This piece was written for The Outcrowd, Syracuse University’s only student-run LGBTQIA+ publication, and published in collaboration with The Daily Orange. Read The OutCrowd’s fall 2021 issue here.

Driving five hours away from campus to go to my first hyperpop show was the most eager I’ve been in my entire life. I got to the venue before the doors had even opened, imagining that I’d be the very first one to get into the venue and to make my way to the front row. But as I walked closer, I noticed that there was already a line of excited fans. When I thought that I’d gotten to the end of the line, I saw that it was just turning around the corner, stretching all the way around the block.

The show was being hosted by the music video channel Overcast, who announced in June 2021 that they’d be bringing some of their most talented and popular artists to Philadelphia on Oct. 9, 2021. My favorite artists right now, aldn and midwxst, were going to be performing at the show. Within 12 hours of tickets going on sale, they’d already sold out.

All 1,100 audience members eventually made their way into the venue, making for some of the most tightly packed mosh pits I’ve ever been in. After the show, I squeezed my way out of the pit and began mingling with other fans outside of the venue, even meeting a handful of artists who’d come from all over the country just to see their friends perform. Right as my friend called our Uber, I noticed someone across the street who I recognized from Twitter — Billy Bugara.

Bugara, who was only 21 years old at the time, had already become the creative director of SoundCloud, the social media manager of the music blog Masked Gorilla, and they had written for the website of the music video channel Lyrical Lemonade. They also recently went on to help start the independent label deadAir, whose artists include quinn, dltzk and saturn.

Bugara and I stayed in touch, and on a call I asked how they defined hyperpop.

“In the most basic way you can put it, hyperpop is just contemporary future pop,” they said. “It’s taking pop music to levels it hasn’t been to yet as far as experimentation, creativity and overall embodying the modern sentiment in general.”

Hyperpop can also be seen as a musical reflection of the chronically online LGBTQIA+ Gen-Z experience. If we’re talking the historical experience of “the Closet,” the advent of the internet digitized those closets and equipped them with portals to connect with queer, trans and ally people around the world. Hyperpop — which utilizes highly electronic and glitchy sounds to create music so extreme that listeners often interpret it as self-parody — has transformed digital queer and trans niches into full on parties.

The word “hyperpop” was popularized in 2019 by a Spotify editorial playlist of the same name. The term had been used in Spotify’s metadata since 2014, and even though it would take the streaming service five years to create the playlist, it would still go on to take ownership of hyperpop in many listeners’ minds despite the scene’s origins on SoundCloud. Bugara admitted that to this day, SoundCloud will “recognize what scenes are brewing on their platform but (won’t) capitalize on them,” leaving platforms like Spotify the opportunity to swoop in.

The hyperpop scene as we know it today started in 2013 by trans producer Sophie Xeon with the release of the track “BIPP,” which instantly received praise from outlets like Pitchfork, who declared it the best new track of that week. A year later, SOPHIE shook up the musical landscape yet again with the track “LEMONADE,” which combined the producer’s usual earcandy refrains with a bubblegum pop melody so sweet that it rotted the teeth of some critics. Both “BIPP” and “LEMONADE” would be featured on SOPHIE’s debut album PRODUCT.

Despite overwhelming acclaim from other outlets, the budding scene wasn’t without deriders. Pop critic Alexis Petridis from the Guardian wrote in 2015 that SOPHIE’s album was nothing more than “slappingly obvious pop provocations.” Petridis would go on to write that “Sophie and PC Music have nothing new to say in response, not a single idea that hasn’t already been explored to the point of exhaustion.”

PC Music is the record label and collective started by British producer A.G. Cook, who’s most known for being Charli XCX’s executive producer on several of her projects, including 2017 mixtape “Number 1 Angel” and the 2020 studio album “How I’m Feeling Now,” and for dividing critics straight down the middle with his avant-garde pieces of sonic exploration.

PC Music, which was made up of signees that Cook discovered on SoundCloud, frequently collaborated with SOPHIE, and the music they put out can only be described in culinary terms: it sounds like they went into a kitchen from the year 3021, put bubblegum pop, trap, crunkcore, 8-bit and dubstep in a blender, and decided to keep that blender running at the highest possible setting while they banged their pots and pans against the chromium metal countertop to make the drums.

To make things even more confusing, after PC Music solidified themselves in the musical ecosystem, artists not signed to the label started drawing influence and collaborating with them, with each artist bringing their own set of esoteric influences into the mix. Dorian Electra — a genderfluid artist from Houston, Texas — will add in baroque organs, harpsichords and Gregorian chants, creating an end result that sounds straight out of the Halo soundtrack. The duo 100 Gecs will add in hints of ska to create some of the most annoyingly catchy melodies you’ll ever hear.

If things weren’t already chronically online enough, Laura Les from 100 Gecs pitches their vocals up after recording them. The technique comes from “nightcore,” which was a form of remixing songs on YouTube and SoundCloud where users would speed up and pitch up popular tracks. Many different artists in the hyperpop scene have taken on the technique, making for vocals that sound like SpongeBob SquarePants ranting to you about ketamine while already tripping on LSD.

Despite its seeming novelty, the technique actually serves a deeper purpose for many of the artists using it. In June, quinn — an artist originally from the DMV (a colloquial term for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area) — tweeted out, “i don’t pitch up my voice because of hyperpop, i’m just transgender.”

drop a comment if u want another OC show :sunglasses:
(zac greer, midwxst, aldn, & koi @ overcast n friends 10/9/21)

A photo posted by overcastaz

Pitching up the vocals helps many trans artists relieve the gender dysphoria they get from hearing their voice back on the recording. This form of vocal manipulation may sound uncanny and artificial to new hyperpop listeners, but it’s actually helping those in the hyperpop community create a more authentic version of themselves on the recording.

quinn’s musical work would actually go on to start an entire new scene called “digicore.” Digicore spun off from hyperpop in 2017, and in 2018, Bugara came across its beginnings while scouting out artists for the blog Underground Vampire Club. Even though Bugara wasn’t an artist themself, they got sucked into Discord servers with digicore artists and became great friends with them, curating their music into a playlist for SoundCloud.

“What that term embodies is a community of artists that have all gone up together,” Bugara told the OutCrowd, emphasizing that each digicore artist comes in with a wide variety of inspirations.

If you click play on Bugara’s digicore playlist, you’ll hear one song that sounds like emo rap, one song that sounds like plugg (an emerging subgenre of hip-hop that features minimalist drums and an 808 so fat that it completely envelopes the airy synth melodies lying underneath) and even a song that sounds closer to folk than it does to any form of hip-hop at all.

The community was created with a culture of acceptance that has made it a home for queer and trans teens expressing themselves with music.

“It’s almost a crime not to be accepting,” Bugara said.

Bugara hopes that, going into the future, less “industry-ready acts” will be able to see more success.

“This time last year, if you told me, ‘Hey, who’s gonna be the biggest star in the scene?’ I would’ve definitely said quinn. And to be honest, I wish it was like that because nobody deserves this more than quinn just because she’s been here from the start,” they said.

Bugara went on to add, “quinn could’ve signed for eight gazillion dollars at this point, you know? But quinn doesn’t want to do that. quinn wants to do her thing the way she wants to do it and that’s all gonna pay off one day and it’s gonna open doors for these people — these independent musicians — to really have an easier way of breaking into the mainstream.”

Bugara also emphasized just how fast hyperpop and digicore grew within the last two years. When the pandemic hit, while it halted many aspects of the entertainment industry, it actually turned hyperpop and digicore from small flames into bonafide bonfires. , gave a sense of community to queer and trans teens struggling mentally even harder than they were before the pandemic. The music’s hyped up instrumentals provided distraction.

Just as hyperpop’s growth seemed uninterruptible early this year, the community experienced its biggest tragedy to date: SOPHIE’s death. The producer at the heart of hyperpop’s creation had been staying in Athens, Greece, at the time and climbed up the balcony to get a better view of the full moon before slipping and falling on Jan. 30, 2021.

SOPHIE left behind a huge legacy and an entire new generation of artists who had the influence of tracks like “BIPP,” “LEMONADE” and those that followed as a core inspiration to everything they made. SOPHIE also left behind a long list of collaborations, including work on Vince Staples’ 2017 album Big Fish Theory and Charli XCX’s 2016 EP Vroom Vroom. This level of mainstream success was unprecedented for trans woman producers. Of all the songs featured on the Billboard Hot 100 and in the Grammy Awards nominations from 2012 to 2018, only 2% were produced by women, and the stigma placed on trans creatives only further compounds the issue.

SOPHIE broke down barriers, and in doing so created a community for LGBTQIA+ artists on a level that’s never been seen before, a scene and a community accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Hyperpop still retains a niche audience, but if its success during the pandemic is any indication, that niche is sure to grow even more in the coming years. It’s only a matter of time before the scene, which was once called “future pop,” actually becomes the future.

Published on March 9, 2022 at 10:20 pm