:Hyperpop
by Renny Hyde – Renny is WREK’s Auto Czar, a member of the Design Collective, and the host of 100 wreks, a specialty show playing hyperpop, digicore, and other music from SoundCloud’s DIY electronic pop scene.
In 2020, Hyperpop took the internet by storm. 100 gecs had an online presence that extended beyond the sphere of chronically-online music fiends, becoming almost notorious with the mainstream audience. The fast beats and pitched vocals of hyperpop scared some and captivated others, like myself, into a cult following of this scene of young queer people making music on their laptops. The next year was a genesis of digital music; when the Covid-19 pandemic forced most social connections to be made online, hyperpop artists and enthusiasts built an entire culture found on platforms like Discord, Twitter, and SoundCloud. Artists could collaborate with each other across great distances and reach fans anywhere in the world. Subculture Party, a rave venue in Los Angeles, hosted weekly zoom raves, where hundreds of hyperpop fans would dance in their bedrooms along with their favorite artists. This era of collaboration and camaraderie is what turned hyperpop from a viral craze into a community and a movement, and made me fall in love with the scene.
But now the scene has changed. The Spotify Hyperpop Playlist (which is notorious among hyperpoppers) commercialized this DIY music community, replacing creativity with competition. The artists that were once prolific are now either inactive or have sold out to major labels to produce drab, unimaginative pop music. The URL shows (free, online hyperpop music festivals) that used to happen every few weeks are now only once or twice a year, if they happen at all. Is this what happens when a genre dies? Is hyperpop dead?
The answer depends on how you think about hyperpop, which begs the question: What is hyperpop?
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has tuned in to 100 wreks that 100 gecs did not invent hyperpop, nor were they the first to use the musical techniques often attributed to the genre. Noah Simon’s 2021 docuseries “Origins of Hyperpop” goes into depth about the history and evolution of the scene attempting to answer this question. Hyperpop’s history is more nuanced than I can fully detail here so I highly recommend watching this series, but in a nutshell Simon names SOPHIE as the main pioneer that led to the music we hear today, which is a conclusion that I completely agree with.
The first mistake people make in analyzing hyperpop is assuming that it began when it went viral; “Hyperpop” may have entered most of our vocabulary in 2020, but artists in the scene have been creating innovative music for years before. underscores alone produced a body of work from 2016-2020 that could be credited as a catalyst for hyperpop’s success. Before that era was PC Music, a label created by A. G. Cook in 2013 that pioneered a sound of maximalist pop music, infused with trance and hardcore production techniques. PC Music’s influence cannot be understated. Songs they released in 2014 could still be considered groundbreaking today, and they’ve inspired countless contemporary hyperpop artists, such as Himera and Petal Supply. A. G. Cook’s maximalist production on several of Charli XCX’s albums helped catapult the PC Music sound to the forefront of mainstream pop music, which paved the way for 100 gecs’ rise to fame. Around the same time and place that saw PC Music’s inception, SOPHIE was creating truly genius music, and sowing the seeds of the hyperpop boom. Influences of her sound design, composition, and vocal processing can be heard in almost every single song that can be considered hyperpop, along with her Splice sample pack, which has been staple in every hyperpop producer’s toolkit. And as a trans woman in a DIY music scene, she paved the way to make hyperpop an inherently trans movement that allows queer people to express themselves freely.
The antagonist in hyperpop’s origin story is, you guessed it, Spotify. Spotify’s infamous Hyperpop playlist helped catapult hyperpop to fame. I remember discovering the playlist and being thrilled that the music I had come to love had a name. And for many, Hyperpop was a name and a genre invented by spotify. While it definitely helped increase the popularity of hyperpop, Spotify also commercialized it. Hyperpop artists were no longer collaborating to push the boundary of pop music, but competing for a coveted spot on the playlist, and the streaming clout that came with it. Up until this point the scene had been built around community and innovation, rather than a specific sound. Spotify made a Genre out of the scene, forcing artists to adopt a narrow and standardized sound in order to compete. Spotify did to hyperpop what the music industry has done to mainstream pop music: gave it a name and put it in a box, restricting artists to only make music that is easily accessible and similar to whatever else is popular.
But it didn’t work. Sure, a handful of artists did sell out, and a handful more made cookie cutter, Spotify-core hyperpop music without ever being a part of the scene (I won’t name names...), but overall the same exciting musical innovation of years past still exists today. Every week when I curate my mix for 100 wreks I’m astonished by the new sounds I hear; they’re the sounds of a scene that’s very much alive, and thriving.
What is hyperpop? I’ve reflected on this question a lot over the past few years, and there still isn’t one clear cut answer. Musically, hyperpop is a fusion of myriad established genres including pop, rap, trap, punk, and EDM, as well as less known genres like nightcore and bubblegum bass. Producers used the internet as their playground to shape these influences into a boundary-pushing sound, which is what most people think of when it comes to hyperpop. Still, I think there’s more to it than this sound. Ask any hyperpop enthusiast to list their favorite albums, and chances are that fishmonger by underscores and Frailty by Jane Remover will make the list. These albums, which are two of my favorites, have a completely different sound! The reason I would mention these in the same breath as the word “hyperpop” is that they arose from the same community of innovating musicians who influence each other to explore bold new sounds and push music to unexplored corners.
It’s finally time to ask the question: Is hyperpop dead? If you treat hyperpop like a genre, invented in 2020 by 100 gecs and the Spotify hyperpop playlist, then it is most certainly dead. The sound that existed then is no more, and the scene definitely looks different. But if you treat hyperpop like a movement, one that began over a decade ago and has been growing, changing, and innovating since, then it becomes clear that hyperpop can never truly die. The word “hyperpop” itself is a feeble attempt to summarize years of online history, musical innovation, collaborative DJing, and queer culture into one bite-sized piece. It’s a herculean task, one that, in my opinion, should not be attempted. Hyperpop was not meant to be commercialized. It was not meant to be easily accessible or consumeable. Any supposed volatility of the scene was introduced by Spotify and the music industry, which do not define hyperpop. The scene may not look the same now as it did when hyperpop first entered the pop-cultural eye, but it is still very much alive. After all, how can something that is constantly being reborn and reinvented ever truly die?
:Shoegaze
by Elise Polo – Elise is WREK’s Program Director, a member of the Design Collective, and a host of Crush, WREK’s specialty show playing shoegaze, dreampop, and noisepop.
I want to start off this by saying Shoegaze has never really been a well-known genre to begin with. This past summer I had the chance to visit Dublin, hometown of the famous band ‘My Bloody Valentine’ who are said to be the pioneers of the genre, and no one knew what or who I was talking about. As the host of Crush, WREK’s resident shoegaze and dream pop show, you can imagine my disappointment.
So what is Shoegaze anyways? Shoegaze, the ‘genre’, is loosely defined as music with ethereal guitars and distorted vocals, typically characterized by the use of effect pedals. The ‘genre’ is said to have began with the release of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’, considered the magnum opus of shoegaze; however, you can see inspiration from previous bands like the Cocteau Twins (who are credited with the genre ‘Dream Pop’, which is another story in it of itself) and the Jesus and Mary Chain. During this time, there were several extremely influential bands, and I would recommend each and every one of them, like Lush, Slowdive, and Pale Saints.
The thing is that during this time, the term ‘Shoegaze’ (named after thinking guitarists using pedals were ‘looking at their shoes’) was never attributed to the movement. It was referred to as “the scene that celebrates itself”, which is a bit of an insult honestly. At its peak, the movement was composed of bands that were mainly female fronted, which at the time was not the norm; and the bands knew of and were inspired by each other. Bands were making music that had not been possible in the past, and truly creating innovative alternative music. After a short period of success in the early 90s, the movement fizzled out, and many bands disbanded or made music in more popular genres like Britpop.
Flash forward to today. The sounds of ‘shoegaze’ can be found in many different genres, but the label is applied to practically any song that uses a guitar pedal. Bands proudly using the label create a song that sounds practically similar to the next. We’ve seen the creation of labels like ‘slowcore’, ‘doomgaze’ and practically ‘anything-gaze’. Spotify and Apple Music proudly display shoegaze playlists with practically the same 5 songs. A lot of bands have tried recreating the ‘shoegaze’ sound without realizing that the music was special because it came from creating music in a way it had not been before. It’s become very repetitive for the listener.
I recently made the journey to r/shoegaze (I know, I know) and there was a post written in 2015 titled, ‘Is shoegaze dead’?, and a lot of the conversation there resonated with me. A lot of the general sentiment basically boiled down to, ‘shoegaze’ itself being too narrow of a descriptor for bands, and the real exciting music coming from bands building off of the techniques from the original scene. A deleted user wrote “A lot of [shoegaze] sounds samey because shoegaze is a total non-genre that fans have tried to define too narrowly”, and I cannot agree more. I don’t think shoegaze should have ever been considered more than a movement in music that served as influences for other genres, and I believe it severely limits the creativity of bands that choose to adopt this label.
With the rise of Spotify as a streaming service, there’s been a movement to pigeonhole artists into very restrictive genres. Spotify themselves published that there were twice as many releases labeled ‘shoegaze’ in 2018 than there were in 1996, the height of the movement’s popularity (‘Shoegaze: the 90s Rock Genre Once Again Gains Ground’). Vice wrote an article last year titled, ‘Gen Z Are Resurrecting Shoegaze for Their ‘Bleak, Post-COVID World’, citing the amount of times #shoegaze has been mentioned on Tiktok. For the record, I’m against ‘gatekeeping’, and I’m happy more people are discovering how good music from this movement was. I’m excited people are being inspired by it. But I’m disappointed that it’s manifested in repeating old sounds and taking shoegaze itself as a restricted genre in terms of soundscapes. It’s also led to a meme culture surrounding shoegaze I personally find to be embarrassing, but that’s another story.
Listeners opening their Spotify Wrapped this year can expect to see genres like ‘Anime’, ‘Sad Rap’, or ‘Alt Z’, attributed to very specific sounds. I’ve always been excited and inspired by the creation of new sounds and ventures into new spaces of music, but it disappoints me when innovations in music are stunted by labeling them as genres.