Hyperpop is noisy, glitchy and hyper-referential. It is also something that has been extensively remixed by fans. But, just as hyperpop was really getting going, superstar protagonist Charli XCX sent out a nuclear tweet: “RIP Hyperpop?”
Who determines how contemporary music, particularly music born and disseminated online, gathers and dissipates? Many have called hyperpop a “micro-genre”. But is “genre”, even in its broadest usage, a useful frame for music that exists within the participatory affordances of new media? Internet music troubles the Western insistence on originality, copyright, permanence and the commodification of musical ownership that have guided traditional forms of genre construction, aligning more meaningfully with the social transmission of oral and folk cultures. Andrew Leyshon, Steve Jones, Steve Knopper, Jeremy Wade Morris, Vinícius de Aguiar and others have explored music industry and gatekeeping challenges in the face of music streaming, playlisting and algorithms. Yet once music leaves the control of record labels and musicians to travel through the networked creativity of fan interaction, the gatekeeping capabilities of intermediaries traditionally tasked with the categorisation and dissemination of music are weakened. Online remediation—the theory that new media forms recontextualise, adapt and borrow from older media to form a dynamic interaction between the past, present and future—can dissolve the parameters of a music text. Fans can take an active role not only in how music travels through platforms, but also in how it becomes volatile, sonically, audiovisually, culturally and aesthetically, as it passes through multiple creative voices.
Here, I suggest that the proliferation of digital media technologies and the accelerated participatory engagement with music they afford have destabilised genre as a coherent way of categorising and understanding certain new music. While the constraints of genre as a mode of categorising music have been explored from a range of angles, generative internet music like hyperpop solicits a supple framework that can accommodate iterative creativity, and multiple voices and modes of cultural production in response to the ways in which music can be created, critiqued and circulated in the meta-connectivity of the current digital moment. Using SOPHIE as a case study, I will open out these debates and resistance to see what an alternative might look and sound like.
About Holly Rogers
