Aren’t pop songs generally meant to lift us up? Or at least make us forget, for a moment, how terrible everything else is? One good working definition of a pop song might be “a three-minute reminder that hedonism exists.” How and when did things turn so morose?

The armchair-cultural-anthropologist answer is the easiest one: Everything is garbage! Who wants to celebrate when the world is crumbling? It’s a seductive explanation. After all, many of us are currently grappling with the reality that the Earth will probably be partially drowned within the next four or five presidential administrations (assuming presidential administrations keep happening). Despite whatever famed optimist and Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker might be peddling, most of us, no matter our politics, are united by the overwhelming sensation that Things Really Aren’t Going Great. As citizens, we are more pessimistic, more distrustful, more anxious. We are angrier. We are more fearful.

In this sense, the pop charts are just mirroring back our internal climate. Wouldn’t it make sense that we wouldn’t be clamoring for FUN! to run around screaming in our faces? When confronted with terms like “climate genocide,” who really wants to party like it’s their last night on Earth?

But “the world is awful” is the cheap and easy answer, even when it’s true. Billboard charts aren’t mirrors. What we want from pop music isn’t straightforward. Sometimes, when life turns especially bleak, we rabbit hole directly into escapism—I don’t think it’s an accident, for example, that in the most agonizing throes of the Great Recession a decade ago, Rick Ross racked up hits with his endearingly fictional accounts of bottomless wealth and appetite, while JAY-Z and Kanye joyrode a Maybach in a vacant lot and stunted in front of a huge American flag.

Around that same time, dance pop belonged to Katy Perry, to Kesha, to songs like “Teenage Dream” and “We R Who We R,” to songs about dancing until the world ended, about being forever young. To listen to them was to imagine yourself dressed up and shivering in line outside the club, promising yourself an evening of... something. Whatever that something was, the songs promised us it would be something good, at least—something memorable, possibly even transformative.

Promises of transformation usually ring hollow, of course, and now we are living through a hard and unforgiving market correction. When the EDM bubble popped, things got real sad, real quick—half-empty pool parties, crashing stock prices, bankruptcies, Zac Efron movies. Today, Skrillex can be found digging himself an ever-deeper hole, collaborating with Lil Pump and a posthumous XXXTentacion on “Arms Around You.”

So, no, pop music didn’t simply wither and contract overnight in response to the 2016 election. The waves that wash up on the Hot 100 shores are generated miles out, and a lot of the energy swarming us comes from years ago. Some of it can be traced to Drake’s chilly luxury-brand brooding and his producer Noah “40” Shebib’s foggy, close-voiced minor key synth pads. Some of it comes from Kanye West and Kid Cudi before him, who made the still-resonant 808s and Heartbreak in the early-morning optimism of Obama’s first two years. Some of this energy was generated by the Weeknd, who has vociferously argued that sex and drugs are depressing and transactional and will bring you no happiness, but that you should do lots of both anyway.

Sex and drugs, hedonism’s most faithful lobbyists, are still everywhere in pop, but they are squalid and sad and presented as such. None of this partying leads anywhere, and no one involved bothers indulging the fantasy that it might. “I’m a sick fuck, I like a quick fuck,” an increasingly desperate-sounding Kanye bleats on “I Love It,” the only hit from his parade of 2018 debasements. “I Love It” trailed in after the release of his album ye, which opened with West admitting to suicidal thoughts and peaked with a triumphant chorus about feeling nothing. What “I Love It” lacks in joy, it makes up for in dead-eyed vigor: Kanye premiered the song’s video at the Pornhub Awards, and it felt like a pop-up ad.

Crippling depression amid unspeakable luxury has been a default setting in rap for a long time now, from Kanye to Drake to Future. And the spiritual avatar of this feeling right now, at least on the pop charts, is Travis Scott. Scott has been involved in Kanye’s work for at least five years, dating back to the sessions for Yeezus. Now, he is atop the charts with a massive and sprawling work of his own, ASTROWORLD. The fundamental presumption of Travis Scott music is that nothing feels good, especially not the stuff that’s meant to. “She thought it was the ocean, it’s just a pool,” Scott mutters on “Sicko Mode”—not the mindset of someone particularly enamored with their spoils of success, or impressed with the company it has brought them.

“Sicko Mode” reinforces the basic notion that rock star hedonism is supposed to feel hollow. It is made from the two corroded hulls of two different songs bumping into each other at an abandoned dock. The most triumphant lyric is Drake boasting how a Xanax made him sleep through a 13-hour flight. The song feels groggy and disoriented, like someone disembarking from an overseas redeye. This is what a rap hit sounds like now—no party, all hangover.