The Undeath of Hyperpop (Part Two):
Pop as Noise

Arthur Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony:

These systems! Elsewhere I will show how they have really never been just what they still could be: namely, systems of presentation (Darstellung). Methods by which a body of material is coherently organized and lucidly classified, methods derived from principles which will assure an unbroken logic. I will show how quickly this system fails, how soon one has to break into it to patch up its holes with a second system (which is still no system), in order even halfway to accommodate the most familiar facts. It should be quite different! A real
system should have, above all, principles that embrace all the facts. Ideally, just as many facts as there actually are, no more, no less. Such principles are natural laws. And only such principles, which are not qualified by exceptions, would have the right to be regarded as generally valid. Such principles would share with natural laws this characteristic of unconditional validity. The laws of art, however, consist mainly of exceptions!

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In Part One, I reflected on early hyperpop’s relationship to grime — a reflection which followed on from a quick appraisal of the differences between US and UK dubsteps. I was thinking about this because grime seemed to be a far more explicit influence on early hyperpop from the UK than is often acknowledged today, as a variety of scenes wrestled with grime’s post-rave punk moment, blending together but also intensifying various affects that had recently felt more disparate.

Perhaps there’s another way of making / updating this connection… Considering SOPHIE’s fondness for Autechre, and Autechre’s love of early hiphop and 80s electro, maybe it is not such a leap to say that SOPHIE is to 00s grime as Autechre were to 80s hiphop…? Different affects produced, different times occupied — but some shared sensibility with regards to the playful deconstruction and (re)synthesis of a cultural moment…

Something is missing though. Maybe I’m just being stupid. There is something unnameable driving new processes of sonic recombination and fragmentation here, and its elusiveness keeps drawing me back to the topic…

Ultimately, it’s hard to clearly name or draw out what’s really going on here; to attend to and find meaning in a (dis)continuum. Grime seemed to place itself in punkish opposition to both UK rave’s peace-and-love aesthetic and the influence of American hiphop, and this was a rupture that produced a great deal of what is contemporarily known as pop, but it remains impossible to make any clean break or connection between warring countercultural currents swirling around in the Black Atlantic. Any attempt to produce a linear trajectory here is quickly humiliated. Everything everywhere all at once.

This is true enough of the relationship between the US and the UK, each impossible to approach without due attention to their syncretic constitutions, long entangled in a cross-cultural exchange — with each other; with the Other — as different communities have contended with the cultural consequences of empire, sharing histories but differing in contexts. This is no different for grime, as an expression of a cresting (then crashing) wave of various post-imperial processes and affects, and all that followed them. It is partly the impossibility of disentanglement here that helps make sense of hyperpop’s relationship to a wider culture and to itself, because the development of this catch-all genre-marker is indicative of a further explosion within any understanding of the Black Atlantic.

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For Gilroy, the Black Atlantic was a term used to describe a sprawling intercontinental plurality, exploring the significance (but also the difficulty of assigning any significance as a form of particularity) to black culture as a monolith. His analysis weighs heavy of black music’s relationship to the experience of slavery (direct or ancestral), of course, but this also leads to its wider percolation among a global oppressed / proletariat.

It is from this perspective that Gilroy builds on a conception of “double consciousness” — generally understood as a particular and racialised form of alienation, which has nonetheless proven culturally generative, felt through an unstable situatedness between cultures.

For W.E.B. Du Bois, for example — although again particular to black experience — “double consciousness” was intended to refer to the experiences of any person who is a part of both a hegemonic culture and a more minoritarian culture simultaneously. For Frantz Fanon, this was even more specific, as he talks about black skin and white masks. But there are various other, more macro-political perspectives to consider here, such as the double consciousness of those situated between a Global North and South.

Before long, then, the doubleness of this form of consciousness is continually fragmented and/or expanded, such that any assumption that the double can be neatly organised into a seemingly obvious sense of Twoness is deceptive.

Gilroy, for example, writes (with emphasis added):

Double consciousness emerges from the unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being, and seeing. The first is racially particularistic, the second nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than from their aspiration towards a nation state of their own. The third is diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist.

In more recent years, this multivalent sense of the double — multivalent in that the double can itself be doubled or divided across various scales — has led to others adapting a sense of double consciousness that no longer centres on the split between two. For José Medina does Alcoff, for instance, “double consciousness” is today better framed as a “kaleidoscopic consciousness”, because it is no longer so easy to demarcate any clear line between dynamic socio-political opposites.

All of this is integral to any consideration of contemporary music because, as Gilroy argues, “the place of music in the black Atlantic world means surveying the self-understanding articulated by the musicians who have made it, the symbolic use to which their music is put by other black artists and writers, and the social relations which have produced and reproduced the unique expressive culture in which music comprises a central and even foundational element.”

It is not simply that music occupies a privileged position here — although it does — but that it is through music — as “a non-representational, non-conceptual form” — that an “embodied subjectivity” is best uncovered, whereas all other forms of expression may inevitably fail at the same task. “Music, the grudging gift that supposedly compensated slaves not only for their exile from the ambiguous legacies of practical reason but for their complete exclusion from modern political society, has been refined and developed so that it provides an enhanced mode of communication beyond the petty power of words — spoken or written.”

It is not so much that music speaks for itself, then, but rather than it functions according to different logics of harmony and disharmony, tonality and atonality, than the logics of language. It is in this way that music is the privileged vector of all that is confusing and conflicting, sensory and harmonious, dissenting and rebellious. The task is how to bring those affects to light in other forms, such that musical sense disturbs the forms of common sense that circulate in opposition to its modes of expression.

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Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai:

Before reading this brilliant book [Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony] I had thought that book should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simple-minded way of looking at the question.

If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese it is a rather naive way of thinking of a work of art, it’s as if you thought this was the way to make a painting: The sky is blue. I will paint the sky blue. The sun is yellow. I will paint the sun yellow. A tree is green. I will paint the tree green. And what colour is the trunk? Brown. So what colour do you use? Ridiculous. Even leaving abstract painting out of the question it is closer to the truth that a painter would think of surface that he wanted in a painting and the kind of light and the lines and the relationship of colours and be attracted to painting objects that could be represented in a painting with those properties. In the same way a composer does not for the most part think that he would like to initiate this or that sounds — he thinks that he wants the texture of a piano with a violin, or a piano with a cello, or four syringes instruments or six, or a symphony orchestra; he thinks of relations of notes.

[…]

& in my mind I would hear languages related like a circle of fifths, I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words …

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Today, the dubstep stylings of Skrillex et al. are acknowledged far more openly as influences on the noisier end of the club underground. From Jane Remover to Kavari, US maximalism appears to have left more of a lasting impact on the sounds of contemporary dancefloors than I’m sure anyone would have predicted ten-to-fifteen years ago.

But hyperpop’s new wave is also far more kaleidoscopic than it was previously. Where hyperpop expands on the black atlantic is that it not only utilises transatlantic sounds produced through the syncretic integration of the former enslaved with other communities already living in the heart of empire, but also many other communities formerly subjected to empire as well. The importance of k-pop to hyperpop’s sound, for example, cannot be overstated; k-pop as an industry that is hyper-Americanised, for better and for worse, and which is similarly a product of its country’s complicated relationship to imperial superpowers — Japan and the US most significantly.

Hyperpop remains interesting because it is a catch-all, kaleidoscopic genre that seeks to embody these never-more-complex forms of subjectivity / subjectivation. If this subjectivity is still somehow “doubled”, it is in the sense that hyperpop contains the warring expressions of both imperial and minoritarian socio-cultural positions. Hyperpop is a sort of accelerationist pop in this regard, seeking out the various pop motifs produced by postmodern capitalism but not belonging to it. It is a sonic domain that, today at least, seeks to recuperate what is most popular and exacerbate what remains most underground about it.

Originally, of course, this wasn’t the case; the first wave of hyperpop was driven by the privately educated (AG Cook; Charli xcx) and the wilfully ignorant, even racist (GFOTY), at times appearing to lampoon the position of genre gentrifier, but with the parody often being very close to the bone, such that it felt, at its worst, like a farcical and intensified affirmation of the truth…

Hyperpop was a kind of canary in the coal mine for two currents in this regard — a meeting point of middle-class and working-class pop sensibilities, which we might compare to how Mark Fisher writes about the ‘glam art pop discontinuum’:

Everyone knows that there has always been a deep affinity between the working class and the aristocracy. Fundamentally aspirational, working class culture is foreign to the levelling impulse of bourgeois culture — and of course this can be politically ambivalent, since if aspiration is about the pursuit of status and authority, it will confirm and vindicate the bourgeois world. It is only if the desire to escape inspires taking a line of flight towards the proletarian collective body and Nu-earth that it is politically positive.

Glam was a return to the Mod moment(um) that had been curtailed by the hippie hedonic longeur of the late 60s. Like most names for subcultural groups, the term ‘Mod’ started off life as an insult, in this case hailing from the mods’ perpetual adversaries, the rockers. As Jeff Nuttall explains, to the rockers, “‘Mod’ meant effeminate, stuck-up, emulating the middle classes, apsiring to a competitive sophistication, snobbish, phony.’ (Bomb Culture, 33)

But no dilettante/ or filigree fancy/ beats the plastic you

Whereas a working-class pop had explored new territories in the original ‘bubblegum bass’ of UKG, hyperpop initially seemed to reverse the polarity once again, in line with socio-cultural shifts affecting the UK pop landscape during the initial years of austerity, during which pop once again became the preserve of a middle class. SOPHIE, however, reconnected hyperpop to its roots, complicating the aristocratic cultural gatekeeping of cis gays with a new trans-gression.

This terse relationship between a pop aristocracy and a pop working class has continued to this day, but the pendulum has become to swing back with other way, with the patriarchal brostep of dubstep’s later years also becoming fodder for new kinds of queering. With a new militancy, the pioneers of hyperpop’s second wave seek to not only dislodge pop’s recuperation, but also hide what it has stolen from a music-industrial aristocracy. That many of these figures have since disowned hyperpop doesn’t affect this tendency; their disowning of the genre-marker is rather indicative of this very process.

It’s complicated, and no less so when brostep (and Skrillex in particular) is still invoked as a major influence. This is most surprising given Skrillex’s complete lack of political nous, which those influenced by him clearly do not share. Skrillex has always appeared staunchly white and apolitical, after all; even in light of his more recent and more emphatic engagement with UK club culture and diversity — Fred Again and Four Tet making for intriguing bedfellows, considering the trio’s respective backgrounds — this sits uncomfortably alongside the fact that he was photographed palling around with Jordan Peterson as recently as 2022.

Not that this appears to count for much of anything, but it is all the more intriguing that those most likely to cite Skrillex as a musical influence — like Jane Remover and Kavari — are also those repeating the nihilistic gestures of grime, stripping brostep and early hyperpop of their peace-and-love aesthetics to replace it with a nihilistic fury directed at the modern world. It’s confusing, yes, but also just one more reflection of where we’re all at…

This political current within contemporary hyperpop is also interesting, not only because it seems like a protest against the characteristics that previously defined the genre-marker it has inadvertently inherited, but also because it recuperates more militantly the affects that hyperpop’s first wave generally held a much more ambivalent relationship towards. Returning again to the recent Jane Remover gig at the ICA, it feels increasingly significant to me that Dazegxd’s supporting DJ set can be summed up as an American playing an hour of jungle to a room of London teenagers. Everything came full circle.

The question is: why? And the answer is obvious. Rave’s most nihilistic affects are all the more appropriate today, perhaps now more than ever. For all hyperpop’s postmodern strafing of genre-forms in a friction-free space, it is recovered a salvagepunk sensibility — more viciously in hyperflip and dariacore — to reassert the particular affects that the cultural objects utilised carry within them. It is for this reason that I think hyperpop has more recently become a lot more noisy…

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With brakence ‘ruining’ hyperpop by neutralising its ‘hyper’ designation, what’s left of the second wave begins to shade further and further into noise, hyperflipping out of the frying pan and into the fire. But I wonder: if hyperpop’s most extreme current — digicore — is where the movement remains at its most interesting, is it better to think of this evasive genre more in terms of ‘noise’ as an equally ambigious and kaleidoscopic genre-marker in its own right?

As Ray Brassier writes, ‘noise’ is an anti-label often used to denote “anomalous zones of interference between genres” and “forms of sonic experimentation that ostensibly defy musicological classification”, paradoxically becoming “a specific sub-genre of musical vanguardism and a name for what refuses to be subsumed by genre”. But too often, noise becomes also becomes a by-word for aleatory expression; for the sculpting of sonic ‘randomness’ given over to chance. Brassier is more interested in song that are constructed “around an overwhelming plethora of sonic detail, challenging the listener to engage with a surfeit of information”, rather than an “[o]rthodox noise”, which “compresses information, drowning out detail in a torrential deluge”. He highlights band To Live and Shave in LA as an example, whose songs “evade decipherment through a surplus rather than deficit of sense.”

He continues:

Yet it would be a mistake to confuse Shave’s refusal to signify and their methodical subtractions from genre for a concession to postmodern polysemia and eclecticism. The fitting analogue is the bracing formalism of Pierre Guyotat or Iannis Xenakis, rather than the agreeable pastiche of John Barth or Alfred Schnittke. Indeed, the only banner which Smith is willing to affix to Shave’s work is that of what he calls the ‘PRE’ aesthetic. PRE is “a negation of the errant supposition that spiffed-up or newly hatched movements supplant others fit for retirement [… PRE? As in: all possibilities extant, even the disastrous ones.” The imperative to innovate engenders an antinomy for any given genre. Either one keeps repeating the form of innovation; in which case it becomes formulaic and retroactively negates its own novelty. Or one seeks constantly new types of innovation; in which case the challenge consists in identifying novel forms which will not merely reiterate the old. But one must assume an infinite, hence unactualizable set of forms in order not to repeat, and the limits of finite imagination invariably determine the exhaustion of possibility. It is never enough to keep multiplying forms of invention; one must also produce new genres within which to generate new forms. Noise becomes generic as the form of invention which is obliged to substitute the abstract negation of genre for the production of hitherto unknown genres.

It is interesting that Shave’s songs are, on the ‘surface’, still ‘pop’ songs, but which also channel the total noise of a given moment. ‘The Plot That Failed’, for instance, sounds like a song emanating from the peripheries of radio transmission, signals overlapping, multiple ‘songs’ attempting to tear through the ether at once. It retains a certain audible ‘form’, but one that is intruded upon with a strange absoluteness.

Rather than this again being a kind of aleatory happening, you might imagine the conductor, with express intent, to be a DJ holding onto errancy, twisting dials from the passenger seat of a racing car, remaining in a position out of phase whilst hurtling down a highway, way over the speed limit.

To Live and Shave in L.A. express a salvagepunk tendency in the very materiality of their sound — a now-timeless analogue mode. But hyperpop, at its most abrasive, functions differently. In many respects, digicore becomes a better word for it. “Hardcore”, after all, is a word drawn from the term’s use in construction; ‘hardcore’ is concrete detritus, rubble, ripe for salvage and reuse, but weighty and ugly. The ‘-core’ affix has since been divorced from this entirely, but keeping it in mind, ‘digicore’ is a fitting name for the weighted objectivity of digital detritus. A contradiction, yes, but an achingly contemporary one.

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If we follow Jauque X’s claim, discussed in Part 1, that brakence ruined hyperpop — and I think we can say (even pejoratively) that he did, by grinding hyperpop’s hardcore down to a far more palatable sand — then we can thank him for allowing hyperpop today (whatever it chooses or does not choose to call itself) to accentuate its raucous particularity once again. Hyperpop, at its best, is noise; it is hardcore pop — and hardcore pop is fun:

Hardcore pop is fun
‘Cause it’s just like chewing gum
Almost makes you wanna come
Go out back and shoot your gun

[…]

Pop music’s a fan
A fan to a fire
Pop music’s for you

Hyperpop isn’t so much dead as digging up graves, and long many it continue to make a racket loud enough to wake corpses.