The Nu-Normal #07: WTF is Hyperpop?
An analysis of Always Online™ futurist genre taxonomy.
I’ve always thought of genre as a largely nebulous descriptor. When I had to categorise music on my phone or in my personal library, I always stuck to nine key groupings: Alternative/Pop/Rock, Hardcore, Hip Hop/Rap, Indie/Folk, Metal, Metalcore, Post-hardcore, Post-metal and -rock, Synthwave. These were less for adherence to strict genre classifications as such and more for ease of listening and the cultivation of moods—a certain ‘vibe’ if you will.
Coming from the realm of alternative music, it’s very easy for me to listen to all sorts of different music in a short period of time. Hitting shuffle on my playlist for this newsletter really drives that point home: Lizzard into Bewitcher into Vatican into Every Time I Die into Fury into Kississippi into VAR, etc. Now, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of those artists on the radio individually, let alone all once.
While they’re all technically alternative, this particular random selection still pulls wildly from genres like alternative and post-rock to thrash and metalcore. And this is why you have musical pedants quibbling over the difference between ‘brutal technical death metal’ and ‘technical brutal death metal,’ or writing a treatise about how ‘easycore’ is both hardcore and pop-punk but also neither.
In short, genre labels are usually dumb and mostly unhelpful. However, words are things and things do matter—especially online.
Last month, I started seeing a lot of videos and articles surfacing in my feed with one common thread: hyperpop. Now, as someone in their early thirties who grew up largely online, with easy access to social media and Internet discourse, this particular term wasn’t immediately apparent to me. I had to feel around for a little while and attempt to parse the phrase.
My brain cried out: “What the fuck is hyperpop?” But I was nonetheless intrigued.
Definition
As Finn McKenty of The Punk Rock MBA puts it, hyperpop is “the most interesting genre of alternative music in years,” and sounds like “if Britney Spears stayed up for four days straight and drank nothing but Monsters.”
Okay. Colour me curious. If words are indeed things (and they are—don’t fight me on this), I’ll need to cover my taxonomy and etymology first.
Let’s look at the use of ‘hyper’ as a prefix. According to Merriam Webster, this denotes something as “above [or] beyond,” “excessive,” existing “in a space of more than three dimensions,” and “bridging points within an entity.” However, the word can also be used as an adjective to indicate being “highly excited” and “extremely active.” So far, so good.
But what about ‘pop’? Surely that’s an easy one to define, right? Well, in both its noun and adjective form, the term typically refers to “popular music” and “of or relating to the popular culture disseminated through the mass media,” while also “having, using, or imitating themes or techniques characteristic of pop art.”
Hhmmm, not so clear. It’s a little broad, and without doing an entire crash course in Bourdieu and cultural theory, it’s likely hard to break down further.
Genesis & Origins
As it turns out, being nebulous and vague and amorphous is kind of integral to the appeal of hyperpop.
According to the crowd-sourced paragons of anarchic wisdom at Wikipedia, hyperpop is a “loosely-defined music movement” and a “microgenre characterized by a maximalist or exaggerated take on popular music.”
This detail is curious for a few reasons. If we think of genre classification as a hierarchy, then it makes sense that sub-genres would sit below or within main or primary genres. Thrash and speed metal sit inside the larger metal umbrella, just as power-violence and d-beat float around in hardcore circles, with ska and post-punk also having roots in traditional punk. Fair enough.
But, as we saw above, if hyperpop at the definitional level is supposed to be above or beyond pop itself, existing outside of pop’s dimensions and bridging points within popular music, then how can it also be a microgenre?
Listing the stylistic origins of hyperpop, that same Wikipedia entry locates its birth in the early-to-mid 2010s and includes “pop; avant-garde; electronic; hip hop; dance; trap; emo-rap; J-pop; K-pop; bubblegum pop; Euro house; cloud rap; chiptune; dubstep; trance; techno; glitch; nu-metal; nu-rave; crunkcore; [and] metalcore” as a range of musical progenitors. Not sure about you, but that wide swath of styles pretty much covers all of popular music since the ‘80s and a good forty years or more of musical osmosis.
As Noah Simon outlines in his video explainer, hyperpop itself goes by many in-house aliases: “Bubblegum Bass”; “PC Music”; “Internet Music.” It’s music for people who are Always Online™: music from the Internet, by the Internet, for the Internet.
Notable artists and early innovators, for both McKenty and Simon, include 100 Gecs, Sophie, and Dorian Electra. And for Simon, Charlie XCX has since become the public “face” of hyperpop, existing as part of a larger musical universe populated by a community of artists that are “philosophically similar but aesthetically diverse musicians.”
Yeah, okay. But what does it sound like? What’s the big deal anyway?
Aesthetic & Affect
Hyperpop is pop as excess, much like the definition outlined. It’s overloaded, indulgent, eccentric, and—above all—extremely self-aware. This aspect of self-reflexivity and irony is born directly out of Internet culture, through endless criticism, memes, anonymity, democratisation, and raw purity of expression.
In a feature for The Guardian, journalist Shaad D’souza describes hyperpop as “bubblegum sweet, razor-sharp and deliriously chaotic.” And to my ear, that’s pretty much spot-on.
Musically, there are a few signifiers. As YouTuber Mic The Snare notes, hyperpop regularly features booming, “overblown” bass and pitch-shifted vocals that transform into an almost robotic “wailing screech.”
Other key elements include harsh synth lines, the heavy use of distortion, compression and electronic glitches, emotionally cathartic and self-deprecating lyricism, and metallic almost industrial percussion.
Perhaps the most noticeable element, however, is hyperpop’s irreverent visual aesthetic. It’s common to see album artwork and artist profiles that feature neon colour schemes, desktop screenshots of archaic and nostalgic software interfaces, anime characters, retro-futurism taken in a decidedly surrealist direction, and over-sexualised content.
Sometimes it can be all of this at once—and more. Remember, it’s all about excess. It’s the artifice of pop magnified and refracted back on itself with a sly, knowing wink.
Crucially, this deliberate form of outsider art has been embraced by, well, outsiders. Hyperpop has strong roots in the LGBTQ+ community and is heavily influenced by queer aesthetics. Many artists and devoted fans identify as gay, transgender, non-binary and gender fluid. And much of the modulation found in gender presentation and sexual orientation is a crucial component in hyperpop's versatility and wide-ranging appeal among younger listeners.
Reception & Legacy
Like any musical genre, hyperpop has its diehards and detractors. Joe Vitagliano of American Songwriter described it as “an exciting, bombastic and iconoclastic genre—if it can even be called a ‘genre’,“ noting that the burgeoning and paradoxical microgenre has “a distinctive late-capitalism-dystopia vibe.”
Likewise, VICE journalist Eli Enis boldly declared that hyperpop was “A Genre Tag for Genre-less Music,” giving birth ‘to a new generation of artists who are young, queer and fiercely protective.”
Others were more dismissive. In a recent piece for WKNC 88.1, a user listed as “Delusional Melodrama” wrote that hyperpop was “a quasi-genre of delusional gay screeching atop loud, sometimes unpleasant noises.” Now, the piece in question is firmly tongue-in-cheek, so don’t get too riled up, but the user does go on to describe the hyperpop scene at large as “polarizing” and “an unquestionable train wreck.” So, you know—stones, glasshouses, etc.
Regardless, it’s hard to deny the innovation and creative flair on display. While you might not enjoy—or like me, not even know—what hyperpop is, it’s hard to argue against what it represents: something new, something fun, and something entirely different from the status quo.