{"id":1244668,"date":"2024-10-03T13:53:35","date_gmt":"2024-10-03T10:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1244668"},"modified":"2024-10-03T13:53:35","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T10:53:35","slug":"the-lost-promises-of-hyperpoptimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1244668","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Promises of Hyperpoptimism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Longform<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Lost Promises of Hyperpoptimism<\/h1>\n
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Why did hyperpop, one of the most exhilarating scenes of the 2020s, fail to endure?<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Kieran Press-Reynolds<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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In the early days of the COVID lockdown, I started seeing silly tweets listing underground musicians that suggested you were washed-up if you didn\u2019t know them. The unmissables included quinn, d0llywood1, midwxst, capoxxo, glaive\u2014anarchic teens who at the time had only a few thousand followers, but would become the faces of the most thrilling musical movement of the decade so far. The pandemic synced up perfectly, giving them the time and a reason to pump out songs and experiment while trapped inside. Online collectives formed like digital lunch tables; artists scored TikTok hits and performed at virtual raves in video games. By the end of 2020, this sound\u2014generally known as \u201cdigicore\u201d or \u201chyperpop\u201d\u2014set Twitter ablaze with discourse and scored one of the buzziest Spotify playlists. Mainstream crossover was only a matter of time.<\/p>\n

Looking back on it, none of these artists have soared in an enduring way. Many junked the \u201chyper\u201d aspects of their sound altogether. The \u201cpop\u201d in hyperpop proved a total bust: the charts are smothered instead in country, trap that sounds stuck in the 2010s, and soft, zamboni-smooth pop. PC Music, the scene\u2019s main kickstarters, disbanded in 2023. The style\u2019s sonic hallmarks have leaked across the genre-spectrum\u2014you can hear its imprint in hyper-rage, hyper-dubstep, hyper-phonk\u2014yet there are barely any hyperpop<\/em> stars. So what happened?<\/p>\n

Hyperpop\u2019s disappointing dispersal happened for a myriad of reasons\u2014the conflicting visions of its practitioners, the end of the pandemic lockdown, and the fact that some of its most promising musicians didn\u2019t want fame and actively recoiled from it. The scene was plagued by existential issues from the start; no one could even agree what to call it, let alone who the genre tag referred to. It was particularly confusing because there were multiple \u201ceras\u201d\u2014the first wave surrounding PC Musicologists like Hannah Diamond, GFOTY, and A .G. Cook in the 2010s (often also called bubblegum bass), and then the swarm of pandemic teens (digicore), who were lumped into the descriptor despite making vastly different styles. It morphed into a kind of Frankensteinian macro-genre, referring to an array of internet artists who down genres like cocktails and love the fuck out of Auto-Tune.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Hyperpop became the most convenient catch-all tag for the music, partly out of convenience and because Spotify aped it for a popular editorial playlist based on the scene. This, in turn, caused people to desert the label in droves, furious that a streaming service had the power to dictate who got popular or vexed that new artists making emo rap and other genre-fusions were included. Some artists have called the label a slur. \u201cwhat is hyperpop?\u201d went the infamous Charli XCX tweet from summer 2020. If the original \u201990s shoegaze was the scene that celebrated itself, hyperpop is the scene that denies its own existence, perpetually locked in an identity crisis like a passive-aggressive teen. People have been calling hyperpop \u201cdead\u201d since 2020, when the music was arguably at its creative peak. Now, if not outright dead, hyperpop feels like a distorted, feeble echo of what it once was. O.G. scenester angelus is talking about \u201cbringing back hyperpop\u201d like we\u2019ve already been through the 20-year nostalgia cycle.<\/p>\n

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The Musical Age of Shitpost Modernism<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Hyperpop was always backflipping on the edge of addictive and abrasive, which was what made it so electrifying but also off-putting to normie audiences. In the mid-2010s, PC Music pushed pop to the brink by imagining a fictional persona who was like an MK Ultra\u2019d popstar, with supermoon-bright vocals and pixel-sharp beats. SOPHIE made the most eerily poignant anthems about gender fluidity and selfhood in the digital era, like \u201cFaceshopping\u201d\u2014a song that chops and shatters as their face melts and mutates in the video. Artists like Fraxiom used hyperpop\u2019s pitched-up vocal aesthetic to explore their identity. Newer artists like quinn and Jane Remover deployed Auto-Tuned caterwauls and cathartic breakbeats to express the all-consuming anguish of adolescent heartbreak and dysphoria. The music rewired puerile shitposts into wonderfully wacko genre experiments, helped people understand their queerness, and carved out a sweet pocket of supportive collaboration at a time of worldwide crisis and ennui. It sparked real-life events like Subculture, whose stacked shows unfurl like hyperpop wonderlands, packed with Y2K goths, neon furries, drag shows, and Auto-Tune mosh zones.<\/p>\n

In many ways, the pandemic was a crucial catalyst of the scene, and the end of the lockdown was its undoing. While some of the artists were already making music before, the forced social distancing chained kids to their bedrooms; all they had to pass the time was music-making and watching Charli XCX and 100 gecs\u2019 Minecraft<\/em> Square Garden set with friends online. Most of the scene\u2019s essential canon came from these early months: the shimmering meltdown of kuru and kurtains\u2019 \u201cclueless,\u201d the ruthless fever dream of midwxst, quinn, and wido\u2019s \u201cTroops.\u201d There\u2019s ericdoa\u2019s spasming, pixel-spitting \u201cmovinglikeazombie.\u201d 8485\u2019s \u201c1:15\u201d feels like cybernetic butterflies are fluttering in your chest. They culled from a mystery treasure chest of sounds like plugg, EDM, and drum\u2019n\u2019bass but defaced and remade them into exquisite corpses, adding mad distortion, heavily-filtered whimpers, and ridiculous stutters. Tracks like \u201cSpawn Camping\u201d and \u201cthreat\u201d were made by kids who obviously grew up on CS:GO and Roblox, capturing the kiddie dysfunction of MMORPGs and shooter games. I couldn\u2019t believe it when I heard \u201cFuck Notch, Fuck Musk, and I\u2019ll piss on Zedd\u201d in Fraxiom and Gupi\u2019s shitpost anthem \u201cThos Moser.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Earnest songwriting, endless memes, freely oscillating between genre and gender\u2014these were the clearest qualities uniting the young upstarts. They were born fully online, the gleefully fried children of Club Penguin<\/em> and Dark Souls III<\/em> and PictoChat and Discord VCs. But their music was also melancholy, the sounds of digital avatars malfunctioning and blue-screening out, unsure how to exist in this new landscape of internet clout and pandemic-stunted adolescence. glaive\u2019s \u201csick\u201d hit like an aural potion in the early pandemic months, its joyously pixelated plucks cheering me up while he wailed relatably about feeling like he\u2019s \u201cwasting all the bandwidth, sick and overstimulated, neurons in my brain filled with information.\u201d The paranoid skitter of quinn\u2019s \u201cok i\u2019m cool\u201d was simultaneously worrying as a listener but also riveting as she mashed breakbeats with raw confessions about feeling like the entire world was against her.<\/p>\n

What struck me most were the posse cuts, which sometimes featured so many people, like noki\u2019s legendary \u201cAmong Us Cypher\u201d\u201416!\u2014or scruff\u2019s \u201cscru cypher 3,\u201d which might have the world record for features at 120 people that they couldn\u2019t fit in a YouTube video title. Most older spectators might think it\u2019s depressing that kids now spend all day tinkering on FL Studio and recreating full-instrument sounds instead of forming garage bands with friends in real-life. But these musicians were intensely collaborative, and they weren\u2019t pretentious or withholding about letting people hop on. They traded files over chat and helped boost each other\u2019s posts. Rather than wait months or years to link up in real-life, they churned out massive collabs like endie\u2019s blood-soaked \u201csmackdown,\u201d which switches verses every 30 seconds like a class show-and-tell sesh: there\u2019s midwxst, ericdoa, aldn, funeral, chach, blackwinterwells, doxia, and (breath) kmoe. The implicit ideal was that everyone would glow up together, leaving no one behind.<\/p>\n

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As COVID restrictions eased up, the scene\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em> ceased to be, and the artists were growing up and graduating high school. Collectives disputed internally or withered out of inactivity. The scene\u2019s biggest players, like midwxst, glaive, and ericdoa, were picked up by major labels and mostly stopped working with their Discord pals. Others posted less frequently, either because real-life demanded their attention or they wanted to focus on full-length albums. Scene lynchpin quinn momentarily deleted all of her music, exhausted by the attention; she told me in 2021 that she was \u201cenvious\u201d and \u201cfelt robbed\u201d that former hyperpop friends had stolen her swag, and later that she was frustrated the scene\u2019s trans origins were increasingly being marginalized.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The scene fractured, and there weren\u2019t many mondo albums dropping to inspire people to keep making pure hyperpop. The original pioneers were mostly busy making non-hyperpop or gone: SOPHIE tragically died in 2021; 100 gecs spent years toiling to make their zany stadium-rock second album. There were still genius oddities here and there\u2014the wistful video gamey emo of Jane Remover\u2019s Teen Week<\/em>\/Frailty<\/em>, underscores\u2019 fictional town odysseys, DJ Re:Code\u2019s ADHD-core hyper-hyper-pop. But for the most part, \u201chyperpop\u201d has seemed less like a coherent underground scene and more like a pandemic relic, a virtual graveyard of lost futures. Many of the 2020 scene leaders have fled elsewhere, putting zoomer twists on genres like frantic jungle and gently unfurling shoegaze. People have also started spraying the tag to describe practically anything amorphously fast and \u201ccunty.\u201d The Spotify playlist, which is one of the first things that appears when you type \u201chyperpop\u201d on Google, began featuring people only tangentially related to the scene and complete randos from other genres.<\/p>\n

As a nerd who grew up hooked on things like Pok\u00e9mon<\/em> and YouTube memes, something about the music felt personal. At a moment when the mainstream was dominated by ultra-slick pop machines and larger-than-life antiheroes, it was refreshing to find musicians who felt like they were the dorks and bookish friends I knew from class. It didn\u2019t matter if their voices were lackluster or downright bad\u2014online, they sounded like rockstars. The rise of digicore felt like an opportunity for a new kind of music stardom and sense of collectivity, where it didn\u2019t matter how much swag you had in real-life or how many genres you blended into an inane smoothie. When the movement failed to crest, it was like being told what I suspected all along: This music is too weird and haphazard to get larger acclaim, the communal spirit isn\u2019t viable in a dog-eat-dog industry where labels sandpaper their artists\u2019 sound and prioritize signing palatable TikTok wunderkinds. Digital collectives still exist, but the online landscape feels much more atomized now, a constellation of artists dropping solo tapes; and anything remotely geeky-sounding gets immediately tagged as \u201cmusic you can\u2019t play for your friends.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The radical potential of the scene has mostly evaporated, flattened and flayed into vague signifiers. You can see this most in an artist like Odetari, whose amorphously vapid style called \u201ckrushclub\u201d sounds like a major label exec board e-mailed him a slideshow of Classic Hyperpop Ingredients: Auto-Tune croons plus cyborgian beats plus bitcrushed fuzz. Or something like Kim Petras and Sam Smith\u2019s cheesily theatrical \u201cUnholy.\u201d It\u2019s maybe the most popular \u201chyperpop\u201d song ever, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it\u2019s gratingly lurid. Charli XCX\u2019s BRAT<\/em>, a carousel of clubby abandon, could go down as the most mainstream \u201chyperpop\u201d LP ever\u2014Kamala Harris and Ella Emhoff probably talked about A. G. Cook\u2019s metallic snares at the dinner table after Charli\u2019s \u201ckamala IS brat\u201d post. But, as sleek as BRAT<\/em> is, the production isn\u2019t any more startling than Charli\u2019s \u201cVroom Vroom\u201d or \u201cSecret\u201d from almost a decade ago. Trawling through Spotify\u2019s hyperpop playlist now reveals some catchy songs but also a heap of rote tropes: the campily Auto-Tuned vox, the distorted-to-death synths and bass, the convulsive EDM beats. \u201cHyperpop\u201d has become a kind of musical font that anyone can deploy without adding much originality.<\/p>\n

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\"Album<\/span><\/p>\n
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The 100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nowadays, it feels like a lot of the most exciting \u201chyper\u201d music is happening beyond the scene. I see it in the obscenely maximal beats that rappers like Carti protege Ken Carson, Osamason, and che use, twitching with volcanic bass. 2hollis, who was always adjacent to hyperpop, has a delectable fusion of hardstyle-ridden electroclash and shivering rap beats. There\u2019s the strain of rhythmically ballistic electronic music known as \u201ctrashwave\u201d\u2014imagine a packed DAW puking up all of its layers and effect-chains during an ayahuasca session. These styles thrill individually yet lack the kind of collaborative exuberance that made hyperpop feel like a virtual neighborhood, a home team to follow and champion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Maybe the biggest driver behind the scene\u2019s dispersion is the fact that \u201chyperactivity\u201d as a musical device has become banal and ran-through. The times we\u2019re living in are already so speedmaxxed, digitized, relentlessly asphyxiated by stimuli. Every popular artist has a \u201csped-up\u201d version of their music; presidential campaigns hurl shitposts and hype edits into the TikTok ether. Hyperpop was originally a countercultural aesthetic, a haven of forum geeks and nightcore freaks, built by and for the underground. When that abrasive style started to become watered-down, it makes sense that some would recoil or turn their attention to less zeitgeisty sounds. In 2024, hyperpop feels like the last new major genre: its dilution and adoption across the world (find hyperpop scenes in at least a dozen countries) shows how much people love it, even if it has barely ever ascended to mainstream glory. It\u2019s helped people actualize things about themselves they never knew and spawned havens for marginalized oddballs. Some of the most fun I\u2019ve ever had going out has been to hyperpop clubs, drunkenly swaying to Umru\u2019s four-person B2B2B2B sets and yelling \u201cFUCK THE PSAT!\u201d with a crowd of sweaty teens at glaive\u2019s first NYC show. Even if hyperpop is approaching peak sterility, we still have a bounty of memories and musical genius to look back on.<\/p>\n

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A Deeply Incomplete Canon of Hyperpop-Digicore (Beyond Ones Already Mentioned)<\/h2>\n
d0llywood1: \u201cithinkimdoingbetter\u201d<\/div>\n

Dolly\u2019s earliest and most exhilarating songs smack like the titles\u2014a crumpled rush of words and confessions, the sound of uploading your brain to the cloud and drowning your worries in bass thuds.<\/p>\n

QT: \u201cHey QT\u201d<\/div>\n

An extract of 100% pure pop, an Ariana Grande arena soundtrack for Uncanny Valley Stadium, the national anthem of a yassified autocracy where the rain is pink and everyone\u2019s Barbie.<\/p>\n

100 gecs: \u201cmoney machine\u201d<\/div>\n

Piss babies, shamefully small trucks, a beat so delectably deranged it\u2019s like Skrillex producing for a Ringley Bros. clown carnival: This is 100 gecs at peak freak.<\/p>\n

100 gecs: \u201cringtone (remix)\u201d [ft. Charli XCX, Rico Nasty and Kero Kero Bonito]<\/div>\n

An all-star posse of quirked-up it-girls assembled to make hyperpop\u2019s most addictive karaoke song.<\/p>\n

Jane Remover: \u201c52 blue mondays\u201d<\/div>\n

A depression anthem so goddamn hard<\/em> it makes 52 glum Mondays sound like the greatest thing ever, fuck Prozac.<\/p>\n

dante red: \u201cfinale\u201d<\/div>\n

ericdoa\u2019s meta goodbye to his bitcrushed alter ego dante red nearly made me tear up. Switching between inflections, he raps against himself, interrogating why he\u2019s selling out and going industry. He promises they\u2019ll meet again someday. We\u2019re still waiting for the moment.<\/p>\n

Capoxxo: \u201cPerfect\u201d [ft. oaf1 and dreamcache]<\/div>\n

Unlike the jittery newness of so much hyperpop, the Auto-Tune fever of \u201cPerfect\u201d feels beamed in from a frayed bootleg edition of Dance Dance Revolution<\/em> circa 2004.<\/p>\n

brakence, glaive, ericdoa, quinn, kmoe & valentine: \u201closin it\u201d<\/div>\n

Digicore Avengers: Age of Auto-Tune<\/em>.<\/p>\n

lei: \u201cOasis\u201d<\/div>\n

True to its title, \u201cOasis\u201d conjures up visions of a cybernetic treescape, with impossibly fresh vines and lapis-blue creeks sparkling in the sun. If there were a \u201c7 Wonders of the SoundCloud Under<\/em>world,\u201d this would qualify.<\/p>\n

twikipedia: \u201cborn to pwn\u201d [ft. midwxst]<\/div>\n

Maybe the most hyperdigital \u201cdigicore\u201d of all time, a mad brainjection of surreal stutters, 8-bit twitches, and lyrics blending Mario<\/em>, Pokemon<\/em>, and Roblox<\/em> with threats about gunning people down.<\/p>\n

angelus: \u201crevenge\u201d<\/div>\n

Click for angelus\u2019 venomous trills and fortuneswan\u2019s laser-shiny beat; stay for the goofy video of angelus\u2019 bed.<\/p>\n

Raegun: \u201cTalk to Me\u201d<\/div>\n

A hyper-ballad so pretty it makes Rae\u2019s exhausted sighs and earnest requests for better treatment sound joyous.<\/p>\n

funeral & blxty – \u201ctrying\/\/cry4help\u201d<\/div>\n

More heady than hyper, this sweet swoon of a tune from two scene O.G.s sounds like a bedtime lullaby for forest fairies.<\/p>\n

kurtains: \u201crain\u201d<\/div>\n

The Welsh artist erupts into so many giddy stutters it\u2019s like they\u2019re roleplaying K.K. Slider from Animal Crossing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Underscores: \u201cspoiled little brat\u201d<\/div>\n

This was the point in the scene when I thought, \u201cIs it just becoming alt-rock?\u201d Wait until the planet-shuddering final half-minute.<\/p>\n

quannnic: \u201cthink with your lungs\u201d<\/div>\n

The way quannnic crests from sedate slowcore to 5,000-lumen-bulb drop feels like climbing over the top of a hill and seeing a horizon full of comets glinting in the night.<\/p>\n

tropes: \u201ca reason why\u201d<\/div>\n

Floating eyes, paranoid spiraling, operatic wails: Tropes\u2019 high-octane hate-letter is as electrifying as it is agitated.<\/p>\n

i9bonsai: \u201cfunee monkee gif\u201d<\/div>\n

Funny monkey, monkey GIF. Funny monkey, monkey GIF. Funny monkey, monkey GIF. Look at the monkey. It’s a monkey. Look at the monkey, at the monkey.<\/em><\/p>\n

EASYFUN: \u201cLaplander\u201d<\/div>\n

Hyperpop at its most idyllic, the kind of tune that makes you want to drop whatever you\u2019re doing and spin gleefully in your bedroom, helplessly fantasizing about everything possible in the world.<\/p>\n

Dorian Electra: \u201cF the World\u201d [ft. The Garden, Quay Dash and d0llywood1]<\/div>\n

Dorian Electra pushes hyperpop to its most garish and grotesque extremes here, a gnarly blast of (un)happy hard-gore<\/em>. Imagine a UFO of Hot Topic\u2013wearing alien-punks descending to destroy Earth.<\/p>\n

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Source URL: http:\/\/pitchfork.com\/features\/article\/the-lost-promises-of-hyperpoptimism\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Longform The Lost Promises of Hyperpoptimism Why did hyperpop, one of the most exhilarating scenes of the 2020s, fail to endure? By Kieran Press-Reynolds October 3, 2024 Graphic by Chris Panicker In the early days of the COVID lockdown, I started seeing silly tweets listing underground musicians that suggested you were washed-up if you didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-1244668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1244668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1244668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1244668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1244668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}