A version of this essay with citations can be found here.
Glitchy, abrasive, noisy—these are just some of the words to describe hyperpop. Just as the name suggests, the genre pushes the limits of what “pop” can sound like. Think of high-pitched, modulated vocals; overboosted bass lines; loud and crass musical accents. Hyperpop tracks are dense in their production, which only reinforces its “hyper-” prefix.
However, beyond the musical aspects of the genre is a unique, inherently gendered, and queer space. As described by Lucy March, “Along with challenging traditional notions of genre, hyperpop serves to challenge hegemonic presumptions around the nature of identity. Hyperpop is also characterized by its propping up of marginalized identities: several of the higher-profile artists in the scene identify as transgender or gender non-binary.”
Some examples of these higher-profile artists include the late Scottish musician, SOPHIE, often referred to as the “mother of hyperpop.” Others include the genderfluid artist Dorian Electra, Ashnikko, Laura Les of 100 gecs, Rebecca Black (in her later discography), Kim Petras, and select tracks from Charli XCX’s catalog, to name a few. It is evident that the genre’s pioneering and high-profile artists are women and gender minorities (WGM).
There is also a subgenre of hyperpop that can be described as “bimbo hyperpop”. This subgenre is characterized by hyperpop’s signature musical arrangements (such as the characterizations above), but the lyrical themes in these songs are hyperfeminine, and lean heavily into sexuality, with vocal tones that are high-pitched and “valley girl-like.” Examples include Ayesha Erotica, Slayyyter, Kim Petras, and That Kid. It can be argued that Ayesha Erotica is a pioneer of this subgenre, with a discography chock full of sexual and feminine tracks. Erotica’s most streamed track, “Literal Legend,” opens with “Hey, this is Ayesha Erotica / The world’s number one coke whore.”
What is interesting about the hyperpop space is its maximalism, and why a genre that is dense and jarring in its production attracts oppressed minorities that have been forced to make themselves smaller in society.
I do it for the girls and gays, that’s it
One of the most defining characteristics of hyperpop is its roots and references to internet culture. While many journalists started documenting the rise of hyperpop in 2020, the genre’s origins can be documented to the early 2010s, such as the establishment of A.G. Cook’s record label, PC Music. PC Music found its legs on the music streaming platform Soundcloud, uploading its first releases in 2013. Cook himself is a prominent hyperpop producer, collaborating and creating hyperpop remixes of tracks by artists like Lady Gaga, Caroline Polachek, and Rina Sawayama.
In 2020, hyperpop surged into the mainstream through TikTok. Emergent (and now prominent) songs such as 100 gecs’ “money machine,” and Ayesha Erotica’s “Nasty” became viral on the platform, with the tracks having over 93 million and 6 million streams respectively on Spotify. Spotify also created the hyperpop playlist in 2020, which contributed to the genre catapulting onto the radar of the mainstream.
However, beyond the conditions of how hyperpop was established and propagated, its musical structure lends itself to internet and digital culture. Hyperpop is electronic, and the presence of physical instruments in its tracks is scant, if not non-existent at all. It is digitally produced and mastered, allowing for the jarring, overboosted elements to shine. The genre’s inherent character to be loud and abrasive is rooted in how it is digitally created.
Hyperpop artists use internet culture to challenge social norms of gender and sexuality, and the genre’s unapologetic platforming of WGM can be analyzed through the lens of cyberfeminism, a strand of feminism that, in its broadest sense, aims to “demasculinize” technology and the internet. One of the field’s pioneers, Donna Haraway, comments on the reimagining of technology, internet, and gender as, “In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.”
In the 1980s, cyberfeminists saw technology as a male-dominated space. A collective of female scholars, coders, and artists then attempted to reimagine what the internet and technology could look like: a mode of hacking “the codes of patriarchy” and a way to “escape gender online.”
While Haraway and Scott lean into the idea of the cyberspace as a utopia that abolishes gender, radical cyberfeminists purport that the textual creations on cybersites (how individuals communicate with each other on the internet and create communities) do not erase gender, but rather, “intensify its performance.” On the Internet, identity is king. The mere creation of social media accounts or a person’s online presence demands one to establish their identity—how you present yourself online (the prominence of “aesthetics”), selecting your gender, usernames, online bios, and the like.
In the case of gender, the Internet’s ability to transcend borders to create communities nurtured the advent of both queer and feminist online communities as well as gender discourse. In the 21st century, websites such as Tumblr created a space for Gen Z and younger millennials to explore gender identity and name it, with microblogs dedicated to the “atomization of gender,” the phenomena of creating highly specific labels for almost all experiences of gender. The blog, All The Genders, All The Sexualities and similar blogs such as the now-defunct queerdictionary.tumblr.com and mogai-lexicon.tumblr.com (MOGAI, meaning Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex) created glossaries of hyperspecific genders such as abroromantic and abrosexual, which means having “an orientation or feelings about it that constantly change and cannot be pinned down for this reason.” It is clear that the 2010s saw heightened discourse and self-discovery on the Internet among then-adolescents. The Internet’s contribution to the intensification of gender identity and expression cannot be downplayed.
How do we then marry gender’s prominence in Internet culture and hyperpop as a gendered space? As discussed earlier, hyperpop is inherently tied to the Internet. Its music proliferates in online spaces: Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube. The Internet as a space that intensifies gender expression reinforces hyperpop as both a musical and visual experience. Hyperpop’s eccentric, visually stimulating, colorful, and epilepsy-inducing aesthetic cannot be separated from its musical texture. Hyperpop’s adjacent terms such as “glitchcore” and “digicore” only emphasize its roots in Internet culture. Just as the Internet is bloated with content, hyperpop’s maximalist structure mirrors and reproduces that same burgeoning characteristic. Moreover, the Internet’s ability to cross borders only adds to the musical influences of artists from opposite ends of the world.
Am I loud and clear
Many of hyperpop’s pioneers and prominent artists come from the West. However, today, hyperpop continues to be an emerging scene in Asia. Asian musicians are just starting to lean into the type of hyperpop as defined by its Western counterparts. Prime examples include Sobs’ frontwoman Cayenne’s solo project, which is unapologetically loud, epileptic, glitchy, and maximalist. Her recent EP, CAYENNE SLAY ERA, incorporates the same visual and musical experience of her Western contemporaries.
In the Philippines, emerging artists such as MIKASAN incorporate elements of hyperpop and the vocal stylings of bimbo hyperpop in her discography. Rapper Pette Shabu creates hip hop music, but there are influences and elements of the same maximalist aspect of hyperpop in the production. Other emerging acts include vice* who describes himself as a creator of “unapologetically feisty digicore music.” In general, hyperpop in the Philippines is still heavily linked with the electronic scene, with collectives such as Showtime Official Club and the genre of budots—a similar, maximalist, electronic genre in the Philippines that is rooted in the class conditions of the country—having their own elements of hyperpop and its density. Likewise, Cayenne’s lean discography has scant references to the femininity and gendered aspect of Western hyperpop. Her track, “Centrefold,” has one line with minor sexual undertones: “But I like it I like it I like it when you touch me there.”
Is the queer and gendered core of the genre that is prominent in its Western counterpart as prominent? It’s hard to tell as early as now, especially as the scene continues to emerge. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any. Filipino electronic and dance collectives such as That Elephant Party are explicitly LGBTQ+ spaces, and are cultivating hyperpop as they emerge. Pette Shabu’s “THE FUTURE IS TRANS” makes references to the Filipino trans experience. In the diss track, “bulbulin ka na,” she drops sexual references in certain lines, such as “Giving good head / tanggal pati dandruff” (Giving good head / Even dandruff’s removed).
Whether it’s in Southeast Asia or Asia in general, artists across different genres seem to borrow elements or are influenced by hyperpop, but have yet to create the clear delineation that Western hyperpop artists do. As the genre grows and emerges in these regions, there is an open space that is waiting to be filled; whether or not the space will be as gendered and queer as its Western parallel has yet to be clearly determined.
Immaterial girls
The core of music is the individual experience and expression, both for musicians and listeners. These individual experiences eventually grow into communities, into movements, and build the genres and subgenres that we love and recognize today. However, the discussions surrounding music and identity transcend just resonating with the music—what is unique about gendered spaces in music like hyperpop is its emancipatory dimension. In a genre that pushes and exceeds the limits of pop music through intense, abrasive, and loud instrumentation, queer people and women push their own limits and experience of gender; what it means to be “unapologetically queer and here.” It is a genre that stands against gender oppression, refusing to make itself small in the same way that WGM are forced to be in the status quo.
What then is the importance of emancipation in music? What could this look like in the future? As we continue to analyze society’s relationship with music, there is a constant challenge to find the balance between the “universalization” aspect of music to transcend identity (meaning, to resonate with people regardless of what they identify as), but also recognizing the lived experiences it is continually shaped by.
Ultimately, hyperpop is resistance. It resists pop conventions and gender conventions, all housed in a cyberspace that cannot be held down and controlled.
Header image: Pette Shabu/Instagram; SOPHIE/Press; Cayenne/Instagram
kara likes music 