Hyperpop Would Like Your Attention
A chapter from my thesis exploring how streaming and the internet is changing music, and the possibilities and perils that brings.
The following is a chapter from my thesis. It’s a work in progress but a piece I’m proud of. If you’re so kind, subscribe to stay updated on all my future musings! We’re talking algorithms, vibes, music, platforms, playlists and culture writ large.
Ok now onto the show:
There’s a moment in “hand crushed by a mallet” by 100 GECS where the song becomes unintelligible. It begins with sweeping synth chord arpeggios as Laura Les croaks in chipmunk-tuned gasps, “I was trying to find a way to kill time/ I didn't even get to tell you goodbye.” The music then builds with white noise sweeps and quarter note snare hits until everything finally drops out. Or everything drops in. The 808s that appear are so loud and distorted, their upper register so gratingly pronounced, that they fill the sonics of an entire instrumentation. Les’s voice is muffled under their weight. “Oh my god, what the fuck/take my hand, crush it,” she sings. Her voice struggles to cut through, but you can hear it enough that you can sense the remnants of her drowning vocals.
Maybe this is the “hyper” in hyperpop. An extremity that renders maximalism minimalist. So much, so loud, so fast, that the whole thing turns in on itself; sounds apply pressure unto sound until the whole thing hardens like a diamond and the music becomes one solid thing. So tough you can bludgeon with it.
But maybe there’s another form of “hyper” out there. The beginning of “Gunk” by Underscores seems as if it’s starting at the very peak of an entirely different song. Sounding like a direct copy of an early 2010s Skrillex Dubstep anthem, we hear a voice proclaim “we don’t give a fuck” as synth hits blare with that classic Dubstep siren-style intensity. It’s a glorious 9 seconds until the music abruptly ends, the sound of a record scratching, reversing and slowing down and then Underscores’s tag, “it’s the new wave of the future,” sounds out. The song becomes simple, intimate, moving. With quiet, tender arpeggiated synth chords accompanied by acoustic guitar, Underscores begins to sing.“Drive the car off the main road/I took way too much . . . And I don't wanna get sick/I've got a bullet to bite before I drive myself crazy.” The song moves in the way a good-old fashioned song does. The chord harmonies change as they sing “did I swallow my tongue?/Did I puncture my lung?” When the typical chords reappear we hear new layers of noise and static, the instrumentation becomes more layered and distorted, we hear the last lines “Been seven years since I cried/ It'd take a lot for you to break me,” and then a moment of pause and finally, the climax: a one second moment of complete, speakers-blown-out 808s and noise static. And then it’s over.
Where was the “hyper” here? Was it in that off kilter beginning and climactic end? Was the rest of the song, with its earnest simplicity, not “hyper” but for the proximity to those maximalist bookends? Or maybe the composition itself, with its surprising structure that necessitates a specific kind of captured attention, makes the song “hyper” not despite its quiet middle, but because of its very contrast.
What unites the music that falls under the banner hyperpop is difficult to track. It ranges form the intimate and emo-inflected heartthrob mutterings of Glaive, to the 2010s-dubstep-inspired musical jokes of 100 Gecs, to the legions of artists inspired by the late producer/artist SOPHIE whose music sought maximalist engagement through tender, challenging pop music. At the very least what unites this music is a sense of the “hyper,” an affinity for sonic business with loud overblown synths and 808s, fast tempos, often but not always shorter songs, and the prioritization of musical engagement.
In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stones, SOPHIE used the word “engagement” to describe her artistic project. She says, “The challenge I’m interested in being part of is who can use current technology, current images and people, to make the brightest, most intense, engaging thing.” It seems that if nothing else, hyperpop is seeking the full attention of its listeners.
Thought of in this way, the range of hyperpop’s sounds makes sense under one banner. Though the term for the genre comes from dubious origins as we will soon explore, the music thought of as hyperpop is united in its intent to provoke and keep its listeners engaged. It is not music for the background. It is music that wants your attention.
In a 2021 NY Times piece by tech critic Charlie Warzel, Warzel describes “the attention economy” as “a catch-all for the internet and the broader landscape of information and entertainment. Advertising is part of the attention economy. So are journalism and politics and the streaming business and all the social media platforms.” But on a more fundamental level, the attention economy describes a literal dynamic that predates the internet. Warzel writes: “Every single action we take . . . is a transaction. We are taking what precious little attention we have and diverting it toward something.” Engagement on the internet is a double-win for content creators and platforms alike; when you are engaging with one piece of content or on one platform, it means you are generally disengaged from everything else. And when revenue is tied to attention, as platforms/websites need your attention focused on them to offer that same attentional space up for advertisers, it is your very attentional capacity that becomes the realm of capitalistic battle.
Anyone who spends significant time on the internet can attest to the feeling of malaise that this dynamic produces. The fractured state of consciousness. Twitter makes itself addictive with its endless refreshability. Tik Tok offers candy-coated entertainment on its infinitely long and infinitely curated “for you page.” News sites flash you with click bait headlines. Everyone, all at once, vying for you.
This is what makes Spotify so lucrative. Musically, they have disengaged from the engagement war. Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify has even said in reference to his company that “we’re not in the music space—we’re in the moment space,” expressing that above all else, Spotify seeks to curate the perfect music for whatever situation you find yourself in, not necessarily the best music in general. So in their bid to recommend their users “music for moments,” they are conceding the quest for users’ undivided attention and offering instead an accoutrement to other more attentive activities. Doom scrolling on twitter. Washing the dishes. Driving. They have your background music.They own the unsexy attentional background.
hyperpop then, is the antithesis of Spotify’s musical agenda. If Spotify’s aim is to provide “music for moments,” then hyperpop fails at this by providing music that is too hectic to serve anything beyond itself; like the social media feeds that Spotify wants to provide the soundtrack for, hyperpop is pining for your undivided attention.
But while the genre shirks the gravity of the platform it’s hosted on, it orbits similarly to the rest of the online attention economy. More than any genre, it is music of and by the attention economy, made by young people who were weaned on algorithmic recommendations and whose aesthetics developed in a complex web of internet irony. In the same way that Tik Tok upped the ante in keeping users engaged via algorithmically curated videos that are curated to maximize engagement, hyperpop has upped the sonic ante by depicting a psychic sense of digital overload through sound.
That’s the double-bind of the genre, its promise and its peril. The promise of hyperpop lies in the genre’s ability to depict and thus help us better understand our state of attentionally fragmented consciousness. Its popularity has also allowed for the emergence of a popular music that is in many ways opposed to the placid aesthetic preferences of Spotify’s recommendation algorithm, a project that is worthwhile for anyone interested in expanding popular music taste towards anything in the realm of the challenging and strange. But its potential countercultural impulse also rings a bit hollow when thinking of it more broadly as part of culture. Its fast tempos and chaotic business may be part of a move towards a more challenging pop music, or it can simply be an impulsive shift towards an all consuming aesthetic of the internet. It could be not a complex grappling, but a musical prescription for an attention-depleted culture, a salve to our fragmented selves, music for squirmy young people raised on the web who cannot focus on anything unless they are being blasted with sensation.
hyperpop may be most remembered though in the long run not for the music that falls under its amorphous banner, but as a historiographical marker: it is one of the first genre’s to be coined by Spotify itself. The term had floated around the internet for some time (since SOPHIE blasted onto the scene in 2014), but it was Spotify itself that marked the term as the official genre title with their creation of the popular “hyperpop” playlist, which has become the unofficial platform for tracking what’s happening in the genre.
In an article for the New York Times detailing the genre’s rise, Ben Dandridge-Lemco confirmed this when he found that the editorial team at Spotify were the one’s to codify the term . . .
after seeing [hyperpop] come up in metadata collected by Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “data alchemist,” whose job is finding emerging sounds on the platform and classifying them into “microgenres.”
Over email, McDonald said he first saw the term applied to PC Music’s releases in 2014 but it wasn’t until 2018 that hyperpop qualified as a microgenre: ‘For our categorization purposes it was mostly a matter of waiting to see if enough artists would coalesce around a similar ebullient electro-maximalism.’”
Spotify’s metatextual tools, powered by their music-data-analytics company the EchoNest, felt the oncoming of an emergent genre and then defined it before subcultures could. To be clear, there is a dialectic here between musical creators, fan communities and Spotify itself. hyperpop as a music largely emerged online on discord servers that fostered emergent communities of young “bedroom producers” and artists. And the music does have a physical presence, as can be seen at shows like HEAVEN in Los Angeles and in PC MUSIC’s (SOPHIE and AG Cook’s label) near-decade-long run of releasing music and organizing performances. But the style’s proliferation from distinct scenes in the UK and the west coast to diffuse bedrooms throughout the world, and its popularization through online platforms, made the thread connecting these diverse musical practices hard to track. And thus its crystallization as a genre was more-easily executed by Spotify who could mark it as a thing in one easy key stroke.
Spotify’s ability to reframe a diffuse group of artists and scenes into one coherent banner is a display of the imbalanced power dynamic between artists and Spotify. And their doing so is made starker by the impersonal nature of their framing; there is no article announcing the idea of the genre, with a comment section to haggle over its efficacy. Simply one day, Spotify deemed it so, made evident by the addition of a playlist on their impersonal platform.
Despite any misgivings that artists who are associated with the genre may have about the formulation and curation of hyperpop by Spotify, many are dependent on Spotify and the hyperpop playlist for a platform. This was made evident when the producer A.G. Cook did a “takeover” of the playlist and replaced many of the up and coming artists that it featured with older music, such as Kate Bush and J Dilla, that he believed had inspired the genre. The stark change in the playlist, and the resultant change in who was receiving streams from the platform prompted many young hyperpop artists to complain. The up and coming hyperpop artist quinn explained the feeling in that same New York Times article. “People were asking why we were making such a big deal about it, but they didn’t realize there were people who were literally living off that Spotify check.”
And in that dependence that quinn alludes to, we see it all. Spotify has such power as a platform and a curator that they not only host the genre’s music, but define it; their curatorial decisions trickle down to the young creators that supply them with their product, resulting in either real revenue or barely anything at all for the young musicians. Spotify has the type of power that beckons one to question if critique is even necessary. For as I sit here and ponder over the sonics and society that the music interacts with, there is the hard economic reality of how the music distributes itself across networks.
In the same way that Spotify has rendered much music journalism and radio curation partially purposeless, as critics and tastemakers no longer make or break artists (algorithms and nameless Spotify curators do that now), they have rendered some of our sincere engagement with music too a bit purposeless. Our championing of artists, our grappling with their import, pales in comparison to the data-giant’s power. With one quick playlisting decision careers are made and stalled. And a whole genre and whole subculture — subculture, that thing that molds itself not at the pace of corporate powerpoints, but at the strange, slow pace of underground culture — is defined in forgetful instants.
And yet, this is music people are listening to. And it blends itself into their restless days. And that’s something, even if the power of our discourse is void in the face of algorithms and corporate backed decision. At least we can take the sounds that people consume seriously. Because there is something there in hyperpop. And its challenge, critique and energy reverberates despite that energy reaching us through faceless technology. Because at the end of the day, the kids are making good shit. Like The Frost Children. That’s some weird, good shit.
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