Certain pop stars seem to pop out of nowhere. These kids were, the “story” goes, immaculately conceived and birthed on the Billboard charts.

Of course, nearly every narrative of overnight success is a false one that is in essence an erasure of someone’s actual history — the work they did to get to number one. But the unwillingness or inability of the most mainstream audiences to wrap their minds around someone’s complex history does more harm than just causing low self-esteem in that someone; it can prevent any important message that they might want to relay to kids from being taken seriously. When the fact that a superstar was ever a normal person is conveniently effaced, the true lifestyles of the normal people who go to their shows are buried under gloss. This destructive cycle hits its sub-basement when Top 40 music is so saturated with fantasies of glamour that the people making it become utterly disconnected from the people buying it. And just like that, the audience is forced to sit and listen to breathy boasts about private boats, waiting for someone to speak for them.

That’s how we ended up with “Work B*tch,” which, regardless of its quality as a tune, is the epitome of lux pop, which has dominated airwaves for the last few forevers. How appropriate that it debuts at a moment in which an anti-affluence anthem is, as of this writing, sitting at the top of the charts. That song is “Royals,” and while Lorde isn’t unique amongst legends like Britney in the fact that she came from humble beginnings, you wouldn’t believe it if she didn’t write it across the sky in her debut single’s lyrics.

It’s not just the hit-makers who blindly proclaim they know what kids want. Plenty of public critics are guilty of a myopic perspective on young listeners, too. The hissy fits triggered by 2013’s Reinvention of Miley Cyrus is a prime example of this disengagement with the realities of young adult life: from the claim that Miley and her ilk are stealing culture to the fear-mongering about her being at fault for trickle-down sexuality (the latter being as ridiculous an argument as acclamation of trickle-down economics).

All of it speaks to a patronizing ignorance of the fact that today’s teens — their population having grown to over 42 million since the teen-pop boom of the late 90s — don’t operate under the guidelines of any kind of cultural segregation. They may do a lot of “oversharing,” but that doesn’t just consist of a sense of self-importance — we share all those little “cultural signifiers” with each other. Pop culture in this country is a free-flowing, three-thousand-mile-wide river without a dam, and Millennials are fearlessly swimming in it. Miley’s rebellious display of “appropriation,” like it or not, is reflective of that.

But the problem with the songs about the Good Life, extolling the virtues of gold teeth and jet planes, is that they reinforce a dam in that river. They cruelly send up an intoxicating incense that wafts down to the kids sitting in shallow water. The picture of a fancy life painted by producers, writers, and recording artists for kids’ consumption is those kids’ version of the American Dream which their parents fell for. As the fictional President Bartlet from The West Wing sighed about majority support for a tax cut to the wealthy, “That’s the problem with the American Dream — makes everyone concerned for the day they’re gonna be rich.”

The Great Recession was like a Wall-Street-firm-sized meteor crashing onto a camel’s back: it woke the working class up, including the kids. Those statistics about the enlarging American teen population include the fact that the percentage of adolescents (age 12-17) living in low-income families has risen to 40% in the past thirteen years. But it’s not just that more young people and their parents have less, it’s that more of those kids are now reconciling themselves to that reality: the portion of American college students who describe themselves as “lower class” more than doubled from 2002 to 2012. 

Gen Y is full of folks who are disenchanted, as those stats suggest, but defiant, as “Royals” suggests. It’s not about beating the rich into benevolence — that’s the job of our elected representatives. They want to drown out that artificial incense coming from behind the dam with the pungent but proud stench of sweat that can only come from toil.

And so the pop music landscape of the 2010s is coming to be defined by songs which are decidedly informed by the financial crisis of the late aughts: from Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” to “Royals.” These songs are an answer to the revelation that the American Dream is a pipe once fueled by the club at the top of the widening income gap, and they stand in direct opposition to that club’s phony air of magnanimity. Lorde wrote “Royals” before she was a pop star, and she still, like millions of other sixteen-year-olds, doesn’t feel like one. She’s speaking for people who know what they don’t have and wouldn’t take it if it were handed to them for free. They shrug at it. They “crave a different kind of buzz.”

Is lux pop dead and buried? Not yet, but the Plastics table in the cafeteria clearly doesn’t have the prestige that it used to. Young pop fans are tired of being condescended to by anyone and everyone, and “Royals” — along with its commercial success — is a blunt manifestation of a generation reaching their boiling point.