicians in France and abroad—artists who live on the margins of economic redistribution and fame but remain dedicated to their craft while seeking professional recognition and legitimacy from their underground music peers and audiences. Ultimately, this presentation advocates for an approach that takes mental health—particularly anxiety, depression, and burnout—seriously as a personal response to broader political and socioeconomic conditions (Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011). It emphasizes the need to examine how these challenges are shaped by structural inequalities related to gender, class, and race.

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“From Solace to Struggle: Busking, Depression, and Mental Health in the Post-Pandemic Era” (Melanie Ptatscheck, NYU/Leuphana University Lüneburg)

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Busking – street performances for donations – has long been an essential aspect of urban cultural life, providing musicians with an outlet for creative expression. It fosters public well- being by creating positive atmospheres and facilitating diverse social interactions. At least since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, these potentials have been at the center of political, social, and scientific debates. However, the pandemic not only underscored the social value of music but also exposed the precarious conditions of those who create it. Lacking financial stability and institutional support, street musicians are particularly vulnerable to mental health challenges, especially depression.

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This study investigates the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of street musicians in New York City, focusing on depression. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and narrative interviews, the study explores how financial instability, the loss of performance spaces, and social isolation have intensified their struggles, with depression emerging as a significant consequence. A key case study is Collin Huggins, widely known as the “Piano Man of Washington Square Park.” While busking initially helped him manage depression triggered by the pressures of a professional career in the music industry, the post-pandemic era reversed this effect. The very practice that once offered solace has contributed to a resurgence of depressive symptoms, illustrating the fragile balance between artistic resilience and psychological strain.

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Situated at the intersection of popular music studies, public health, and urban music studies, this paper explores how depression manifests among buskers, highlighting both individual and systemic factors that contribute to mental health challenges in the live music sector. By examining this distinct group of creative workers, the study provides new insights into their specific vulnerabilities and offers a broader discussion on depression in the music industry. The findings emphasize the urgent need for policy interventions to support the well-being of creative workers and sustain urban music cultures in the post-pandemic era.

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“Suicide, Depression and the Music Industry: Epidemiology, Risk Factors and Possible Intervention Approaches” (George Musgrave, Goldsmiths University of London)

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Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, country music singer Mindy McCready, Keith Flint of The Prodigy, Electronic Dance Music (EDM) DJ Avicii, K Pop stars Goo Hara, Sulli and Moonbin, and many more. This long and heartbreakingly incomplete list of musicians that have died by suicide represent not only tragedies, but cultural reminders of a devastating apparent connection between artists, mental health challenges, and early mortality. Historical discourse surrounding musician-suicide has often perpetuated problematic narratives: either normalising these deaths as inevitable or mythologising them within a romanticised framework of artistic suffering. There has been, at times, a deeply uncomfortable sensationalising of suicide in the context of a music industry which is a storytelling, myth-making industry, and a story which can be traced all the way back to Plato is that artists are troubled, brooding, mad, and by extension, in extremis, perhaps, suicidal. However, contemporary research on suicide risk factors reveals a more nuanced aetiology. This presentation will seek to move beyond unhelpful cultural representations and engages with the latest mortality data on musicians and suicide to approach two questions. Firstly, how at risk are musicians of suicide around the world and based on the evidence and theory, what are the factors likely to increase the risk of suicide in musicians? Secondly, what does current evidence from the study of suicide screening, assessment, and prevention teach us concerning the application of best practices for musicians, and what are the challenges for those who work with and care for these musicians in their personal and professional networks? It is hoped that addressing these questions should both advance our understanding of the cultural, sociodemographic and clinical factors that may increase the risk for suicide among musicians, and inform the work of suicidologists eager to better develop more effective methods of suicide intervention as has been observed in a range of other industries and occupations which have also been found to be high-risk e.g., construction workers.

Mental Health in the Popular Music Industry Pt. 2

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“The End of The Road: ‘Cruel Optimism,’ ‘Burning Out,’ and Abandoning a Performing Career” (Matthew Day Blackmar, UCLA)

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What makes aspiring performing musicians “burn out” and “quit,” eschewing the precarious life of social media, “the road,” and the recording session for less creatively fulfilling work? This paper examines the affective micropolitics and political economy of abandoning one’s aspiration to professional-musician status. In my case, I long ago “quit” aspiring to a performing career, when I left Hollywood for graduate study. I have thus translated my own experience of deferred creative recognition into an instructive instance of what Laura Berlant termed “cruel optimism” (2011)—when aspiration runs counter to flourishing. This is the signature affect of artistic endeavor under neoliberal capitalism, and one that remains understudied even as scholars engage with how digital enclosures circumscribe artists’ rights in IP regimes, reckon with the casualization and automation of musical labor, muster artistic and theoretical critiques of such structures, and imagine the possibility of life after them.

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This paper reconciles Berlant’s “cruel optimism” with the emerging study of musicians’ mental health, centering “depression” as the condition that inheres when too much effort is met with too little reward. Studying the psychological effects of musical precarity helps us to remember that valedictory narratives about the technological democratization of practice and participation are unfounded: amateur musicians face formidable competition from each other, an impediment to online success that is a feature, not a bug, of the sociotechnical systems that administer structures of power like digital copyright. Silicon Valley thrives on user aspiration to stardom in part because low-yield participation has minimal overhead—by contrast with the pricey licenses for superstar content. Affects of constrained agency—aspiration, deferral, and resilience—are thus bound up with macro- power structures, opening space to imagine a micropolitics of resistance. How can we illuminate the claustrophobic digital spaces to which amateur users submit provisional claims in ambitious agential acts against overwhelming “odds?” How do such users in turn succumb to the paradox of achieving some measure of online recognition—what social-media marketers call “burn”—absent meaningful remuneration? Can we achieve a more equitable and just digital-music economy that prevents musicians’ “burn out?” I conclude by posing provisional answers.

“‘I Have to Feel’ or Where is the Depression in Popular Music?” (Macon Holt, Copenhagen Business School)

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This paper considers what is meant by the idea that depression can be in popular music. While numerous scholars have convincingly proposed that popular music has been, and perhaps increasingly is, about (Holmes 2023) or expressive of depression on both individual and societal levels (James 2015; Cooper 2022), a representational gap persists between music and the psychic suffering in question. In and of itself this is not a problem, however, if popular music and cultural analysis are to intervene beyond the level of music as representative text or adjacent to mental health experiences and practices (Aalbers et al. 2017), then what is meant by depression in popular music as an object of study requires further consideration.

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Rather than understanding depression as an entity in itself, this paper starts from the circumspect understanding of depression found in psychoanalysis (Freud 1914-1916; Lacan 1990; Kline 1975) and psychodynamic theory (Town et al. 2022), which, broadly speaking, holds that depression is symptomatic of a process of psychological suffering stemming from internalised anger towards an obscured object leading to self-directed aggression. In approaching popular music, this paper diverges from psychoanalysis’ problematic reliance on semiotics and instead conceptualises this music as existing immanently across strata following Deleuze and Guattari (2013). From here it engages with Fred Moten’s (2004) problematisation of music as text and instead considers it a site through which the objectified can resist their objectification. With these tools, the paper will perform a conjunctive analysis of the Black Eyed Peas’ 2009 hit, “I Gotta Feeling”, as a latent expression of post-2008-financial-crisis depression. That being, as an example of the frantic instantiation of “depressive hedonia” (Fisher 2009) against the encroachment of intolerable emotional pain in the face of the collapse of capitalism’s promise of “the good life”. This paper will, then, argue for an understanding of depression residing not in popular music’s form, content or reception but energing through the relational loops it produces between music, artist, audience, industry and historical-material conditions. Loops that obstruct the desire/agency (Stengers 2012) of those subjectivised by the cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) of capitalist realism. Preventing such subjects (author included) from both recognising the structural violence performed upon them and from effectively resisting it by way of the subject positions and social relations into which it has forced them.

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Gen Z, New Media, and the Internet

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“Headphone Listening, Sonic ‘Self-Care,’ and Neoliberal Intimacies” (Jacob Downs, University of Oxford)

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It is a common refrain in both academic and popular circles that music has the “power” to influence emotion and regulate mood. Scholars in the psychology, sociology, and philosophy of music have long claimed that music variously functions as a “technology of the self” (DeNora 2000), as a means of “enabling” listeners to do “emotional work” (Dibben 2017), and as a form of “affective scaffolding” that supports the “self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional consciousness” (Krueger 2019). In distinct though related areas, scholars have explored the role of mobile sound devices—such as Walkmans, iPods, and their requisite headphones—in users’ “cognitive management of everyday life” (Bull 2007) or as a means of “sonic self-control” (Hagood 2019). However, little attention has yet been paid to the interaction between specific musico-sonic materials, their presentation through particular technologies, and the self-directed impact of sound on listeners’ affective states. 

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In this paper, I attend to the neoliberal logics of what I term “sonic self-care.” Building on recent work by Jessica A. Holmes (2023), who connects the intimate affordances of Billie Eilish’s “whisperpop” production with its reception through headphones, I present some of the findings of a recent interview study, one that underpins my forthcoming monograph on the phenomenology of headphone listening. I demonstrate that listeners often report using headphones to regulate mood and control the negative symptoms of chronic mental health conditions. In particular, I attend to the manner in which some listeners describe the intensely intimate “parasocial” connections they feel towards specific voices during headphone listening, noting the illusion of closeness they feel to singers or performers and the resulting comfort they experience from being in the “presence” of virtual others. In some cases, this leads listeners to feel that they come to embody a singer’s voice, effecting a peculiar merging of affectivities, subjectivities, and corporealities.

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In sum, I argue that headphones may serve a dual spatio-affective function for listeners, auditorily separating them from the wider sonic environment while also “refurnishing” the interior auditory space of the head with comforting sound. This extends my existing work on “sonic homeliness” and headphone listening (Downs 2021).

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“#mitkskiistherapy, Mental Health, Fandom, and Participatory Practices in Algorithmic Music Culture”  (Veronika Muchitsch, Uppsala University)

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Current public debates have discussed young people’s higher degree of mental health conditions, including depression, a development that is often tied to notions of negative effects of social media. At the same time, digital media like TikTok have become platforms where new types of therapeutic content have emerged, and young people foreground mental health in their media practices. Recent reports further conclude that mental health problems have particularly increased among young women, and in popular music and media culture, the “sad girl” has been described as an increasingly visible figure of young feminine subjectivity. This paper engages the intersections of mental health and online music cultures through a study of TikTok users’ negotiations of mental health through musical participatory practices. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from feminist affect theory and sonic cyberfeminisms, the paper examines participatory practices around the work of Japanese American singer songwriter Mitski, where references to depression and other mental health conditions have gathered around the hashtag #mitskiistherapy, with over 140 Mio. views to date. The analysis combines tools for multimodal and auditory analysis of user-generated videos and is guided by two questions: First, I ask how depression and related mental health conditions are mediated through TikTok users’ musical and multimodal practices. Second, I examine how these practices are shaped by TikTok’s sociotechnical qualities that center around the platform’s ‘for-you’-algorithm. Finally, I situate these practices within broader gendered discursive frameworks surrounding fandom and genre that have informed Mitski’s work and reception.

Feminine Melancholy, Mourning, and Healing

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“‘King of Sorrow’: Sade’s Melancholic Protest” (Ramona Gonzalez, Occidental College)

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This paper investigates musician Helen Folasade Adu, the British Nigerian artist known as Sade, and her 2002 audiovisual concert-album Lovers Live. I analyze how this music, while a work of political lamentation regarding the Black diasporic experience, has been derided by journalists as “easy listening” music—a term initially used in 1970s FM radio to refer to commercial music with smooth contours, construed to be devoid of originality or depth. “Rockist” critics have long framed Sade’s musical genre as romantic fluff, her unique vocal delivery as a conduit for sensuality, and herself as a vacant sexual object. As a result, these listeners have been unable to reconcile mourning and melancholia as a part of her artistry or recognize the considerable socio-political stakes of her work, as a Black woman asserting a claim to a complex and nuanced subjectivity.

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In order to move beyond these reductive portrayals of Sade, I analyze her album through the lens of women’s lament, demonstrating how her music acts as a radical channel to express and process feelings of historical, feminine, and racial traumas. I forward this interpretation by way of musical and visual analysis of Lovers Live, theories of racial melancholia (Cheng 2000; Eng & Han 2019), and Black feminist interventions, such as the theory of the “avatar,” in which Black female artists exhibit radical will by “performing objecthood”—manipulating and converting their selfhoods into art objects through a rigorous process of performativity (McMillan 2015). Through this analysis, I show that, far from being mere background music, Sade’s work within the lineage of Black women’s mourning practices is a quietly subversive expression of artistic agency, collective communication, and solidarity among the oppressed.

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“Joni Mitchell’s Descent into Melancholy on Side 2 of Blue” (James Grier, University of Western Ontario)

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Many characterize Joni Mitchell’s Blue as her most important and most personal album. Many also see profound autobiographical revelations in the songs on Blue and in many of her other songs as well. Irrespective of the actual autobiographical content of Blue, Mitchell maps, on the second side of the album, a descent into melancholy, each step of which she depicts in both lyrics and music. Whether these steps represent events in Mitchell’s own life is irrelevant to the listener who shares Mitchell’s feelings of sadness and descends alongside her. I chart, in this paper, the descent and the textual and musical means Mitchell uses to bring the listener with her down to the final despair with which the side, and the album, concludes.

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To take three examples, “California” shows the protagonist enjoying mixed experiences in Europe, presented with clipped diction in the voice and staccato articulation in the instrumental accompaniment, while longing to return to California, with declamation in more legato tones. The whole is capped with her repeated question “Will you take me as I am?” to which her pleading vocal tone suggests she does not anticipate an affirmative answer. In contrast, the next song, “This Flight Tonight,” combines the vulnerability of Mitchell’s vocal performance, mumbling “I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight,” with the aggressive rhythmic playing in the guitar that relentlessly drives the airplane on to its (and the protagonist’s) destination.

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The side concludes with the dark “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” which traces Richard’s path to mundane middle-class existence while the protagonist remains in a desperate romantic fantasy, sitting in darkness and hoping that no one will see her. Mitchell makes a powerful statement about the scale of the song with her sombre introduction on the piano, while the dialogue between Richard and the protagonist takes on an air jovial but serious with the parlando style in which Mitchell proclaims it. Is this the end for each of us, either drinking at home with the lights on or languishing in a café? Mitchell shows that either result brings with it its own despair.

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Queer and Trans Aesthetics of Depression

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“‘Trauma Looks Good on Me’: Depression in Pop Music: An Austrian Case Study” (Magdalena Fuernkranz, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)

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The precarious nature of work, especially the “gig economy”, that is typical in the music industries (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011) affects the vulnerability of musicians, including psychological distress, depression, and anxiety. Gross and Musgrave describe the wider entertainment industries that musicians inhabit as “full of people struggling and suffering from a variety of overlapping economic, psychological and addiction issues” (Gross and Musgrave 2020: 1). The results of the Can Music Make You Sick? report (Gross and Musgrave 2020) also make it clear that gender aspects have a central influence on musicians’ mental health. According to the study, both anxiety and depression levels, which are based on respondents’ reports, are higher among female respondents than among male. 

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Even though depression became a subject in Austrian popular music in the late 1970s with songs of predominantly successful male musicians such as Ludwig Hirsch’s „I lieg am Rucken“ (I lay on my back), Wolfgang Ambros’ “Wia wird des weitergehen” (What’s going to happen next), Georg Danzer’s “Heite drah i mi ham“ (Today I’m gonna kill myself), mental health became crucial during and after the Covid 19 pandemic. With her album The longest day of my life (2021), Sophie Lindinger intended to remove the taboo from depression by making it the main topic of her record and its promotion. Another musician, who uses music as an expressive strategy for communicating her health-related transformation process, BIPoC trans artist ÆNGL, repeats the sentence “Trauma looks good on me” in the track “Painted Pain” (2022), accompanied by hard guitar sounds. The musician describes the lyrics as a representation of her depression and healing process with the music video depicting her reckoning with heteronormative ideas of the body and mental health stigmata. 

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This paper provides a discourse-analytic approach to different perspectives on depression and its stylistic gendered and racially-coded conventions in popular music. Focusing on the semantic strategies that selected musicians use to reveal and aestheticize depression, their (self-)representations in different contexts such as videos, social media and interviews in health-related transformation processes as well as the impact on relationships between musicians, critics, and fans will be examined.

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Placing Depression/Hearing Structures: Quare Affects and Expressive Strategies in Queer/Trans Americana Music in Appalachia (Jacob Kopcienski, Appalachian State)

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“Doom and Gloom and Gladness: An Exploration of Long-form Heavy Music as Deceleration and Fugitivity” (Evan Martin-Casler, University of Arizona)

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Over a decade ago, Buzzfeed published a piece called “How 2012’s Most Miserable Album Helped Me Through Depression.” The article focused on an album by the French-Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who have built their career on long-form compositions experimenting with electric guitars, noise, found sound, and strings. Since 2012, the pace of life has accelerated considerably, due in no small part to our world’s increasing intimacy with technologies that commodify human attention spans via screen time and click-through rates. As the pace of acceleration reaches a breakneck speed, a singularity facilitated by non-human and potentially anti-human intelligence, it is no surprise that music fans have sought fugitivity in music genres that prioritize long structures, minimalism, slow build, and low, womb-like soundscapes. Post-rock, doom metal, and hauntology, though considered in different stylistic spheres, all centralize slowness, memory, immersion, and process over product. As Black Queer scholar Kemi Adeyemi suggests in her analysis of slow R&B, these musical traits run contrary to Neoliberal ethics of acceleration and accumulation. This aesthetic antithesis to capitalist principles, particularly in a modern culture of instant-gratification, requires the artist and the listener to enter into a contract of refusal, one wherein both engage in a praxis of non-productivity, of togetherness, and of engagement with illegibility. By engaging with the work of Adeyemi, Mark Fisher, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and metal theorists such as David Burke, this piece will explore how slow music, though it may sound scary or sad to new listeners, proves therapeutic for people who struggle emotionally with the cacophonic pitch of the modern capitalist soundscape. 

Music Therapy, Psychotherapy, and Self-Care

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“‘It Sounds How You Feel’: Music Therapy and the Possibilities of Popular Music Interventions” (Charles Carson, University of Texas at Austin & Annie Vandervoort, Moxie Music Therapy)

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As an evidence-based allied health profession (services provided for health care vs medical care), Music Therapy assists individuals with improving their health or independence. Music Therapy uses music-centered interventions within the boundaries of a therapeutic relationship to accomplish nonmusical goals, including improving communication, social functioning, cognitive skills, physical health, or emotional well-being. 

Popular music as a focus of serious scholarly inquiry began not in the field(s) of “the musicologies” (musicology, ethnomusicology, analysis), but rather emerged from various directions in area studies and the social sciences. Popular music is increasingly accepted as a legitimate—indeed, highly valuable—locus of inquiry and criticism, both in the US and across Europe. Recent studies have sought to expand the scope of such inquiry, utilizing popular music as a lens into other aspects of individual and collective identity through discussions of the relationship between music and culture, music and politics, and more recently, music and health. The works of scholars like Cheng (2016) and Holmes (2023) have forced us to consider the often fraught relationship between the musics we love and our own physical and emotional health. While these works are invaluable, the musicologies could further benefit from the interventions of Music Therapy.

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Through a discussion of select case studies drawn from the clinical experiences, this paper seeks to bridge the gap between therapeutic and scholarly studies in music by bringing to bear issues related to genre (genre theory, topic theory, reception) upon the practical, therapeutic uses of music. The goal is a clearer understanding of how popular music can be integrated into mental/emotional healthcare (Shuman, et al., 2016). Music Therapy has been integrated into inpatient mental health environments wherein popular songs become a means through which patients can address their current state of mind and explore deescalation strategies. We explore the relationship between behavioral and/or mood disorders, preferred popular genres, and how this informs clinical decisions in a music therapy setting.

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“Addressing Loss and Nostalgia in Contemporary English Folk Music” (Christopher Butler, Royal Holloway, University of London & Morag Butler, Rosslyn Court)

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Critics of the English folk movement have often dismissed the genre’s frequent retrospection as a form of nostalgia (Boyes, 1993; Harker, 1985) which, itself, has tended to be viewed as at worst inauthentic (Brocken, 2017), or at best problematic (Boym, 2001). However, in his study of the British folk scene, Niall MacKinnon (1993) has noted the preponderance of upwardly mobile participants experiencing discomfort with the changed lifestyle they have adopted. A key purpose of contemporary folk music, he suggested, was to make sense of traumatic and/or disorientating social change, an insight endorsed by the folk singer and social historian Roy Bailey (1994).

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In this paper, which I approach as a psychotherapist with a lifelong interest in contemporary English folk music, I examine examples from contemporary folk artists and relate them to recent and current psychological theories of loss and grieving. Socio-musicologist Tia De Nora underlines this connection in her book Hope (2021), referencing psychotherapist and bereavement expert Kubler-Ross (1997) who notes that in order to retain hope in the face of major setbacks, people undergo a complex grieving process involving different stages – typically denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Looking at these themes and especially at more recent psychological theories of grief and trauma (Weller, 2015; Wildschut et al., 2006) as well as of researchers who see grief and therefore depression as a rational response to current sociological issues (Choi, 2024 plus Berlant etc. as cited) I will argue that English folk music might better be understood as an opportunity to address trauma and depression. 

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The presentation will be supported by slides and excerpts of contemporary folk songs performed by Morag Butler. This interpretation not only explains the waxing of the popularity of English contemporary folk music in the post-war period when social mobility in England was heightened; its waning in the latter part of the last century and possibly its contemporary re-emergence as a form of community response to depression in the current age of social dissociation as experienced by the presenters in their work running a venue in an exceptionally deprived area of the UK.

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“Happy Music, Happy Mom: Using Popular Music to Navigate Depression and Matrescence” (Michelle Meinhart, Trinity Laban Conservatoire)

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Though the mental well-being of people who give birth has been overlooked historically due to the medicalization and stigmatization of maternal experiences, maternal depression has gained increasing visibility in both social media and the press, particularly during and following the Covid-19 pandemic. Such depression stems from trauma and anxiety related to maternity and delivery (Waller et al 2022); isolation and identity loss related to early motherhood (Laney and Hall 2015); intensive parenting norms of the twenty-first century (Jones 2024); construction of the child as “commodity” (Sanders 2020; Moss 2021); erosion of community and familial networks who historically helped with childcare (Hill-Collins 2005; Laloux 2018; Sihvonen 2021); and necessity of full-time work because of neoliberal economic policies (Cvetkovich 2012). In response to this widespread panic about the inevitability of depression in motherhood, many individuals are actively seeking ways to mitigate emotional challenges they expect to have, including through curation of popular music playlists to regulate mood. As midwifery journals and mothers’ narratives of their experiences indicate, mothers desire to not only block out sounds that might be anxiety inducing, such as that of medical equipment (Tagore 2009; Gunaratnam 2009; Rice 2013 ), but also to “soundtrack” “matrescence”— the term coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1975 to describe the challenging hormonal, physical, and emotional transition into motherhood, which lately has had a resurgence in academic, clinical, and popular discourses (Sacks 2017; Sacks 2018;
Jones 2024).

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This paper explores mothers’ curation and deployment of popular music in mitigating depression and anxiety during matrescence, as shared via social media. Drawing from my experiences using curated playlists in COVID-19 lockdown maternity wards (Meinhart 2022), I argue these playlists of popular music, often consisting of personally meaningful tracks associated with specific life memories, serve as extensions of Marie Thompson’s concept of “reproductive sound technologies” (2020). Actively using popular music in this way in the clinical environment of the maternity ward and in the domestic isolation of early motherhood sits at the intersection of self-care and empowerment. In 2025, a time when debates about motherhood—from “childless cat ladies” to “tradmoms”—have saturated political, cultural, and media discourses, the need to study and articulate experiences of mothers in their situated, intersectional, and lived complexities has become ever more pressing.

Tracking Feelings in Pop

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“‘I’m Not Actually Sad’: Chappell Roan’s Celebration of Radical Kinship” (Ajitpaul Mangat, Niagara University)

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In this paper I consider Chappell Roan’s admission that she was surprised to have been diagnosed with “severe depression” since she was “not actually sad.” I argue, drawing on the work of Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, that Roan refuses to pathologize her symptoms – which include “brain fog, forgetfulness, poor focus and ‘a very lackluster
viewpoint’” – by taking into account the external circumstances that brought them on: she states, as I point out, that her “whole life has changed.” Such a tracing outward is evident, I suggest, in the gendering of her experience: I show that Roan empathically situates the bodily tensions triggered by her newfound fame – which she relates to “going through puberty again” – within the long history of abuse faced by female pop singers like Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey, and Sabrina Carpenter. Roan emphasizes, as I note, that only “girls know how it feels.” She thereby, I propose, answers the call made by Ann Cvetkovich to trace depression not to
biochemical imbalances but rather to social structures like sexism.

When Roan describes her life now as “very abnormal,” I contend that she articulates a fundamental lesson of mad studies: it’s the world that generates madness and distress. I offer Roan’s aesthetic development as proof that an abnormal world can be fixed through community building, charting how the feeling of finally finding her people led Roan to leave behind her earlier sad-girl persona in favor of acknowledging her queerness on “Pink Pony Club” and later The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. I posit that Roan has come, like Johanna Hedva, to understand that resistance entails not writing love songs for the one you desire but rather, as evident during her live shows, celebrating community. Roan made her commitment to radical kinship clear, I claim, in supporting trans rights by refusing to attend
White House Pride events until they “want liberty, justice, and freedom for all.” Ameliorating depression and unwellness more generally requires, I conclude, reshaping society around the inherent vulnerability of, as Roan stresses, all bodies.

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“‘Tell Me, Do You Feel Like Shit?’: Musical Comedy and Millennial Attitudes Towards Depression in Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021)” (Elizabeth Hunt, University of Liverpool)

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This paper presents an analysis of mental health themes in Bo Burnham’s musical special Inside (2021) with reference to Millennial attitudes towards mental health, as well as an increased reference to themes of depression and anxiety in popular culture. Written, filmed, and released by Burnham during the COVID-19 pandemic, Inside is presented as an introspective glimpse into the artist’s declining mental health in his self-imposed isolation between the March of 2020 and May of 2021 while creating the special. All of this, however, is presented under the guise of a musical comedy production, in line with the musician/comedian role with which Burnham has been associated throughout his career.

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While many of the songs in the special can be read more strictly as comedic moments, songs such as “Shit” and “That Funny Feeling” overtly deal with themes and topics of depression and anxiety. Comparison of these two songs in this paper will facilitate analysis of the dual perspectives of mental health in popular culture. “Shit” provides a satirical, comedic perspective of Burnham’s depressive state. Analysis of musical features such as instrumentation, timbre, and lyrics will demonstrate how “Shit” reflects a common Millennial sensibility of making jokes of one’s poor mental health. In contrast, musical analysis of “That Funny Feeling” finds that, while a clear satire of acoustic authenticity, the instrumentation and timbre make the song distinct from the rest of the special and suggest a dropping of Burnham’s comedic persona.This paper concludes that Inside presents a window into a particular attitude towards mental health themes in Millennial culture, particularly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, of open discussion, but also trivialisation through humour. In Inside then, Burnham presents himself as a dramatized avatar for his peers and their struggles.  This paper demonstrates how this is achieved musically by Burnham through the implementation of comedic musical tropes, synth-pop, and acoustic artist personas.

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