When analyzing the internal evolutions of pop music over the last decade, it is impossible not to take very seriously the path tied to electronic music and its process of mimesis of contemporary society.
Taking a leap ten years back, let us sketch a partial picture that allows us to frame the world in which these musicians operated. By 2013 the world had reached the maturity of the society of the spectacle: Facebook had just passed a billion users, while Instagram, bought shortly before by Mark Zuckerberg, was running at over 100 million. Communication, advertising above all, was turning more and more toward social networks, increasing speed and the need for attention. Speed and connection are thus two of the keywords that characterize the early years of the last decade.
These dynamics naturally involved the record market, which a couple of years earlier had seen the Swedish streaming giant Spotify enter as one of its leading players. The Scandinavian company, which in 2011, through an agreement with the four major American record labels, launched its streaming service in the USA, thereby becoming the worldwide standard for music listening. Its model, centered on the enormous availability of a catalog that includes both the biggest labels and independent ones, allows users to move from one musical style to another, building their own playlists or listening to those proposed by algorithms and curators, in an endless shuffle driven by tags and sponsorships.
It is hardly surprising, then, to see a path like that of PC Music be born and thrive in such an environment, as a sort of natural mutation of a certain way of understanding pop music. Founded by the English producer A.G. Cook in 2013 as a demonetized Soundcloud profile, in its first phase PC Music gathered, without particular stylistic restrictions, a group of British producers who, through a series of shared fascinations and reflections (ultra-synthetic kitsch elements, up-pitched vocal tracks modeled on the nightcore remixes ubiquitous on YouTube, the use of melodies and progressions typical of bubblegum pop), made plain to their listeners the process of acceleration underway in the music industry. It was within this stylistic and sonic magma that the multiform blob took shape that, over the years, would come to be called Hyperpop, among the most recognizable stylistic movements of recent years until it was absorbed and codified by the mainstream, culminating in 100 Gecs entering Billboard's Alternative chart in 2020 with the remix of their “Hand Crushed By a Mallet,” made together with Fall Out Boy, and in the crossover success achieved over the years by the pop star Charli XCX.
The name that, running through these movements, albeit in a totally independent way and without any kind of homogenization, probably characterized them most significantly and provided a standard against which to measure oneself was probably SOPHIE, a Scottish producer who died prematurely in January 2021 in Athens. She came into contact with A.G. Cook in the months before the birth of PC Music and of her own recording debut, and it seems certain that their first works found strong mutual interest and ended up influencing their respective artistic paths, even while reflecting on different themes.
As Cook recalled in a letter on his website, in the wake of Sophie's death: “We were opposites in many ways, and naturally complementary. \[…\] We were intrigued by each other’s approaches and would trade a lot of those skills over the years, but when we worked together we tended towards that original formation, bringing elements together almost instantaneously. My chords, her sounds, done.”
But while the approach of Cook and the producers tied to PC Music tended toward excess in production, for SOPHIE the formula was the opposite: reducing elements to a minimum, working more on the virtuosity of her sound design. The same goes for her approach to composition: A.G. Cook, in the letter mentioned above, recalls how SOPHIE preferred a melodic approach to chords, reducing the harmonic progression to a set of single notes and sounds.
The series of singles SOPHIE released from 2013 onward (starting with the single “Nothing More To Say/Eeehhh”) and culminating in the compilation released in 2015, “PRODUCT”, presents the Scottish producer to the world with a recognizable and iconic sound, in an attempt to reproduce real-world phenomena in the digital realm. A clear example is one of the very first tracks she released: “LEMONADE”. The track, whose verse repeats certain lines in an apparently disconnected way, seems an extreme exaggeration of a commercial for a soft drink company (a company which, in fact, her father ran), with its sounds representing, through sound, carbonated bubbles, satisfied sips and flowing liquid. In any case, lyrics and sonic events could also be read in another way: SOPHIE tells a second character (the ‘candy boy’ invoked in the chorus) that, despite her involuntary emotional manipulations, she is eager to have her ‘lemonade’ (“It's just that when I'm with you and everything's okay /I get that fizzy feeling and I want lemonade”). Sexual references pervade this whole part of SOPHIE's output, as on the single's B-side, “Hard”, packed with references to BDSM practices. It is no coincidence that, in the physical edition of “PRODUCT”, the record could be purchased with some complementary products, including a silicone sex toy.
This part of SOPHIE's poetics represents one of the fundamental aspects of her practice as a musician, namely that of expressing through artistic creation an unfiltered queer narrative that would communicate to the listener through sound. This, together with the uniqueness of her sound, achieved through a meticulous practice of sound design on frequency modulation synthesizers (FM synthesis), meant that she quickly became one of the most prominent musicians of the new musical landscape. Not by chance, in 2014 she was hired by the American pop star Madonna to produce “Bitch I’m Madonna”, third single from the album Rebel Heart, released the following year.
After the release of the already-mentioned “PRODUCT”, in November of the same year, SOPHIE became a cult musician among enthusiasts and industry insiders, but very little was known about her. Over the years a video has become famous of a 2014 DJ set in which SOPHIE supposedly had a lookalike stand in for her before going on stage, in a sort of easter egg that involved only those who knew her personally.
This mystery about her identity is an integral part of the project behind her 2018 debut album, “OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES”. The first single taken from the record, “It’s Okay To Cry”, is a central point in SOPHIE's artistic and personal narrative, a hinge in the story of her music as a whole and not only with regard to “OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES”. In the video accompanying the track, in fact, SOPHIE shows the public her person for the first time and lets us hear her voice. The act of showing herself bare-chested, however, is not to be understood as a banal provocative marketing move, but as an invitation to self-acceptance before the world. The body thus becomes a means of artistic expression, the vehicle for the message the musician sends to her listeners, and not the end of an operation.
“It’s Okay To Cry”, with its expressive and liberating power and its final crescendo, thus opens the doors to the story told by “OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES”, released on June 15, 2018. The concept of ‘transition’, both in the physical world and in the virtual one (in that sort of digital transhumanism referred to earlier), remains one of the central themes in the Scottish musician's work.
This narrative is particularly present in the third track of the record, “Faceshopping”. In this song the idea of self-realization through manipulation, as underlined by the line closing the first verse, “I’m real when I shop my face”, allows SOPHIE to move further along this narrative of the creation of the self. Not only a physical or digital transformation (as suggested by the track's official video), then, but a combination of both practices, presenting an idealized figure as one's own real identity, which expresses itself through music.
This self-reconstruction inherent in SOPHIE's transness is also, and above all, an inner search, in a path of deconstruction of binary roles within society. As she said in the interview given in 2018 to PAPER magazine: “For me, transness is taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit so the two aren’t fighting against each other and struggling to survive. On this earth, it’s that you can get closer to how you feel your true essence is without the societal pressures of having to fulfill certain traditional roles based on gender. It means you’re not a mother or a father—you’re an individual who’s looking at the world and feeling the world. And it’s somehow more human and universal, I feel.”
A physical-spiritual communion, then, which finds its musical fulfillment in the most melodic track on the whole record, “Immaterial”. This realization is made explicit by SOPHIE in the lyrics: “You could be me and I could be you / Always the same and never the same / Day by day, life after life / Without my legs or my hair / Without my genes or my blood / With no name and with no type of story / Where do I live? / Tell me, where do I exist? / We're just immaterial boys, immaterial girls”. A sort of anthem dedicated to a queer community struggling for the recognition of a non-binary identity in this world, in which mutating bodies expand the discussion on gender, no longer tied to the sex one comes from.
The impact of “OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES” in the five years separating the record's release from this article has been enormous and far-reaching. SOPHIE has become the musical point of reference for the LGBT+ galaxy, thanks to her reflections in music on body, gender, identity. Over the years hyperpop too has become one of the community's ‘banner’ styles, thanks to its capacity to expand limits and be fluid by nature.
Despite SOPHIE's premature death in January 2021, the importance of the British producer has been among the greatest to emerge in the last decade, leaving the artistic world embittered over the contributions she might still have made.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →