Exploring the Trans Roots of Hyperpop
A look into why the new pop genre finds its home in largely queer spheres.
Story by Ty Marsh/ @tyolinmarsh / pronouns: they/them
Illustration by Isabel Canales / @isabel.canales / pronouns: she/her
Step aside, Top 40. There’s a new genre of pop in town, and it’s run by queers. The genre, late-2010’s in origin and appropriately titled “hyperpop” — unofficially coined beep-boop music — has risen in popularity recently as the music industry leans into digital consumption and production accessibility. Transgender artists, despite the music industry’s historical rejection of them, have found home, and even success within the hyperpop niche. Artists like Arca, Dorian Electra, Kim Petras, SOPHIE and Laura Les, each trans or nonbinary themselves, currently lead the loosely-defined genre. Countless other smaller trans and enby artists push it forward, diversifying hyperpop’s sound and expanding its influence throughout the internet.
Trans-inclusivity is hyperpop’s framework. SOPHIE, a genre pioneer, maintains her influence on the genre since its creation. After the release of her first project, “Product” in 2015, fans referred to SOPHIE’s sound as “PC Music,” meaning ‘personal computer’ music, due to the techo-pitched, futuristic sound. PC Music is also a London-based record label created by the equally-influential A.G. Cook, which has served as a home to many early artists of the hyperpop genre today. Though not signed to PC Music, SOPHIE’s unmatched sound, consisting of pitched-vocals and heavily experimental instrumentals, as well as her friendship and collaboration with many artists under the label, solidified her status within the cult genre.
Upon her debut, the artist rarely allowed for photos with fans, and refused to show her face in any visuals or art related to her music. That changed in 2017 when SOPHIE released her debut album “Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides,” and publicly came out as a transgender woman. She used the music video for her lead single “It’s Okay to Cry” to intentionally show her face to her audience for the first time.
It’s not hard to see the trans influence on the artist’s sound before her face reveal with the Grammy-nominated album. You just need to know how to look for these influences. Within “Product,” each song consists of hyperpop-signature pitched vocals and maximalist, exaggerated lyrics regarding hyperfeminine caricatures such as latex, silicone and ponytails (listen to the song “Hard”).
However, in her 2017 album, SOPHIE leans into her transgender experience. She unapologetically admits, “I’m real when I [photo]shop my face” in the song, “Faceshopping,” and questions the reality of gendered consciousness. In “Immaterial,” she asks, “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?” The album doesn’t stray from the original extremist pitched sounds from her previous work – it simply exists as a further contextualization of her now fully-realized identity.
Pitched vocal tracks are more mainstream due to the recent breakout artists “100 gecs,” a St. Louis duo consisting of Dylan Brady and the absolute trans icon Laura Les. The two have unreleased work on Soundcloud dating back years, but reached the hyperpop mainstream in 2019 with their debut studio album, “1000 gecs.” Les, credited with naming the duo after accidentally ordering 100 geckos online, has been open about the reasoning behind pitching her vocals up, stating that it not only sounds ‘cooler’ to her - it helps in calming her gender dysphoria when listening back to herself.
Pitched vocal effects are a reason why many trans artists are drawn to the hyperpop sound. Mainstream artists influenced by hyperpop, such as genre-benders Charli XCX and Rico Nasty, use pitched vocals liberally. In fact, both artists released singles this year produced by Brady using this technique, and were featured in the duo’s remix project of their debut, 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues.
Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of 100 gecs is it’s absurdity in both lyrics and sound. The intro to the duo’s most popular song, “Money Machine,” begins with a jarring callout by Les - “Hey you lil piss baby, you think you’re so f*cking cool? Huh? You think you’re so f*cking tough? You talk a lot of big game for someone with such a small truck.” The emasculation does not stop there, though. Les also compares her rival’s arms to little cigarettes, threatening to “smoke” them, and then promising to ghost her opponent once they admit they’ve fallen in love with her.
With an accompanying chorus that speaks of big boys coming in with big trucks, assumingly much larger than Les’s antagonist’s, and a chaotic 18-second sound breakdown to close, the track reads more like an extreme musical parody than a signature song from a debut album.
But that’s the beauty of hyperpop. It is defined by pushing pop music to its limits and satirizing the gendered music industry. There’s an enjoyable sense of irony and juxtaposition.
There’s just something so entertaining about being called a “little piss baby” by someone who sounds like a chipmunk. The hypermasculinity of the song, accompanied by Les’ vocals read as caricature because that’s the entire point. The song pokes fun at the “manly” sounds of pop punk with open threats and corny one-liners. We all loved 3OH!3’s beef with some girl’s boyfriend (despite being vegetarian), but the annoying thing about “Don’t Trust Me” is that people actually read it as a legitimate “for the boys” grudge anthem. The musical tropes of both angry hypermasculinity and hypersexualized femininity underlie the gender binary’s utter absurdity and make listeners aware of the root folly of the gender binary.
Trans people, especially trans women, notice these standards more quickly than cis-gendered people because of how unachievable and toxic the expectations of gendered idealism truly are.
Growing up, girls are expected to listen and look up to the female artists of their time, historically thin, white, and feminine, while boys are pushed to explore the angry and often misogynistic sounds of rock & roll, rap, and punk. Trans people who transition within the binary have the distinct experience of aiming to fulfill these ideals from both sides within their lifetimes, resulting in that jarring awareness of absurdity along the way.
So, reader, understand that hyperpop matters as a safe space for trans artists to explore musicality. It is a genre built on laughing in the face of what is normal and creating something so extreme within its boundaries that the obvious gendered tropes become bizarre.
As hyperpop inches closer to the horizons of the mainstream, musicians outside of the transgender experience have added to the genre, notably Shygirl, Alice Longyu Gao, and That Kid bring new interpretations of the sound for listeners - this development isn’t bad, though.
Hyperpop isn’t exclusively trans – it never has been. As public consciousness of gender and sexuality grows, musicians and listeners will inevitably grow tired of the gendered traditionalism in music and will look for new sounds to replace it. Maybe hyperpop isn’t a genre after all – maybe it’s simply a movement for artists to reject current standards in the hopes of a better future. Or maybe it’s just a fad that artists are jumping on now. One thing is for sure, though: trans artists have inherently been a part of the hyperpop conversation from the beginning, and they’re here to stay.
For more insight on this topic, check out Ringtone Magazine’s story on trans artists in the genre: https://www.ringtonemag.com/2020/08/how-hyperpop-gives-trans-artists-voice_13.html