Choosing not to fix the formatting on this yet, because I’m lazy. Just copy-pasted.
Ludic, Ebullient, and Counterintuitive: An Introduction to
Hyperpop
Two summers ago, I interned at a music venue in Houston. My title was in “DigitalMarketing,” but really, I was a runner—carting around bags of groceries, slapping wristbands onconcertgoers, changing out posters in the bathrooms, and hoisting tables, really heavy tables, tothe hilltop wooden bleachers from Harambe. Harambe was the shed across the street—it used tohave a giant cutout of a gorilla above it before the owners of the venue bought it for storage.Unlike the shed, I didn’t have a name—I was exclusively “the intern.” Some of the time I wouldbe shadowing my boss, a tattoo-clad former-model the same age as me but who had beenpromoted to the head of the marketing department the previous year—where in addition to beingcalled by your actual name, you get paid. When I wasn’t busy, I was listening in on people in theoffice gripe about how Cuco is a little baby who went to the hospital for a hangover or howMorrissey hates leather belts so no one can wear leather belts.My involvement slowed down once the summer ended, and completely halted withCOVID. Stuck at home, relegated to my daily walks around the neighborhood, I started listeningheavily to a band I had discovered on Spotify that previous December—100 gecs. Listening to100 gecs felt like being over-caffeinated. It was invigorating, intoxicating, pure unadulteratedexuberance, excess, sometimes forgoing musicality altogether. It made me love it for its lack ofseriousness, for its auditory whiplash, for its unabashed fervor. It was different from the music Ihad been listening to the year before—more muted, midwestern, folky, indie rock. Music that, incomparison, was honestly a little depressing.
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I started listening to other artists like 100 gecs, too; they also sort of led into eachother—no doubt the Spotify algorithm was doing the heavy lifting—and it was refreshing. As Ilistened to more related artists, an ebullient genre term crystallized before me—hyperpop.Hyperpop, taken at the surface, is the name of a Spotify-curated playlist, created inAugust of 2019, based on the breakout success of duo 100 gecs. It conglomerates songs looselybased on a maximalist pop aesthetic.Taken more speculatively, hyperpop is a subgenre of music that has recently developed(primarily within the last year), one that fuses the futuristic electro-pop the likes of Charli XCX,Grimes, Slayyyter, SOPHIE, Kim Petras, and PC Music, and the Soundcloud rap of artists likeYung Lean, Bladee, and Ecco2k. Common binding factors include the Internet, queerness,experimental performances of gender, clashing parody and sincerity, both unlimited exuberanceand, more recently, confessional sorrow. Vice calls it “a genre tag for distinctly genre-lessmusic.” 1It’s also a contentious term, created not by the artists involved but by corporate-giantSpotify, who molded the genre based on user-listening analytics.In September, when I first really started digging into the sound of hyperpop, I was stillunsure what to call it: bubblegum bass? PC Music, after the label that ignited the sound? And Ihad other questions: How does the sound differ from just plain experimental pop? If it’s truly anexaggeration of pop music as the word implies, what parts of pop is it exaggerating? How does itdiffer from other, associated “microgenres” like glitchcore? What does it mean ?In September, a Wikipedia page appeared for “hyperpop.” However, it promptlydisappeared after a brief and turbulent stint. It was then relegated as a subcategory on theWikipedia page for the record label PC Music, and then, in November, the page was backagain—albeit shorter and with more “credible” sources—the New York Times and Vice provided1 Eli Enis. “This is Hyperpop: A Genre Tag for Genre-less Music,” VICE, 27 Oct. 2020.
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that backbone with their articles focused on the genre in late October/early November.2A lot ofdiscourse around hyperpop also occurs on Twitter, on Reddit, in online student newspapers, andin the comments sections on YouTube videos. While this discourse has since taken a moreestablished form in published album reviews and in other online publications, there’s stillsomething unfinished about what hyperpop is and what it does, and naturally, like any genre, it’sevolving.It seems almost misguided to apply serious critique to music that can be so ludic, and ontop of that, is “genreless”—to affirm that there’s some sort of social commentary taking place(like more than one media outlet has asserted) when the artists themselves declare that they’rebeing entirely earnest, or eschew the label of “hyperpop” altogether. But artists don’t have to beexplicit in either their motives or the effects of their music for critique to take place—in fact, Iwould say good art is rarely explicit. Combining these flowing conversations with establishedcritical works also seems weird—but there’s something about hyperpop that invites these typesof speculations, even if there seems to be something antithetical to it.
PC Music, Charli XCX, Spotify, 100 gecs: Who, exactly, createdhyperpop?
Right now, the biggest songs aren’t being determined by what’s being played at theparties and the clubs (as they usually are) but, mainly, by what music is popular on TikTok(Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” recently throttled to the top of the charts in a cyber-induced
2 Ben Dandridge-Lemco, “How Hyperpop, a Small Spotify Playlist, Grew Into a Big Deal,” New York Times, 10Nov. 2020; Enis, “This is Hyperpop.”
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renaissance). 3
Charli XCX’s album How I’m Feeling Now , inspired by the COVID-19
quarantine, was created in collaboration with fans over public Zoom calls. 4
Other hyperpopartists are also making use of the tools at their disposal—Zoom, Instagram live feeds,Twitter—to make a space for the genre. While other genres may currently struggle to stayrelevant, hyperpop flourishes through the relative safety and escapism created by cyberspace.Last September, I attended a virtual concert run by artist and producer A.G. Cook. Anumber of artists from his label, PC Music, “performed,” as did other acts, both big andsmall—Planet 1999, Fraxiom, Me&U2, Aaron Cartier, Dorian Electra, 100 gecs, Charli XCX.The event was called AppleVille.Appleville. Apple. A.G. Cook, whose then-upcoming second album was called Apple,chose the word for its infinite connotations: Apple, like the software company. Apple, like theBeatles’ record label. Apple, like the “apple” that Adam and Eve ate.Ville. Like, a community—a place you can be. In the concert’s description, the concert isdescribed as: “an infinite green field where you can watch some of your favorite musiciansgrapple with the limitations of time & space.” The contradiction here is clear. How cansomething “infinite” also contain time-space limitations? After the event, A.G. Cook tweeted:“Appleville is my ideal musical landscape. Thank u everyone for watching, moshing & takingpart.” Again, there’s some sort of liminality present. A finite-infinite-ideal-yet-realpseudo-location.The entire concert, as far as I could tell, peaked at around 5000 viewers, give or take acouple hundred. The amount of strobe warnings I got was a lot. Shuttery, blinking visuals were a
3 Marianne Garvey, “Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ returns to the charts, thanks to viral TikTok video,” CNN, 22 Oct.2020.4 Claire Shaffer, “Charli XCX Announces ‘DIY’ Quarantine Album ‘How I’m Feeling Now,’” Rolling Stone, 6 April2020.
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hallmark of the concert. After each set, the sound of clapping and crowd chatter would fill thescreen. As the sets progressed, the sound would get choppier, restart, stutter, bringing attention toits fabrication. It becomes abundantly clear that all the performances are not meant to simulate areal concert at all—it’s something entirely different.Among the visuals presented were Dorian Electra alone in a backyard with a soundboard,duo 100 gecs carrying around a laptop playing the movie Ratatouille , and artist Charli XCXjumping in a pool while holding the camera. Midi tones bounced around in the background asdigitally altered voices from the band Me&U2 said, “We are officially sponsored by theMcDonald’s Corporation” or “Fifteen people have died listening to this music” or “All thismusic was produced on the XBOX.” An artist by the name of Ö began their performance with abit of ballet before morphing into a strobey experimental vertigo-inducing apparition. The fewartists holding acoustic guitars felt out of place. Artist Quiet Local’s set, featuring a dreamy fisheye effect, felt more like a picnic in your brain rather than the overwhelming feeling of guzzlingRed Bull and battery acid through your ears and eyes, which is what most of the otherperformances were like. Fraxiom goes so far as to make fun of actual, real guitars in their set.Halfway through, however, I did feel that “Zoom fatigue” setting in—the feeling ofhaving stared at a screen for too long and needing to go outside. I walked around my apartmentwith my headphones in, listening to the music while stretching my legs and eating. It’s prettyclear that audience involvement is harder to accomplish in this medium, though there was avirtual moshpit. Though moshpits are typically known for the bruises they leave and theadrenaline they create, this one was different. Twice during the concert, the screen flashed thewords “YOU ARE IN A MOSHPIT” before showing an aerial view of a giant crowd at anoutdoor concert, then populating the screen with Zoom windows of people dancing, all live
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attendants of the concert. It had other perks—being able to change your Zoom background, forone, or being able to show your pets, or for a few brief seconds, having an audience of 5000looking at you wildly wave around in your bedroom. It’s a new type of rush.The performance ended with A.G. Cook’s set. He performed a cover of The SmashingPumpkins’ “Today.” A.G. Cook’s face was shrinkwrapped onto an apple sitting atop a digitizedbody running through a virtual field of flowers while apples fell from the sky. “Today is thegreatest,” A.G. sung, as the flowers glitched around him and he walked off into a black hole.His performance (and all the performances) took advantage of their digital landscape topresent an entirely new experience to the audience—one that combined a variety of disparateartists who used the “infinite green field” to their own purposes, whether it was a simple video ofthem playing a guitar or a mess of bright colors and autotuned vocals.It’s no stretch to say that A.G. Cook’s enigmatic record label PC Music laid thegroundwork for the hyperpop genre. When producer A.G. Cook—now acclaimed as “thegodfather of hyperpop”—founded the label back in 2013 in London, I was a middle-schooler in asuburb of Texas obsessively listening to Icona Pop’s hit single “I Love It,” featuring Charli XCX.Charli XCX is an artist that became closely associated with PC Music (A.G. Cook became herartistic director) and probably one of if not the most successful artists to be associated withhyperpop. Six years later, I would rediscover her when my housemates urged me to go to one ofher concerts.In 2013, however, A.G. Cook was taking “friends, often with little or no musicalexperience, and turn[ing] them into recording artists, growing their sound and brand.” 5
PC Music
was not so much a label in the traditional sense as it was a loose collective of artistscollaborating over the Internet. In fact, they hadn’t all been in the same room together until5 Wolfson, “PC Music: the Future of Pop.”
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performing their first showcase at SXSW, Austin’s mid-March mega festival. The label wentover a year without offering any of its music to the public for purchase—instead posting singleson SoundCloud, a free music sharing platform that would later shape another emergent influenceon hyperpop. The perfectly polished artists to come off the PC Music label, with overblownpersonalities and glitzy music to match, looked like they descended from some alternate,futuristic world.When the label emerged, it was really weird. But deliberately weird. Publicationsalternatively called the artists “digital phantasms” or “conceptual cyber droids.” 6
Which wasn’treally a far stretch for the label in those early years, when thematically, the label dealt mostly inconsumerism, cyberspace, and exaggeration to the point of absurdity and almost unpalatability.There was a lot of ambiguity surrounding the label: interviews were sparse, and artists straddledthe lines between real and fake and hyperreal. 7
Photoshop, glossy headshots, bright colors, and
fluid identities defined these first few artists.Beyond the pyrotechnics of PC Music’s lavish imagery, we have the music itself. A lotlike fireworks, PC Music can have big, abrasive booms, or bright and glittery tones—usually inthe same song. Just looking at PC Music’s second compilation album, the listener is presentedwith grating noises and unsettling whispers sandwiched between saccharine lovelorn dancey poptracks. 8In 2015, The Guardian had this to say about the label: “Its releases are some of the mostdeeply idiosyncratic sounds to emerge in the recent history of British music: part intellectualresponse to the prevalence of marketing in popular culture, part antagonistic refreshing of themost critically ridiculed music from the past decade, and packaging it as the future.” 96 Simon Vozick-Levinson, “PC Music Are for Real: A. G. Cook & Sophie Talk Twisted Pop.” Rolling Stone, 22 May2015; Sam Wolfson, “PC Music: the Future of Pop or ‘Contemptuous Parody’?” The Guardian, 2 May 2015.7 Wolfson, “PC Music: the Future of Pop.”8 PC Music, Vol. 2. Various Artists. PC Music, 2016.9 Sam Wolfson, “PC Music: the Future of Pop or ‘Contemptuous Parody’?” The Guardian, 2 May 2015.
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PC Music established specific themes that informed the hyperpop sphere—first of all thekey exaggeration of pop music and its themes, and that special brand of pseudo-ironicearnestness, and hyperfemininity, and cyberculture, and consumerism and gender. PC Music is sodefinitive of this nebulous genre that it almost emerged as the genre label, what would’ve been abottom-up term that makes sense for the approach and sound of these artists. But the acts thathave come to be associated with the label are more glitch than glitz, less pop and more all overthe place.Artist SOPHIE was among the first to collaborate with A.G. Cook directly on music. Shefocused on producing what she called the “loudest, brightest thing” but also made identity—andthe way it exists in cyberspace—a key theme in her music. 10
As a trans artist who came out withher debut album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides , SOPHIE was among the first to use vocalmodulation to alter the tone of her voice, and the technique has since become a defining featureof hyperpop. 11
SOPHIE’s recent death (in late January 2021) has cemented her not only as adefining influence in hyperpop, but in experimental electronic music as a whole. Her tragic anduntimely death shook up the hyperpop community and catalyzed numerous tribute pieces thatdeservedly spotlighted her contributions. Kim Petras and Slayyyter are similar proto-hyperpopartists who used their music as an expression of a hyperfeminine aesthetic and as a grounds foridentity curation. Overall, queerness was and is still a fundamental aspect of hyperpop, as aredeliberate performances of gender—nonbinary artist Fraxiom, genderfluid artist Dorian Electra,Laura Les of 100 gecs are just some notable examples of queer artists working within thehyperpop sphere. Hyperpop up-and-comer ElyOtto (whose song, “SugarCrash!” blew up onTikTok around March) called hyperpop “a very trans sounding genre.” 1210 Vozick-Levinson, “PC Music Are for Real.”11 SOPHIE. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. MSMSMSM, 2018.12 Zoya Raza-Sheikh, “ElyOtto is the trans TikTok star taking on the music industry” Gay Times, 29 April 2021.
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Another notable artist who I’ve already mentioned, Charli XCX, is one of the mostmainstream artists to be associated with hyperpop—undoubtedly, as multiple publications andfans have put it—the queen of hyperpop. Charli’s popularity, collaborative capacity, and soundprepared the way for a new genre—especially her 2017 mixtape Pop 2 .13Just the name of themixtape, Pop 2 , gives the impression that pop has gone and died, to be replaced by a new andimproved, updated and refurbished version. Reviews of the mixtape claimed that it sounds “likethe future” and yet also acknowledge the influence of decades of preceding electronic and popmusic. 14Pop 2 features a number of collaborations with other proto-hyperpop artists and isclosely linked to the label PC Music, whose producer (A.G. Cook) worked on every song in themixtape. The sheer number of collaborators and producers on the mixtape—PC Music, CarolinePolachek, Kim Petras, Dorian Electra, and SOPHIE, to name only a small few—and the glitchy,eclectic production, as well as the critical acclaim and popularity of the mixtape, represent abright spot in the emergence of a cohesive genre.If PC Music gathered the logs, if Charli XCX laid down the kindling, then 100 gecs wasthe match that ignited hyperpop. They were the impetus for Spotify to create their hyperpopplaylist, and have reached far enough into the mainstream with their polarizing sound that Iwould bet a good portion of Gen-Zers have at least heard of them. They sound nothing like thebubblegummy, squeaky tracks of Hannah Diamond or Kim Petras. Whereas these tracks bouncearound in my head like a colorful DVD logo savescreen from 2010, 100 gecs just rattles aroundin there like an empty Mountain Dew can. 100 gecs introduced a more hodge-podge approach tomusic, combining a variety of genres, while also crafting lyrics that are so vapid they’re almostembarrassing to listen to, but end up leading to genuine enjoyment.
13 Charli XCX. Pop 2. Asylum Records, 2017.14 Megan Garvey, “Charli XCX: Pop 2 Album Review” Pitchfork, 20 Dec. 2017.
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As one of the most popular music streaming platforms, Spotify plays a big hand in whatpeople listen to. In addition to user-focused, algorithm-run playlists, Spotify hosts a series ofcurated playlists that lead to other types of music discovery—like Fresh Finds, adiscovery-focused playlist that has made superstars out of relatively unknown artists. Itsgenre-bending playlists like “POLLEN” and “Lorem” challenge traditional ways of categorizingmusic—not based on instruments or tempo or song structure but with more of a marketingapproach, looking at users’ listening patterns and demographics. 15If Spotify can challenge traditional genres, surely they can mold new genres. However,when Spotify created the hyperpop playlist, they were co-opting a genre that already existed,albeit by a few different names—abrasive, exaggerated, ironic tunes alternatively calledbubblegum bass or PC Music after the influential record label. However, the meaning of“hyperpop” soon began to change—it no longer meant maximalist pop music, but rather, agenreless conglomeration of sounds that can more or less be divided into two camps:PC-influenced and a newer strain of online-emo-rap.As the genre has become more expansive, the themes have gone a different direction. In astrange reversal, hyperpop may have been a better descriptor for PC Music’s early releases, andPC Music a good term for the type of music—like 100 gecs—that is associated with the genrenow. While their music can most definitely be described as hyper, there isn’t much of a “pop”element at play. Sonically, hyperpop fits the bill of “Personal Computer” music—wild synths,midi tones, and auto-tuned vocals are only a few of the elements that are employed to producethe industrial-sounding tracks characteristic of the genre.The Spotify hyperpop playlist has since molded the genre into something new—nowhyperpop seems to have developed from two separate sources—not only PC Music, but the15 Joe Vitagliano, How Spotify, ‘Fresh Finds’ Discovers The Next Big Thing, ” American Songwriter. 31 Aug. 2020.
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emo-influenced Soundcloud rap of the mid-2010s. The latter camp is more serious in tone andinfluenced by the sound of artists like Bladee and Ecco2k—lo-fi hip-hop combined withelectronic tones. What the New York Times calls, “a far cry from the winking parody of PCMusic.” 16These artists, like glaive and osquinn, tend to be younger, representing anup-and-coming layer of hyperpop.Many artists also deliberately eschew the term “hyperpop”—whether they be CharliXCX, whose music has long been a staple of the “genre,” or glaive, whose popularityskyrocketed after he began producing music after the COVID lockdown began. (The COVIDera, it should be mentioned, has also had an impact on making hyperpop what it is. Some of thebiggest and youngest artists on the hyperpop playlist only started producing music when thepandemic kicked into gear in March—glaive, for example. Charli XCX released an albumproduced entirely in quarantine. Rico Nasty’s single IPHONE, released last August and producedby Dylan Brady of 100 gecs, has a line that says “I forgot to put my mask on” which hasmistakenly been thought to be an allusion to the pandemic when the line itself was written beforethe pandemic. 17)Lilly Szabo, the main curator behind the Spotify hyperpop playlist, calls hyperpop a“parody of pop”—which it is—but goes on to say that “as time has gone by and you have a lot ofyounger creators experimenting within this sound, it naturally, just like any genre, is evolving.” 18A.G. Cook has described “PC Music”—not as a sound, but as an ethos. 19
The New York Timesagrees: “outside of a collective allegiance to gaudy auto-tune, hyperpop’s identity is less rooted
16 Dandridge-Lemco, “How Hyperpop, a Small Spotify Playlist.”17 Rico Nasty. “IPHONE.” Nightmare Vacation, Sugar Trap, 2020.18 Enis, “This is Hyperpop.”19 Joe Vitagliano, “A.G. Cook is Changing Popular Music As We Know It.” American Songwriter, Sept. 2020.
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in musical genetics than it is a shared ethos of transcending genre altogether, while still operatingwithin the context of pop.” 20As the genre is evolving and perhaps filtering into the mainstream, some reservationshave come up. One student magazine in January 2020 worried, “Hyper pop started as amovement for queer inclusivity in the music industry—will growing critical acclaim homogenizethe sound and rid it of creativity?” 21
20 Dandridge-Lemco, “How Hyperpop, a Small Spotify Playlist.”21 Ilana Slavit, “Is Hyper Pop the Future of Music?” Daily Emerald, 6 Jan. 2020.
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How Not to Kill a Song, and How Spotify Ate the Music
Industry
On April 16, 2021, I was scrolling through Twitter. That fact by itself is not particularlyinteresting, and actually scrolling through Twitter is a pretty mundane, regular thing for me. Buton Twitter that day Charli XCX was also answering questions from fans. One person asked whather favorite book was. Although she didn’t have an answer, she did describe a book she wasreading at the moment, “disagreeing with a lot of it” but nonetheless enjoying it. That book isJohn Seabrook’s Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory . Curious, I picked it up. In it, Seabrookdescribes how and why producers and artists chase smash hits and what that has meant for howthe music industry functions.One of the points Seabrook makes concerns exactly why the songs we hear repeatedly onthe radio tend to grow on us, even if we despise them. This is the same experience my friendshad listening to my hyperpop playlists, which I force-fed them on car rides in my Jeep Cherokee.Seabrook describes it like this:The more I heard the songs, the more I liked them. How could that be? If you dislike asong the first time, surely you should loathe it the tenth. But apparently that’s not how itworks. Familiarity with the song increases one’s emotional investment in it, even if youdon’t like it…This happens gradually, in stages. The initially annoying bits…become thevery parts you look forward to most in the song. You quote lines like “No lead in our
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zeppelin!” as if they are hoary oaths. In the car, I steel myself against hearing the samesong yet again, but once it starts, I feel oddly elated. 22This is due to your brain eventually being able to predict what comes next in the song,causing a sense of anticipation that makes you feel like you’re singing along—what’s called“virtual participation.” 23
The same science applies to why people don’t enjoy genres they aren’t
familiar with, and why you might hit repeat on your favorite songs on Spotify.There are some songs, however, that you’ll despise no matter how many times you hearthem—especially songs with simpler melodies that tend to rise to pop prominence faster thanmore complex songs. Studies have shown that the more complex a song is, the more you maylike it over time—which may explain why, after months of hearing me play 100 gecs andSlayyyter and food house in the car, my friends like about as much if not more than I do. 24TheIndependent points out “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a complex song with a long lifespan, andEurovision contest winners as basic pop songs catchy only for a short duration. 25
The latter is just
not sufficiently stimulating.The same principle might explain why some pop hits of the past—like Fleetwood Mac’s“Dreams”—are still well-known today. Some pop hits of the past, however, have remained there.Hyperpop, which tends to be jam-packed with layers of pitched-up vocals, random soundeffects, disjunctured melodies, and bass so powerful you can feel the skeleton in your body,might have the sort of longevity described above, but like with any song you glut yourself on,you can kill its charm if you listen to it too much. Striking the right balance is hard.
22John Seabrook. The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.23 Katie Sharp. “The Science Behind Why We Listen to Our Favorite Songs on Repeat.” Mic, 25 Sept. 2014.24Sharp, “The Science Behind Why We Listen.”25Sharp, “The Science Behind Why We Listen.”
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Maintaining the listener’s interest is not only something hitmakers strive for—it’ssomething Spotify, and really any streaming service, has to do in order to make money. Spotifyjust happens to be quite good at it.Spotify tracks its listeners’ habits in order to serve them up exactly what they desire,based on data like time of day and location—Seabrook quotes Brian Whitman, co-founder ofEcho Nest, a music intelligence platform owned by Spotify, who says, “We’ve cracked the nut asfar as knowing as much about the music as we possibly can automatically, and we see the nextfrontier as knowing as much as we possibly can about the listener.” 26Spotify’s ability to create genres (like hyperpop) highlights not only its particular impacton the music industry, but the impact of streaming as a whole—it is now the most profitable armof recorded music, accounting for more than 83 percent of total industry revenue this past year.27Streaming is relatively new, however, only picking up steam in 2015 or so. But its rise makessense. The reason Spotify initially succeeded was because it capitalized on the free-music-for-allmodel spawned by the file-sharing service Napster, the service that killed the music industry inthe first place. “Napster…began the cataclysm that caused worldwide revenues to decline from apeak of $27 billion in 1999 to $15 billion in 2014.” 28At the turn of the century, the music industry was the most profitable it had everbeen—mostly due to the purchase of CDs, which made up over 95% of profits (the other 5%consisted of cassettes and a slim interest in vinyls). 29
CDs were cheaper to manufacture and
priced higher than vinyls, and on top of that, much more popular:
26 Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.27 Igor Bonifacic. “Streaming music made up 83 percent of the record industry’s revenue in 2020.” Engadget, 26 Feb2021.28 Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.29 Nick Routley. “Visualizing 40 Years of Music Industry Sales.” Visual Capitalist, 6 Oct. 2018.
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The high-tech allure of the CD would allow the industry to raise the cost of an albumfrom $8.98 to $15.98…in spite of costing almost twice as much, CDs turned out to beextremely popular with record buyers. Fans who already owned music on vinyl dutifullyreplaced their records with CDs. 30However, as the 00s progressed, CD purchases plummeted due to the launch of Napster,an online music sharing service that allowed users to download music for free. Though Napsteronly survived for a brief three years—from 1998 to 2001—the seed of piracy had been sown,and other file-sharing sites began to fill the void—what one founder of Napster called a“Whac-A-Mole problem” that the record labels who sued Napster for copyright infringementdidn’t anticipate. 31
Despite a brief ringtone era just before the advent of smartphones which“injected $1B into the music industry,” the music industry was perpetually sliding down. MP3purchases from iTunes could not compete with the advantages of piracy, especially in theabsence of a tangible product.Because there was no returning to the individual purchase of albums, Spotify capitalizedon the Napster model—all music available at once—and made it profitable through the use ofads and a subscription service. Now, the music industry has grown to “$12.2 billion in 2020” inthe United States. This growth has been almost single handedly due to “streaming services, withthe format generating $10.1 billion in revenue in 2020, up from $8.9 billion in 2019. 2020marked the fifth consecutive year of growth on that front.” 32However, Spotify has faced backlash for distributing profits non-equitably, with most ofthe revenue to the producers and artists of the most popular tracks. Spotify’s model, despite whoyou may personally listen to, will send “90 percent of your subscription fee…to the megastars in30Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.31Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.32Bonifacic. “Streaming music made up 83 percent of the record industry’s revenue in 2020.”
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the head.” Like it has been with the music industry for years, the smash hits make the majority ofprofits—“Ninety percent of the revenues in the record business come from ten percent of thesongs.” 33The streaming model is no different, paying “out generously to the world’s biggest actsbut [making] it difficult for smaller and independent artists to make a living off their music.” 34Though this has always been the case, the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented smaller artistsfrom touring, which is typically where they make a significant portion of their profits. WhileSoundcloud is making moves to transition to a direct payment model, currently, streamingdirectly benefits only the biggest artists. 35This is why, Seabook points out, artists aim to try to write the biggest hits—a hunt for aformula that can turn a song into an earworm, that can entrance a listener, that could blow up onTikTok.The song “SugarCrash” by ElyOtto has recently reached almost 110 million streams onthe platform. Like many fresh faces in hyperpop, ElyOtto is a teen who slingshotted to fame byproducing music in his bedroom while under lockdown. TikTok, notorious for creating thesesorts of one-hit wonders, flung his single to the charts in the same way the platform hasreinvigorated “Dreams” and resuscitated Charli XCX’s “Unlock It,” prompting her to create amusic video for the song. 36The number of relatively unknown artists who have been made famous overnight viaTikTok seems endless. While today artists may try to “hack” the TikTok algorithm, cracking thecode of a pop hit has been a venture as old as pop music itself. Some producers, like Max
33 Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.34 Bonifacic. “Streaming music made up 83 percent of the record industry’s revenue in 2020.”35 Noah Yoo. “SoundCloud Exploring Fan-to-Artist Direct Payment System: Report.” Pitchfork, 5 Feb. 2021.36 Eric Volmers. “High school student ElyOtto an overnight hyperpop sensation with major record deal.” CalgaryHerald, 21 Apr 2021.
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Martin, have been doing it for decades. It is this obsession with the pop hit that Seabrookexplores in his book, and that entrances artists like A.G. Cook, creator of the PC Music label.In a recently published memoir for late artist SOPHIE, producer A.G. Cook states hisobsession quite clearly: “In our minds, pop music was going through a golden era in the early2010s, but all that Max Martin/Stargate craftsmanship was looked down on by anyone cool, andthe London scene was fixed on an indie-rock & dubstep revival.”Stargate and Max Martin are the names of just two of the most prolific songwritingmasterminds of the 2000s. Seabrook calls these people “hitmakers”—the behind-the-scenesmasterminds of many of the biggest pop hits of the 2000s.It is this obsession that led to A.G. Cook’s collaboration with SOPHIE, a workingrelationship that laid the groundwork for hyperpop. A.G. Cook mentions SOPHIE’s vision of thefuture of music, conveyed to him around a year before she passed:She was completely disenchanted with the conservative notion of ‘the album’, and waseven more disillusioned with the limited potential of streaming. With a mix of self-awarehubris and total dedication, she sketched out this idea of an extremely generous platformthat would give listeners all kind of access to stems, fragments, and revisions of hermusic. She believed that technology was wasting everyone’s time by attempting toemulate vinyl and radio, and that this infinitely generous approach was a logicalendpoint for what music was always trying to be. She asked for my opinion. “Do youthink it’s possible?”The future of music consumption is largely unpredictable. As artists strive not only formore equitable pay but for a more generous conception of how we find and interact with music,we might find ourselves stepping into unexplored territory. What remains, however, is a
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vision—a future in which the music industry doesn’t have to rely on the simplest, catchiestmelodies which can ascend the charts the fastest, but one where there’s room for more complexmusic to breathe—room for artists to experiment, to strive for more idiosyncratic sounds, and tohave the backing to do so.
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Despite what it may look like, Hyperpop is not ironic:
How the microgenre furthers the joyful sincerity of a
post-postmodernist agenda
I should admit that I did not anticipate hyperpop to affect my life so much. It seemed likea benign enough topic for a year-long English project–a burgeoning, unclearly defined musicsubgenre with a small following and really almost no coverage explicitly identifying it as acohesive thing. Now, it’s been covered by the Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , TheAtlantic , and numerous music magazines and student publications. It has a Wikipedia page. It’sall over my Twitter feed. I hear 100 gecs blasting out of the bathroom as my roommate showers,after she spent the whole fall semester critiquing my “awful taste in music.” My friend from backhome called to tell me he’s “fallen in love with the genre.” He said his dad likes it too. I feel thesullen necessity to blast IPHONE by Rico Nasty from any available car speaker, usually at thegodforsaken request of some nascent hyperpop fan I converted sitting in the passenger seat.I feel like I’ve unintentionally become some sort of hyperpop evangelist, convertingnaysayers into admirers through my sincere enthusiasm for the genre, despite their initialcomplaints and groans. But I feel like I’ve had my fill. Not that I don’t enjoy it—I absolutely do.But in my regular listening, I’ve been catching up on popular music from the past decade andlistening to genres I hadn’t yet spent much time with. But my friends, newly-minted fans, keeplistening.There’s a reason ironic appreciation turns into genuine enthusiasm—partly because themore times you hear an unfamiliar song, the more familiar you become with it, and the more, in
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return, you enjoy it. That’s what the biggest hits on the radio hope for—that the more you listento a song, the more it’ll grow on you. Hyperpop, however, is not only wildly unpredictable incomposition, but can be straight up embarrassing to listen to. It’s why it makes it hard to believeLaura Les and Dylan Brady (duo 100 gecs) when they state, as earnestly as skepticism allows,“We’re not being ironic.” 37There’s something invigorating about genuinely liking something when everybody elsehates it, or claims not to understand. If we agree with the claims of New Sincerity, then beingvulnerably earnest is the new leading-edge of culture–the new “cool.” And when thisearnestness (and enthusiasm tends to be contagious) spreads to others, there’s even more joy inwatching them, to their own horror, start to enjoy the music they despise. Once you cross thethresholds from disgust to ironic enjoyment and finally to genuine thrill, you know what Lauraand Dylan mean when they claim not to be employing a sense of irony in their music.This sort of sentiment—of genuine enjoyment under the scrutiny of irony—is a feature ofwhat might be called a post-postmodernist moment. Post-postmodernism is a reaction to thecynicism of postmodernism, what has defined our culture for most of the past fifty to sixty years.Christy Wampole in her 2012 piece for the New York Times , “How to Live WithoutIrony,” forecasts the fed-upness with irony:As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness,resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endlessseries of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least(or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective
37 Hannah Mylrea, “100 Gecs: “People think we’ve staked our entire career on the fact that we can be ironic.” NME,10 July 2020.
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misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or asymptom? 38She mentions David Foster Wallace’s particular response: “The loosely defined NewSincerity movements in the arts that have sprouted since the 1980s positioned themselves asresponses to postmodern cynicism, detachment and meta-referentiality.” 39
However, she treatsNew Sincerity as a failure. Jonathan Fitzgerald in The Atlantic clapped back, posturing NewSincerity as the forefront of this response to irony. Though once, detachment was the norm(Fitzgerald says, “to be vulnerable or authentic, to be sincere, was death in those days [the‘80s]”), it’s now cool to be authentic. 40
Wampole herself revised her opinion with a new piece,How To Live Without Irony (For Real This Time), postulating that joyful sincerity is now thenorm. She does so on the heels of the 2016 election.In the words of music artist Father John Misty, “satire has died.” 41
For him, this moment
came particularly during the night of the results of the 2016 election. He says:In that moment, it was like all of the Gen-X humour that I was weaned on had this verycruel orgasm in my mind. In that moment, satire died. We’re now in a post-satire worldbecause this is the stupidest thing that could ever happen. It’s like bad comedy. I just can’ttotally verbalise how tragic I think it is. I feel like the boy who cried wolf. All thisscepticism and cynicism that I have felt my whole life became so literal. 42So we are in a cultural moment in which cynicism and irony have become unbearable.Instead, we desire authenticity, vulnerability, and true, unabashed enjoyment.
38 Christy Wampole, “How to Live Without Irony.” The New York Times, 17 Nov. 2012.39 Wampole, “How to Live Without Irony.”40 Jonathan Fitzgerald, “Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age’s Ethos.” The Atlantic, 20 Nov. 2012.41 Dorian Lynskey, “Father John Misty: ‘I Get Sick Pleasure out of Reading about How Much People Hate Me’.” TheGuardian, 30 Mar. 201742 Lynskey, “Father John Misty: ‘I Get Sick Pleasure.”
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Postmodernism, the thing to which New Sincerity is responding, is not really a thing initself—it’s a reaction against modernism, like the name implies. Postmodernism emerged in the‘60s as a response to the predominant mode of art/architecture/poetry/philosophy/music/film atthe time, which involved a desire for grand narratives, for neat and stable meanings. Whilemodernism was once “scandalous,” “shocking,” “subversive,” it became the dominant form ofthought—what Fredric Jameson calls “the establishment and the enemy”—what has to be torndown in order to make something new. So postmodernism developed to tear it down—mostly byrejecting it and treating it with cynicism.While nowadays irony and cynicism are typically treated as the hallmarks ofpostmodernism, Jameson points out a few other key characteristics, like the erasure of thedistinction between “high culture and so-called mass or popular culture” which modernismworked hard to preserve. (Lady Gaga had a similar thing to say about pop music: “Pop musicwill never be low brow.”) Postmodernism is also intrigued by advertisement and by capitalism,which leads to Jameson’s biggest point—postmodernism coincides with the economic order oflate capitalism. However, Jameson is unsure postmodernism is subversive at all. He says:There is some agreement that the older modernism functioned against its society in wayswhich are variously described as critical, negative, contestatory, subversive,oppositional, and the like. Can anything of the sort be affirmed about postmodernism andits social moment? We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicatesor reproduces—reinforces—the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significantquestion is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. But that is a questionwe must leave open.
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I don’t have an answer for Jameson, and in some ways it seems postmodernism hasfailed, or at least, come to an end.While modernism was once “an offence to good taste and common sense,” it became theinsufferable mode to work against. The biggest indicator of when a period ends, Jameson says, iswhen that period (here modernism) is “taught in schools and universities—which at once emptiesthem of any of their older subversive power.” Postmodernism follows that cycle. First it wassubversive; Jameson even begins his essay with the sentence: “The concept of postmodernism isnot widely accepted or even understood today.” However, that was the late 1980s. Now we aretaught about postmodernism in schools. We are all comfortable with the postmodern mode ofthinking—irony, self-referentiality. Think of any adult cartoon show— Family Guy , thinkDeadpool . It’s everywhere we look—and it’s boring now, and stifling, and cynical. David FosterWallace probably explains it best: “the problem is that now, a lot of the shticks ofpostmodernism—irony, cynicism, irreverence—are now part of whatever it is that’s enervating inthe culture itself.”While Fitzgerald and Wampole praise directors like Wes Anderson and artists like FrankOcean for their vulnerability and sincerity (Father John Misty, too, who inhabits the same realmof authenticity-under-satire), artists associated with hyperpop make it considerably more difficultfor themselves to be taken seriously. It’s more difficult to convince someone you’re beingabsolutely genuine when from the outside you look very, very satirical.Take 100 gecs’ music video with giant trucks and sparkles and fake explosions. DorianElectra’s drawn-on pencil mustache and shoes with swords in them. PC Music’s entire roster ofparodic-but-not-actually-parodic artists. Fraxiom’s neverending allusions to unfashionablyanachronistic Internet culture (the celebratory treatment of “cringe” culture in hyperpop can be a
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whole entire topic on its own). They take the veneer of irony that we’ve all come to expect fromexaggerated appearances, but instead of being satiric, they’re serious, and celebratory.Post-postmodernism can be touched by the absurd. Sometimes, it’s camp without the irony.In everything I looked at, people agree that this New Sincerity, earnestness, orseriousness is not solemn—it’s the joyful kind. Alan Kirby calls this post-postmodernismdigimodernism, emphasizing the role of Web 2.0 in bringing about this return to sincerity.43Kirby also adds another descriptor—infantilism. There’s a childish gall to admitting you like tolisten to 100 gecs—and that you take it very, very seriously.To end, here’s a really long quote from David Foster Wallace, but I think it’s important,not only to hyperpop, but to general trends in Gen Z culture that even allows for such a style ofmusic to gain prominence. Basically the hyperpop/Gen Z creed:The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch ofanti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who havethe childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles… Realrebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked thegasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism,anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing torisk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of giftedironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Ofovercredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starerswho fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. 44
43 Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies DIsmantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture.New York, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2009.44 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13(2),Summer 1993, pp. 151-194.
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“A very trans sounding genre”: Hyperpop and Queer
Identities
On a paper for a different class, I wrote about a genre that blew up and fizzled out in the‘60s—baroque pop. While I researched the annals of this long-forgotten genre, I stumbled uponan instrument that launched the whole concept of electronic music as we know it—the Moogsynthesizer. The Moog was one of the first electronic synthesizers, and though it was originallyreserved for avant-garde music, there was one album that ushered it into the mainstream—butit’s not the type of music you’d expect.In 1968, Columbia Records released an album that was really not expected to receivemuch attention. That album was Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach , an array of Bach’scompositions all played on the then-novel technology of the Moog synthesizer. To everyone’ssurprise, the album reached number 10 on the US Billboard 200 and won three Grammys. It wasthe first classical album to go Platinum. Electronic music at the time was reserved forexperimental artists—not something the public knew about or was interested in. But here was aclassical album composed electronically that reached mainstream popularity.Part of the album’s popularity may have come from the countercultural desire for weirdmusic and a strange irreverence for “high art” that came with the postmodern sensibility of thetime. Whatever the reason, Wendy Carlos singlehanddedly ushered the Moog synthesizer, andtherefore synth and electronic music as a whole, into a popular consciousness, where it remainsto this day.At the time of the album’s release, however, Wendy Carlos was transitioning. Havingrecently started hormone therapy,
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the album thrust Wendy unexpectedly into the limelight, just as she was trying to keep alow profile in order to undergo her transformation. Although Wendy had thought ofherself as a woman from well before [Switched-On Bach], her public persona was stillWalter.45Wendy Carlos was one of the first public personas to transition—her collaborator andclose friend, Rachel Elkind said, “You have to remember this was 1968, there was onetranssexual in the whole world that anybody had heard of. That was Christine Jorgensen.” 46As a result, Carlos couldn’t make live appearance and felt like she “lost a decade as anartist.” She says:I was unable to communicate with other musicians. There was no feedback. I would haveloved to have gone onstage playing electronic-music concerts, as well as writing for moreconventional media, such as the orchestra. 47Columbia Records became uninterested in Carlos since she couldn’t make liveappearances, expressing a need for a “real” artist “they could have in pictures and stuff, andrunning around concertizing.” 48Wendy make a single concert appearance with the St. Louis Orchestra—however, itproved to be nightmarish for Carlos.Just before the show, Wendy “began to cry hysterically” and informed Rachel that shedid not want to proceed with the performance. She had arrived at the theater dressed inwomen’s clothing, but now the necessity of getting up in front of all those people asWalter, was, understandably, overwhelming. In what must have been a desperate the45Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco. Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge,Harvard University Press, 2002.46 Pinch, Analog Days.47 Pinch, Analog Days.48Pinch, Analog Days.
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show-must-go-on spirit, Carlos “touched up his face, which the estrogen had softened.He pasted on sideburns, stuffed his long hair under a man’s wig, ran an eye- brow pencilover his smooth chin to simulate 5 o’clock shadow,” and went on with the concert. Afterthis experience “Walter Carlos refused to perform in public again. 49The music industry—and culture as a whole—has since made strides in transgenderacceptance. Take Kim Petras, a prominent hyperpop artist who emulates pop stars like KatyPerry and Britney Spears with her hyperfeminine, bubblegummy music. She began receivinghormone therapy at the age of 12, paid for by German healthcare, and had full genderreassignment surgery by the age of 16. For the New York Times,“I don’t care about being the first transgender teen idol at all,” she said, before taking afinal spin on a seat swirled with candy cane colors. “I just want to be known as a greatmusician.” 50Nowadays within the music industry, queerness has become more accepted, thanks topioneers like Wendy Carlos and Kim Petras, and additionally more mainstream artists like FrankOcean and, more recently, Lil Nas X. However, hyperpop has emerged as a bright spot—acohesive grounds for queer artists to express themselves and interact with queer fans.As one scholar I stumbled across in my baroque pop research states, “genres should notbe viewed as lists of musical characteristics but rather as an expression of identity enactedthrough the interaction between performers and listeners.” 51
This expression of identity is largelyat the heart of what makes hyperpop, hyperpop—not the scraping sound effects or the sugarymelodies.
49Pinch, Analog Days.50Jim Farber. “Kim Petras Just Wants to Be a Pop Star.” The New York Times, 17 Mar 2018.51Sara Gulgas. “Looking Forward to the Past: Baroque Rock’s Postmodern Nostalgia and the Politics of Memory,”2017.
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In order to help me orient myself in terms of music scenes and how they affect culture asa whole, I looked at Dick Hebidge’s 1979 book The Meaning of Style .In the anthology where I accessed this piece, the editor explains, “In many ways, Hebidgeis tackling the same questions that take center stage in Judith Butler’s feminist work. What roomis available for selves to maneuver within the signifying systems that constitute them and theconditions within which they live and act?” This is also one of the big questions I’m tacklingwith hyperpop—part of the reason Butler’s work is so important here, too. Hebidge looksparticularly at British youth subcultures of the ‘70s, notably punk—characterized by both musicand dress, and a particularly anarchist agenda. Hebidge opens Chapter 6 by saying “subculturesrepresent ‘noise’”—a deliberate attempt to eschew meaning.However, the “signifying systems” within which subcultures work almost make itimpossible to produce “noise”—to step outside these “signifying practices.” Hebidge states that“resignification” of mainstream commodities may be one way to accomplish this—taking thematerials of prevailing systems and imbuing them with new meaning. However, mainstreamculture also seems to succeed in incorporating and defusing subcultures in the end. While thiscan be somewhat progressive, since such a process incorporates the radical meanings of thesubculture into the mainstream, it also dilutes it in the process. Hebidge seems somewhatpessimistic here—which makes me wonder whether radical subcultures can achieve some sort ofeffect on the mainstream on their own accord, instead of simply being subsumed, reinterpreted,for the mainstream.As an emergent genre, hyperpop hasn’t yet been subsumed into the greater culture. So, itcan still be reactionary and radical, opposed to whatever is mainstream culture. Therefore, itmakes sense that hyperpop could be on the cutting edge of whatever is replacing postmodernism,
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what has long been the prevalent Western mode of thinking about arts and culture, and which isnow, many believe, coming to an end. Furthermore, as a haven for queer artists, hyperpopopposes a greater music industry that is not always receptive to fringe identities, or one thattokenizes them.In November, one of my favorite hyperpop artists, Dorian Electra, dressed in their mostridiculous costume yet. Dorian, who’s known for putting on a variety of hypermasculinepersonas like the sugar daddy, the business mogul, the incel, among others—dressed as astereotypical young woman, Starbucks cup in hand, engagement ring in view, cheery scarfaround the neck (on Twitter, this look would be referred to as “Christian girl autumn”). I’m notexaggerating when I say this is the strangest Dorian has ever looked. I have never seen someoneso expertly make white femininity look like a costume.This isn’t the first time Dorian has parodied a feminine persona—on their 2016 song“Mind Body Problem,” they said it was “about femininity as a performance—when being a‘woman’ feels like putting on a costume and the costume doesn’t seem to come off with theclothes.”Dorian’s act, and actually many hyperpop acts, also call to mind Judith Butler’s seminaltext Gender Trouble . A formative text in queer theory, Butler’s arguments within the text gatheraround the take that gender is performance—a repetition of “received meanings” that “constructthe illusion of a primary and interior gendered self.” That is, gender is “performed,” throughimitation, and through this performance, it pretends to be an essential and natural part of identity.Parody, and particularly drag, is used to disrupt and destabilize the received categories of gender,revealing the ruse.
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While Dorian puts on the persona of a brawny male who smashes glass on their head innearly every music video, for Dorian, they are “not a woman dressing as a man. It’s morecomplex.” 52
Dorian immediately destabilizes the binary that Butler lays out as insidiously buriedthrough imitation and performance. With vocals that pitch between a stereotypically femalerange and a masculine one, sometimes within the same verse of a song, Dorian’s discography is aprime example of the “parody” that can work to reveal the construction of gender.Dorian Electra puts these themes pretty succinctly in an interview for The Guardian : Thecore of my being is not gendered at all – even ‘gender fluid’ is a form of identity that can putsomebody in a box.” 53
Dorian Electra was assigned female at birth and now identifies asgenderfluid, though they perform the hypermasculine male in their variable songs and musicvideos. 54Here, Dorian echoes Butler’s sentiments: gender is performance, not identity. Thoughgender masquerades as an essential aspect of identity, parody destabilizes this notion of thenatural. Earlier Butler points out that identity must be disrupted from the inside—The more insidious and effective strategy it seems is a thoroughgoing appropriation andredeployment of the categories of identity themselves…in order to render that category, inwhatever form, permanently problematic. 55The “gender trouble” created by queer artists like Dorian Electra is a reflection ofButler’s biggest sentiments, but the idea of disruption from the inside doesn’t stop at gender.Take Dorian Electra’s parodic take on hustle culture in “Career Boy,” in which they gloat about“[loving] the pain” of working extra shifts, staying up all night, “hanging out in the breakroom,”52 Ben Beaumont-Thomas, “Pop sensation Dorian Electra: ‘I’m not a woman dressing as a man. It’s more complex,’”The Guardian, 12 Jul. 2019.53 Beaumont-Thomas, “Pop sensation Dorian Electra.”54 Beaumont-Thomas, “Pop sensation Dorian Electra.”55 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
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and in an act of performative machismo, once again smash glass—in this case a coffee pot—ontheir head. 56With the Internet, gender performance occurs within a different realm of identity—theInternet persona. In this case, performance becomes even more fluid. The line from SOPHIE’ssong “Faceshopping”—”I’m real when I [photo]shop my face”—suggests the reality ofperformance and affirmation that comes with Internet tools such as vocal modulation and photoediting. 57
56 Dorian Electra. Flamboyant. Dorian Electra, 2019.57 SOPHIE. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. MSMSMSM, 2018.
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“Even though we’re hyper-connected we’re also
extremely isolated”: How hyperpop resides in cyberspace
and critiques Internet culture
You can be anywhere when you listen to music—a feature of contemporary technologythat sets music aside from early generations of record players and, before that, live orchestras.But you don’t even really need headphones to experience music out and about—departmentstores, other peoples’ cars rumbling by, parties, concerts—all are avenues for impromptumusic-exposure.Music also resides in memory. These situational experiences—of hearing one type ofmusic in a Kohl’s department store and another blasting from the Chevy Impala in the next laneover—often fall along specific genre lines, and therefore determine the mental times and placescertain songs take us to. But these aren’t physical locations. They are types of places; vaults ofmemory that generalize and alter over time. They are places tied with time. Unlike a paintingthat exists all at once, music needs time to fulfill itself.An album on its own can also take you somewhere. Probably the most clear-cut,easy-listening concept album is Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon, which takes you through Cudi’slife with narrative moments and storybook-like phrasing. Additionally, ambient sounds insongs—birds, owls, industrial noises, rain is probably my favorite—can put you in a certainplaces. Just thinking of songs and bands named after places—”Mildenhall” by The Shins, forexample, or band Chicago, or Calexico.
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More expansively looking at genre and scenes, different music scenes can flourish indifferent places. Physical “scenes” are the hallmarks of some of the most culturally relevantgenres of the past (punk, for example). Britrock is British, there’s no Nashville without country,no Japanese ska without Jamaica and Japan. Some genres are inextricable from theirlocations—but more particularly, their locales. Midwest emo is obviously from themidwest—but not just because Ohio and Illinois are physically located where they are, butbecause of the suburban sprawl and the depressing cold weather and the lack of things to do.Midwest emo can exist even if it’s produced in Texas.Hyperpop, beyond its roots with the British label PC Music in London, doesn’t reallyhave a place, or a scene. At least in real life. The scene exists on the Internet—in cyberspace.Cyberspace doesn’t exist in actual space—thus the prefix—but it does, indeed, exist.Cyberspace is a place that is accessible at nearly all times and from any place with aWi-Fi signal. However, cyberspace has no physical location—meaning it relies heavily on acurated, conceptualized locale to make up for its lack of real-world existence. However, physicalplaces have a stability that cyberspaces do not. Whether “being online” is a stable existence, andvirtual concerts will continue to maintain the same appeal once we can once again attendconcerts in person, is yet to be seen. As of this moment, however, hyperpop is only growing inpopularity.Hyperpop also has a vested interest in satirizing all the weird parts of Internet culture.Rather than always focusing on a cyber-futurist aesthetic, artists take loads of pop culturereferences—from the unhealthy masculinity of the Internet “incel” (satirized in Dorian Electra’ssingles “Gentleman” and “M’Lady”) to praise/contempt for nightcore and Elon Muskrespectively (in Fraxiom and gupi’s “Thos Moser”)—and blend them together in eclectic tracks,
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resulting in what can be described as the epitome of bad-good taste. Honestly, “Thos Moser” isthe most ludic track I’ve encountered in a long time. It includes endless pop-culture referenceafter reference in such an irreverent way that I can’t even begin to fathom that it has any intent atall besides trying to induce pure mania. It’s the farthest thing from serious that I could imagineany one thing being. It’s, as one newspaper put it, as if the Internet had a fever dream and it wascondensed into this one track.In October, Dorian reignited that approach with the release of their sophomore album MyAgenda , a dive into some of the most insular and averted corners of Internet subculture: thealt-right and incelism. 58
In this album, Dorian platforms far-right propaganda on a queer stage,aesthetically co-opting “Neck Beard” fashion to satirize and “reclaim [the] edginess” of far-rightInternet communities. 59Take Dorian’s treatment in “Edgelord” (featuring Rebecca Black—yes, “Friday” RebeccaBlack), where, dressed in a Joker get-up (a character which has become a cultural touchstone forthe alt-right), Dorian parodies the ambiguous irony—whose function is to provoke andaggravate, while remaining inculpable—used by pro-Trump “shitposters.” Or the title track “MyAgenda,” on which Dorian remixes far-right conspiracies to create an alternate universe in whicha militant gay agenda is “out here turning the frogs / homosexual” (a nod to alt-right radio hostAlex Jones’s comment from 2015 about chemicals in the water “turning the friggin’ frogs gay”).“My Agenda” also features vocals from Russian feminist pop-activists Pussy Riot, andadditionally, from all-American band Village People (known for having their gay anthem
58 Dorian Electra. My Agenda. Dorian Electra, 2020.59 Nadya Tolokonnikova, et al. “Dorian Electra Has the Gay Agenda on Full Blast for Their New Album.” GAYTIMES, 19 Oct. 2020.
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“YMCA” played in “nearly every straight American wedding” as well as during Trump rallies, inwhat one critic calls an obvious form of camp). 60According to FLOOD Magazine, Electra was pushed to create this album whileresearching far-right online spaces. This prompted them to “think about the vulnerability of suchindividuals and how simply dismissing them can be unproductive and in turn aid in reinforcingthe political divide.” 61
Dorian asks, “What is driving people to do that? How is it that they have
so much self-hate or hate toward others?” 62
In discussing the rise of the alt-right within the pastfive to ten years, multiple aspects are important to note: Donald Trump’s 2016 election, for one,which emboldened alt-right sentiments. A second is the provocations that appeal with their“edge” to the straight white men who are often drawn to the radical right. A third is social mediaalgorithms.One article from the New York Times presents a profile on aformer-white-supremacist-turned-leftist who found their way to the alt-right by innocuouslysurfing YouTube, and then being sucked into a rabbithole of right-wing conspiracy theories andpropaganda. 63
Far from a rare phenomenon, it’s part of the monetary push of YouTubeencouraging users to stay on the website, typical of social media and spotlighted on Netflix’sdocumentary The Social Dilemma .64However, it’s also broadly tied to how the Internet functions
for community-building as a whole. Dorian reiterates it like this: “Even though we’rehyper-connected we’re also extremely isolated, and that can also breed really toxic internetcommunities and internet cultures like incels and the misogyny and self-loathing that things likethat can fuel.” 6560 Spencer Kornhaber, “Donald Trump’s Reelection Campaign Is Total Camp.” The Atlantic, 30 Oct. 2020.61 Jack Irvin, “On Their New Album, Dorian Electra’s Agenda Is to Make You Think.” FLOOD, 15 Oct. 2020.62 Irvin, “On Their New Album.”63 Kevin Roose, “The Making of a YouTube Radical.” The New York Times, 8 June 2019.64 The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, Exposure Labs, 26 Jan. 2020. Netflix.65 Irvin, “On Their New Album.”
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Dorian also asks the question of how the left “can be better at communicating theseconcepts to people without pushing them further to the right and making matters worse.” 66In TheNew York Times ’ profile, Mr. Cain, the young man drawn to the alt-right by YouTube, explainsbeing brought back by leftists who borrowed the tropes of the alt-right—like referring to theirparticular language used by alt-right creators—and who “hijacked” the YouTube algorithm bytalking about the same content as alt-right YouTubers. 67
Dorian describes a similar type ofinfiltration: say, on Spotify, a Trump supporter includes The Village People’s “Macho Man” on aplaylist because “it’s Trump rally music! …And then the next recommended song after MachoMan is ‘My Agenda’ because Village People are on it. You know, it’s this idea of infiltratingmainstream culture in a way that can breed openness and acceptance and more inclusiveness anddiversity. Like how Village People have.” 68Village People infiltrated the mainstream through their campy aesthetic in the late ‘70s.Now, camp has become a hallmark of the right: “It’s glaring that as the right wing gorges oncamp and campiness, much of the queer-friendly popular culture of the late 2010s has taken amore sober approach.” 69A recent New York Times piece states that Donald Trump’s election killed politicalcomedy on the left. 70
According to the article, “in the Trump era, liberals have drifted away fromirony even as the right has embraced it—not just as a rhetorical tool but also as a means toadvance joke versions of its actual agenda, in ways that make it hard to distinguish between thetwo.” 71This is the irony characteristic of the “shitposts” used by online alt-right users, the“edgelords” Dorian satirizes, who revise the seriousness of their statements when called out for66 Irvin, “On Their New Album.”67 Roose, “The Making of a YouTube Radical.”68 Tolokonnikova,“Dorian Electra Has the Gay Agenda.”69 Spencer Kornhaber, “Donald Trump’s Reelection Campaign Is Total Camp.” The Atlantic, 30 Oct. 2020.70 Dan Brooks, “How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy.” The New York Times, 7 Oct. 2020.71 Brooks, “How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy.”
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it. For the left, there is no room for the “ambiguous irony” used by the alt-right, spearheaded byTrump himself—the doublespeak that functions both as a joke and as seriousness, depending onaudience reaction. 72
Rather, the left must respond with “straightforward indignation” to analready absurd news cycle—“In order to avoid having their jokes mistaken for dog whistles, the‘Daily Show’ staff has learned to let the crowd know when it is kidding. Right-wing comedianshave made an entire style out of doing the opposite.” 73Father John Misty puts it best when describing the 2016 election:We’re now in a post-satire world because this is the stupidest thing that could everhappen. It’s like bad comedy. I just can’t totally verbalise how tragic I think it is. I feellike the boy who cried wolf. All this scepticism and cynicism that I have felt my whole lifebecame so literal. 74This sort of cynicism collapsed in the 21st century to let in the New Sincerity of artistslike Father John Misty. New Sincerity distinguishes itself from the cynical irony ofpostmodernism by opting for a sincere, vulnerable approach. However, this sort of soberapproach isn’t effective in stirring the sort of sentiments that emboldens politics, for example. Atleast, it hasn’t been effective for political comedy, and neither has it been effective for steeringthose most vulnerable to ideas of white supremacy away from it.Again, Dorian says:[People on the far-right] feel like they have the monopoly on edginess and saying it like itis and being real, whereas the left is like, fascist about language and pronouns and allthis stuff. That’s kind of the narrative that they’ve constructed. I feel like the lefttraditionally had edginess on its side. It was always the left who was the cool72 Brooks, “How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy.”73 Brooks, “How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy.”74 Lynskey, “Father John Misty: ‘I Get Sick Pleasure.”
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underground. They were saying things that were inappropriate or not allowed to be saidor being censored. And now people on the right – like radical far right YouTubers whoare being banned from Reddit and stuff – are saying it’s contributing to this feeling ofthem being oppressed, which is also very dangerous. You know, that like helps strengthensomebody’s political identity.75
It’s this “edginess” that Dorian most broadly reasserts for the left and for queerness.I feel like, if we reclaim edginess and reclaim those things that are cool, in a way we canpush by winning over people that are attracted to those kinds of things. 76One particular online tool of alt-right supporters that I’ve already mentioned isshitposting. Shitposting is a tactic to derail discussion by inserting utter meaninglessness, in thevein of ambiguous irony, in order to provoke. It’s this sort of action that Dorian satirizes in“Edgelord”—but as Wikipedia points out—shitposting isn’t necessarily a one-sided tactic. 77Shitposting has been described as a sort of Dadaist approach for the right: meaningless, meantfor provocation and little else. However, Dorian isn’t the only one borrowing flippancy andambiguous irony as tools for the left and for queerness. If ambiguous irony and a quasi-Dadaistapproach can serve as tools for provocateurs on the far right, then it can serve the same purposefor hyperpop artists concerned with more left-wing politics.Take duo Food House. Composed of nonbinary artist Fraxiom and son of legendaryskateboarder Tony Hawk, producer Gupi, Food House is, in few words, utter chaos. Their firstalbum, self-titled, is, according to Paper magazine,Like shotgunning the entirety of Tumblr, Reddit and 4Chan at the height of the Homestuckfandom, food house’s breakout sounds like mainlining cringe comps and bass-boosted75 Tolokonnikova,“Dorian Electra Has the Gay Agenda.”76 Tolokonnikova,“Dorian Electra Has the Gay Agenda.”77 “Shitposting,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Dec. 2020.
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TikToks all while listening to every top 10 pop hit between the years of 2010 and 2013 atthe same time. It’s the type of music that makes what we typically think of as hyperpoplook decaf. 78Food House sentimentally refers to areas like the parking lot outside of a jointCVS/Target and a 24-hour Barnes and Noble, while additionally punching the listener withnon-sequiturs like: “I don’t wanna die / Hyperpop playlist, Spotify.” 79
Fraxiom is just as flippantwhen they talk about right-wing conspiracies like “that 5G mind control” among their infinitereferences to obscure ‘10s Internet culture. 80It’s this type of post-irony, of nuttiness, of edginess, that seems effective atinfiltration—take 100 gecs’ smash hit “Money Machine,” an extremely ludic, simultaneouslysatiric and yet serious piece of music, that blew up hyperpop to begin with.Hyperpop, to be honest, has a general obsession with technology—vocal modulation,computers, femmebots, cars, photoshop. Many for good reasons—photoshop can be affirming, ascan vocal modulation, as can inhabiting an immaterial body online, for those who don’t identifywith the gender they are assigned at birth . The other side of technology for hyperpop is in theactual production of the music—not just how it’s shared, but its fundamentally electric andcomputer-generated nature. Additionally, the online concerts that producer A.G. Cook describedas his “ideal musical landscape” form an important cornerstone for the genre, since the genre hasonly blown up within the last year under COVID regulations. Hyperpop wouldn’t otherwiseexist. However, Fraxiom raps about an unhealthy relationship with social media on Food House,“I need to get off Twitter because it gives me fucking mental illness.” 81
Yet for as much as I’m on
78 Matt Moen, “Food House Turns the Snare Up One More Level.” PAPER, 6 Nov. 2020.79 food house. food house. Dog Show Records, 2020.80 food house. food house.81 food house. food house.
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Twitter, I regularly see tweets from Fraxiom on my timeline. Other artists like Rina Sawayamashare the same sentiments, as she expresses on her song “Cyber Stockholm Syndrome.” Aboutthe song, she says: “the digital world can offer vital support networks, voices of solidarity,refuge, escape. That’s what ‘Cyber Stockholm Syndrome’ is about: pessimism, optimism, anxiety,and freedom.” 82A principle organizing factor for hyperpop is the Internet; it’s integrated within the basicfabric of the genre. There is no outside perspective from which to criticize the Internet for thoseartists who are indebted to it for their music. As The Social Dilemma puts it, “you can’t put thegenie back in the bottle”—meaning, there is no reversal from the Internet. 83
One approach to thedisadvantages of the Internet is accelerationism, or pushing things to their logical end/collapseby heightening them. This makes sense in terms of how hyperpop treats gender, for example.However, accelerationism usually refers to capitalism. Wikipedia distinguishes between the twobranches of accelerationism: “Left-wing accelerationism attempts to press ‘the process oftechnological evolution’ beyond the constrictive horizon of capitalism by repurposing moderntechnology for socially beneficial and emancipatory ends. Right-wing accelerationism supportsthe indefinite intensification of capitalism itself, possibly in order to bring about a technologicalsingularity.” 84
It so happens that accelerationism has also been co-opted by an extreme version of
the alt-right to argue for an acceleration of racial conflict.Somehow, the Internet and the alt-right have become mutually supportive endeavors. Asleft-wing accelerationism intimates, the Internet, as it exists now, is not “socially beneficial” or“emancipatory.” It’s primarily a money-making machine for corporations, set on selling users’
82 Owen Myers, “Rina Sawayama’s Glitchy R&B Captures The Realities Of Living & Loving Online.” The FADER,10 Nov. 2017.83 The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, Exposure Labs, 26 Jan. 2020. Netflix.84“Accelerationism.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Dec. 2020.
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attention even if it means pushing them down alt-right rabbit holes. The ways in which theInternet is designated as a means to community is conducive to corporate money-makingpractices, but in the process it does become a means to a sort of “cyber stockholm syndrome.”Hyperpop artists addressing this are essentially co-opting the internet to push a conversation thatis antithetical to how the internet currently operates—and in the process, hopefully brings light toits shortcomings, and additionally further jolts the gears for change.Hyperpop, a fast developing genre that thrives on cyber involvement, is concerned withthese same shared online spaces that serve as gathering grounds for the alt-right, spaces that allfunction by basically the same rules.While talking about the alt-right to such an extent seems tobe a divergence from focusing on the critiques of hyperpop, in many ways it seems themicrogenre has evolved as a combative opponent to far-right communities. Not only is hyperpopvery obviously a politically left-leaning entity, but as a relatively niche online music community,it occupies the same position on the fringes of the mainstream—and the mainstream, whetherknowingly or not, gets influenced by these surrounding entities.
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Conclusion
At this point, I’m left with one main question: What’s going to happen to hyperpop? Willit fizzle out? Be swallowed by mainstream music? Remain a niche, relatively unknown musicgenre for the rest of eternity? It’s hard to say. When the music industry itself is so volatile—oneyear ago, no one would have guessed that TikTok would be determining the biggest hits; onedecade ago, no one could have predicted the advent of streaming—making any sort of predictionseems to be jumping the gun.What I know for certain is that there’s something significant about hyperpop, both interms of sound and influence. Never before had I heard music that was so counterintuitivelyaddictive, so seriously ludic, so joyfully sincere. Seeing my friends turn from haters to fans hasbeen unexpected to say the least.Tracking the development of hyperpop—from before it even had a single name—gaveme a weird sense that I couldn’t rely on hindsight for anything. While I wrote, I had to constantlyreassess past conclusions I had come up with and expand my understanding to include newerartists and sounds. It felt like I wasn’t working on stable grounds and even now, the sense of thepassage of time is apparent in my work. Whether my thinking will hold up in a few months is yetto be seen, and putting a conclusion seems antithetical to the genre when there’s so much morethat could happen. I did my best to leave things open-ended, to engage in writing about hyperpopin a way that was exploratory, not intending to cement a certain verdict or persuade the reader ofa certain take. It feels like all I’ve written is a beginning—a beginning for a genre that willundoubtedly grow and enter new realms, and therefore interact with the greater culture withinwhich it’s situated in new ways.
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