What is (or was) hyperpop? The YouTube commentator debates have raged for years, with most either trying to formalise an errant trajectory, or affirm its un-codifiable nature. For the most part, this is a tale as old as time. No matter the medium, genre-markers and collective nouns are rarely chosen by those to whom they apply. It is generally the critic who denotes the contours of a group or sensibility — as ever, we must take our hats off to Simon Reynolds, for probably being responsible for more of these names than most are aware of.
Although names rankle those to whom they apply, charting the development of these names is as fun as inventing them in the first place. The history of whoever tries to take possession of a word is always interesting, as is a refusal to be named altogether, but familiar tensions arise when we attempt to bridge the gap between these two modes of thinking (or not thinking) about what defines a particular genre of music.
Hyperpop is no exception, even though its claims of non-categorisation as particularly loud among artists and archivists alike. In 2023, for example, YouTuber Jauque X presented a short artist-specific primer titled “How Brakence Ruined Hyperpop”, addressing this complicated relationship to genre explicitly. However, far from the scathing overview that might be expected from its clickbait title, X argues in his video that brakence’s ruining of hyperpop was intentional, claiming that 2022 album Hypochondriac
doesn’t fit into the hyperpop landscape at all, nor does it fit in with any genre. Hypochondriac is a complete deconstruction of the idea of music genres. Why try to fit into a box when you can do all of this instead? This was an idea that many of his biggest influences, like Dylan Brady of 100 gecs, also believed. An entire generation of experimental music was categorised under the umbrella of hyperpop by major labels to make them more marketable, even though this went against the movement’s core message: music doesn’t and shouldn’t fit into boxes. And maybe brakence, a nineteen-year-old kid from Ohio, would be the one to finally kill hyperpop and the need for genres in general.
As discussed here the other day, it is partly this scene’s deep refusal to codify itself through marketable terms that has fascinated me in recent months. But it nonetheless remains true that hyperpop has a history, and that its refusal to be codified is not always entirely convincing.
The various sonic forms strapped together by brakence — midwest emo, pop, hiphop, r&b, glitch, et al. — do not suggest a total break from some sense of cultural history. It is possible to chart its various influences, and I think it’s worthwhile to speculate on why it is these sounds and not others that have been chosen for recombination. In fact, at a certain point, to list these various influences, worn openly and identifiably on brakence’s sleeve, starts to feel like a far more appropriate use of genre than the use of ‘hyperpop’ as a catch-all. Multiplicity wins out over singularity here, but so does particularity win out over generality. There are very particular sonic sensibilities being drawn on here. I even get a strange feeling, when listening to brakence, that whilst his music might refuse to be put into a single genre, the genres it utilises are a cross-section of contemporary pop forms: those sonic sensibilities most widely circulated by the algorithm itself, as if his sound doesn’t want to be a trend but is nonetheless a culmination of trends.
If this is ‘hyperpop’, it starts to sound not like a freeform gluttony of pop forms — which is perhaps what ‘hyperpop’ should be, if we are to understand the ‘hyper-‘ as a designation of something that is ‘more pop than pop’ — but rather a mastery of all that is contemporary. This is to say that, on the one hand, it is a sound that melts together all the popular motifs that you might hear on an average TikTok scroll session, but whereas the more extreme end of the hyperpop continuum might reflect the affective qualities of this semioblitz, which a scroll is likely to induce, brakence takes a less hyperactive and more salvagepunk approach, in Mark Fisher’s sense:
salvagepunk retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages. That’s precisely because salvagepunk is dealing with objects rather than signs. While signs are interchangeable, objects have particular properties, textures and tendencies, and the art of salvage is about knowing which objects can be lashed together to form viable constructions.
brakence demonstrates this viability for now, and is all the more pop for doing so, as his sound is less a shockingly aberrant mutant than it is a broadly palatable culmination of contemporary pop trends. It’s no less interesting, but this palatability also sets it curiously aside from a lot else that falls under the hyperpop banner. If brakence ruined hyperpop, then, it is not in the sense of pushing beyond that loose genre’s limits, but in establishing a sound that is a contemporary ‘pop’ pure and simple.
This is the sound of a ‘hyperpop’ now, but it was not the sound of hyperpop old, and in trying to understand where this new sound has emerged from, I’ve gotten the impression that hyperpop has become a strange beast that — like other contentious genre markers, such as ‘dubstep’, before it — has passed through a number of iterations and, perhaps most significantly, has also undergone an explicit process of Americanisation, sacrificing a far more global (and also perhaps more ‘political’ and minoritarian) sound that once defined it. [Count me among those eagerly awaiting an English translation of Julie Ackerman’s Hyperpop in the hopes it charts this trajectory more extensively than I plan to do here.]
The dubstep comparison is useful here, and I’d like to unpack it. To do so will take us momentarily away from a consideration of hyperpop, but since dubstep must also be acknowledged as a hyperpop antecedent in its own right, we will return to it in due course. To nonetheless quickly prefigure the question to be arrived at shortly, my intention here is to ask whether a tentative relationship between dubstep and hyperpop can be made generally, or whether it is this only applicable to its more American current…
On the one hand, there was the British dubstep scene, which was already the product of socio-cultural combinatory impulses, reflecting the influence of a racially diverse and errant underground. It is a sound that was vaporously distilled in the output of Burial most famously, but before that it was a far less subdued sound, combining elements of grime, 2step, dub, and jungle, and known for its bass-driven, spacious, and tensely minimal-maximal production style. In this regard, it was still often raucous, angry, expressing a melancholic rage — a sort of return of the repressed through sub-bass — but it also felt acutely haunted by the spectre of UK rave culture far more specifically than its American cousin…
The American maximalist scene, synonymous with Skrillex, displayed a subtly different approach to bass, which did not take itself so seriously, and also sought to produce a very different set of affects. Whilst UK dubstep was haunted, US dubstep leant into a farcical approach to bass that pushed a UK sensibility to an extreme.
When I first started going to clubs in the late 2000s, both of these scenes were at their peak, and although the two styles initially felt diametrically opposed — with the US version being so achingly and obnoxiously American that it was, for some time, an embarrassment to the UK purists (and therefore termed ‘brostep’ to distinguish it, later blurring into the generic non-identifier ‘EDM’) — the two currents nonetheless began to cross-pollinate, such that it wasn’t totally surprising to hear the likes of Mala and Skrillex at the same club night.
Where the two scenes differed most was perhaps in their relationship to a wider political landscape. Listening to Mala’s classic 2006 track, ‘Anti War Dub’ — the b-side to single ‘Haunted’, which was a Digital Mystikz (Mala + Coki) production — makes the differences between the two scenes seem extreme. When listening to the a-side, however, the blown-out baselines show that these two scenes are more like related than many liked to think.
Even looking superficially at the track titles — ‘Haunted’ versus ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ — there is a shared invocation of para-normal sonic sensibilities here, of another spectral world of ghouls and monsters, flirting with countercultural and socio-cultural excess. But if these scenes were stubbornly distinguished all the same, it was perhaps because US dubstep felt at a greater distance from a Jamaican dub culture and its more particular association with the duppy.
American ghost stories, particularly those that feature poltergeists, are obviously inseparable from its wrestling with racialised terrors, but UK dubstep retained a relationship to a wider political history that often felt overshadowed by an American maximalism. The UK’s dubby/duppy sensibilities can be traced back to the doubling and strafing of the maximal and the minimal in 1960s and ’70s Kingston with far more ease, as this was so key to dubstep’s UK context in the early twenty-first century.
We might argue, in this regard, that UK dub culture exacerbated the tensions of its Jamaican uncle. It is notable that Jamaican dub arose around the same time that the country gained independence in 1962, and so dub’s (or the “double”‘s) process of ‘versioning’ can be read as a way of engaging with the rupture / impasse felt between a colonised sense of alienation and a newly independent crisis of identity. [For more on this, see my 2023 post on Edward George’s ‘The Strangeness of Dub’.]
For Paul Gilroy, this is the (non-non-)essential quality of black culture in general, in a post-slavery world, made difficult to extract from two warring perspectives, which argue that music is, on the one hand, “the primary means to explore critically and reproduce politically the necessary ethnic essence of blackness” — that is, questions of (multi)cultural identity — whilst on the other hand, there are “those who would dispute the existence of any unifying, organic phenomenon” that designates ‘black’ culture as such.
There is a telling contradiction here, which has nonetheless been explored productively and at length by many over the last few decades. Fred Moten, for instance, in In The Break, sees blackness itself as errancy, as that which exceeds all categorisation. But how are we to understand this errancy and excess as a quintessential characteristic of specifically black culture? How is it possible to categorise a subject position on the basis of its elision of category as such?
Gilroy makes a similar point — more succinctly, if no less complexly — when he argues that anyone who thinks about black culture and pop culture (with the two being increasingly inseparable today) is faced with “the difficult task of striving to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the destabilising flux of the post-contemporary world.” This errancy can be traced back to specifically black modalities of expression, but it is an errancy that has also been appropriated and recuperated in ways that are both a consequence of that errancy itself and a reflection of capitalism’s own powerful destabilisation of codes. There is thus a paradox wherein a black errancy is both response to and consequence of capitalism’s own attempts to striate black bodies and their modes of cultural expression.
The erratic and recombinatory modalities of black culture are nonetheless powerful when expressed in this context regardless, in that they knowingly walk this peculiar tightrope, dancing in the break between evasion and recuperation. Gilroy continues:
it is tempting to endorse the Brechtian suggestion that some version of “montage” corresponds to an unprecedented type of realism, appropriate to the extreme historical conditions which form it. But these dense, implosive combinations of diverse and dissimilar sounds amount to more than the technique they employ in their joyously artificial reconstruction of the instability of lived, profane racial identity. An aesthetic stress is laid upon the sheer social and cultural distance which formerly separated the diverse elements now dislocated into novel meanings by their provocative aural juxtaposition.
Gilroy again explores this tension in relation to the commodification of dance music in the late-twentieth century, “whereby a commodity like a twelve-inch single, released from the belly of the multinational beast, comes to anticipate, even demand, supplementary creative input in the hidden spheres of public political interaction that wait further on up the road” — that is, in the sense that twelve-inch was “a new type of musical product that could maximise their [the record companies’] own economic opportunities, but this had other unintended consequences”, with this new format lending itself to new methodologies of “dubbing, scratching, and mixing … join[ing] production and consumption together”.
UK dubstep latches onto this wonky trajectory explicitly, oscillating between music-industrial recuperation and a next-level countercultural evasion, wrestling with a new post-empire sense of identity that was giving rise to a pervasive melancholy at the start of the twenty-first century, when the increasing homogeneity of pop-cultural expression necessitated the further exacerbation of those affective and aesthetic qualities that were most subversive — for the time being — to the recuperative tendencies of the overground.
The intensification of bass is integral to this, as I think it is notable that bass — particularly digitally synthesised bass — can become a problem for the commodity-object. I’m reminded here of DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, which cannot be properly reproduced on a vinyl format because — as she has often had to tell those who ask for a vinyl release — this physical format simply cannot handle the sub-bass sounds she has produced without losing a lot of their detail.
Dubstep twelve-inches may not have had this same problem, but they nonetheless pushed the format to its physical limits, necessitating new approaches to mixing and mastering. This objective errancy is important, and we can make a leap here from attempts to push the commodity-form to its limits and the eventual evasion of the physical product altogether, as dance music twelve-inches are eventually replaced by digital files, which once again allow for greater profit for record companies, but also lead inadvertently to new avenues to evasion from music-industrial capture and lawful dissemination, i.e., digital piracy — most notably in the lively remix/bootleg culture that dominates a platform like SoundCloud.
All of this is significant, in trying to distinguish UK dubstep from its US counterpart, because what we begin to see is how ‘brostep’ functioned as a recuperation of dubstep’s sonic palette. US EDM culture looks very different to its UK counterpart, and subsists on a wilful idiocy that vacates any political subterrain from its modes of expression.
Let us stick a pin in this observation for now, as what is interesting about a more contemporary hyperpop sound, in being openly influenced by its US dubstep antecedent, is that many artists have hoped to reinvigorate this sound with a micropolitics that it had previously ejected…
Remaining with UK dubstep, however, we can also note how the growing complexity of these methods of evasion from music-industrial capture, continually jousting in the break between identity and alienation, gave rise to a nihilistic tendency that was anathema to its US cousin. This was a consequence of rave’s long-since commercialised status, leading to a certain melancholia seeping into the underground. Indeed, there was a sense that the UK wanted to murder the pop-rave culture it had inadvertently given rise to, looking for the new by both eschewing an American influence — in UK hiphop specifically — and exploring new levels of intensity as even rave’s most radical currents found themselves susceptible to recuperation within the context of the music-industrial marketplace.
The emergence of grime is integral here, and must be understood as a defiant and nihilistic UK subculture that sought to distinguish itself from all American influence most forcefully. But it also had a far more complicated relationship with the UK’s own cultural history as well. This wasn’t music for the free party or the new cool of the private gatekept clubs; this was a music that reflected life on Britain’s streets, taking a perverse sort of pride in London’s quintessential ‘griminess’ in particular.
Here I always think about Kode9’s assessment of grime in 2014:
[O]ften when people are talking about the history of rock music, they say that punk killed rock. Punk was the end of rock and everything after then was just, like, undead zombie rock. I think you can do a parallel in the UK – I don’t know how far you could run with it – by saying it was grime that stuck the knife into rave. It was grime that killed this kind of peace, love, unity, respect, the hippy side of rave…
Kode also notes, however, that
every innovation of rave kind of came from a kind of mini-death. Rave has died a thousand deaths over the last twenty years, and each one of them produced something interesting. Darkside jungle, for example, was a breakdown of rave culture. It was a mini breakdown. It was a psychological breakdown, a mental breakdown, and it produced amazing music.
Grime was the product of another British breakdown, and dubstep arguably emerged as a kind of post-grime mutation that sought to deal with the melancholic aftermath of grime’s dark visions of life in the present, whilst also trying to recuperate some of what grime had sought to kill off before it. Dubstep is, after all, a mutant combination of dub sensibilities (particularly in its approach to bass), but is also coupled with the skittish drum patterns of 2-step garage. ‘Skittish’ is the operative word here, as whereas the original swing of 2-step gave it a romancing swagger, its dubstep variant can feel far more anxious.
And that was how Britain felt at the time: anxious. It is not for nothing that various classic dubstep tracks — Mala’s ‘Anti War Dub’ included — were used to soundtrack Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men. Dubstep was the sound produced by twenty-first-century children of empire; a multi-racial but nonetheless predominantly black subculture that expressed a certain kind of melancholia in response to the UK’s dwindling global significance and the alienation this produced in the children of immigrants who saw the UK both as coloniser and promised land. It was the sound of an identity crisis, and perhaps even an attempt to wrestle with a post-Y2K cultural impotence, as every dissenting subculture found itself recuperated too quickly.
I think you could argue that hyperpop developed in tandem to grime’s ascendancy, but far from its UK and American variants remaining terse and relatively detached, they have since been collapsed together and integrated with scenes spanning every continent.
A few nights before we went to see Jane Remover at the ICA, I was thinking about this whilst listening to Ryan Hemsworth’s COOL DJ MIX in bed with Byro — a mix I’d burned to a CD-r that rarely left my car in 2014, but which I hadn’t listened to since. Although Byro and I have bonded over a shared love of hyperpop this past year, it suddenly struck me how the version of hyperpop I was more familiar with was so different to the hyperpop Byro knew. In fact, it was most striking to me how indebted to grime this first wave of hyperpop was.
Hemsworth’s mix opens with the voice of Sarah Bonito, of hyperpop pioneers Kero Kero Bonito:
Hi there, this is Ryan Hemsworth. I’m a young adult who still wears a retainer sometimes because my dentist tells me to. This is a mix inspired by life, death, technology, rap music, Japan, being a cool DJ, kissing, cuddling, feeling hurt, feeling happy, feeling dumb, and other feelings. Please enjoy this mix because you are awesome and you deserve something enjoyable in life.
And from here moves at a surprisingly leisurely pace (compared to the extreme speeds of a more contemporary hyperpop) with unmistakable grime productions, at once cold but also sugar-coated, sitting alongside transatlantic R&B that is as joyfully romantic as it is melancholically wistful.
I’d never realised this before, but it appeared that this first wave of hyperpop had attempted to reinvigorate grime with rave’s peace-and-love tendencies, which grime had otherwise stuck the knife into. It is interesting, then, that grime, as rave’s ‘punk’ moment of blackened nihilism, begat not only dubstep, but also hyperpop.
Hyperpop too has had its own breakdown moment, in the form of its second wave, aka digicore, exacerbating the growing influence of an equally shaky emo-hardcore continuum to cut kawaii across a whole plane of affective intensities. Here, all affects collapse together, love and hate alike; far from being negated, however, the genre is buoyed by what Mark Fisher might call “an erotics of affect — it is about emotional engineering, not about the removal of all affect.” The task here is “to increase your affects.”
In so doing, the first wave of hyperpop collapsed together everything that came before it: 90s sugar pop, 00s rap metal, grime, dubstep, cloudrap… You can hear every pretty much every identifiable subcultural current of the last 35 years thrown in the mix, if you listen hard enough. It was a loving, intercontinental genre privileging online cuteness over grime’s streetwise fury — more cyberpunk than crustpunk. But it was perhaps its complicity in the viral cuteness of online culture in general that led to hyperpop becoming a categorical disaster for those associated with it. It is a movement that is at once born of the internet, and all the more susceptible to online homogenisation. It is for this reason that it was always at risk of collapsing into unlife. Hyperpop is dead; love live hyperpop.
Digicore — to use the title that is perhaps more fitting of hyperpop’s second wave — is notable in much the same way. Although the two waves sound entirely different, they share an approach to the total collapse of now. But a collapse is a movement into oblivion. It makes sense that hyperpop would appear to disappear once again…
To be continued…