A hyperpop artist; a MacArthur genius; a dub pioneer
I’m All Lost In …
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#51
1) Oh no, I’m becoming one of those old people who gets their contemporary music tips from the New Yorker.
The September 30 issue had an intriguing and beautifully written review of a new release from a news-to-me, but evidently widely known “Hyperpop” star named Sophie.
It’s a posthumous album. Sophie, a processed-beats production trickster, died in 2021 at 34. “Sophie fell to her death from a balcony in Athens,” New Yorker staffer Jia Tolentino writes, adding with alluring prose: “Her representatives said she’d gone out to look at the moon.”
Tolentino also waxes elegant about Sophie’s experimental bent:
In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel.
Nothing else sounded like Sophie, because she made her sounds from scratch. She didn’t sample; she built each hiss and smack and boom by manipulating raw waveforms. She wanted to get to the “molecular level of a particular sound,” to understand why that sound “behaves a certain way when processed or cooked.”
The trajectory of academic 1960s experimental-music-lab composers, to 1980s new wave and hip hop singles, to modern EDM is one of my favorite musical through lines. Fascinated by Tolentino’s evocative description, I promptly listened to Sophie’s “new” self-titled album, a collection of tracks that Sophie had been working on as a follow-up to her successful 2018 debut LP, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.
The slick new album doesn’t quite live up to Tolentino’s purple prose—”Sophie’s sonic plasticity pointed to interrelational reinvention, toward a truth that had to be formed in the primordial tide pool of a dark, pulsing room.”
But the set’s constant rhythmic shifts, trance breaks, dirty robot come-ons—and, my favorite, the reverberating kettle drum waves on the downbeat track “RAWWWWWW”—do regularly conjure the abstract R&B sounds that make modern dance floor music rightly classified, like Tolentino describes it, as “underground-adjacent.”
Luckily, in addition to the New Yorker, I have my younger friend XDX as a resource, and she—a longtime Sophie fan—pointed me to a 2021 Sophie set that’s available on YouTube, SOPHIE LIVESTREAM HEAV3N SUSPENDED.
This shape-shifting, 20-minute collection is dreamier, sexier, and more exploratory than the new record, leaning into the trance, liquid, and bent signals side of Sophie’s skittering soundscape. It also includes a great middle movement weighted by a slow-motion sample that sounds as if the source material is both a dissonant music-theory piano chord and the accompanying piano wires rattling.
“Watch me touch myself/inside out/do turn on/upside down,” Sophie, whose trans identity is central to both her fluid music and her body positive lyrics, sings against a shimmering fantasia of tones, blips, and burning static. “I can see you like my name/let me rest it in your mouth/open wide/let me finger fuck myself,” she continues, upping the transgressive challenge as the music accelerates both its BPMs and its gender queer politics.
Lifting off like an ‘80s Madonna classic, the set concludes with an anthemic plea: “Everybody’s got to own their body/Everybody wants to be somebody/Everybody’s got to own their story…” eventually scrolling out into tape-in-reversed vocals chanted over the soft pulse of a minimalist keyboard part.
With this Lysergic mix putting Sophie’s slick new album in context, I feel better about my plans to listen to the record on repeat all weekend.
2) Last April, a dear old college friend emailed to say she was coming to town for a conference, and we should get dinner, which we did. For several days afterward, I couldn’t stop talking about her to anyone who would listen. Or more specifically, I couldn’t stop talking about the exciting research she was doing.
Jennifer is a longtime history prof at NYU and the author of several books, including Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004, University of Pennsylvania Press) and the award-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2020, Duke University Press).
She’s currently working on a new book about an early American slave named Elizabeth Key. Key won a landmark case in the Virginia courts in 1655 after suing for her freedom on the grounds that her father was a white Christian; common law at the time held that social status was determined by one’s father, who had an obligation to support both legitimate and illegitimate children.
Jennifer explained that her forthcoming book, titled The Eve of Slavery, was seizing on the subsequent tragedy that Key’s legal victory prompted: The Virginia legislature quickly enacted new laws encoding emergent political ideas (or more accurately, racialist ideas) about blackness. The reactionary legal backlash to Key’s court-mandated freedom stated that a person’s mother, not her father, was the metric that would now be used to determine if one was free or enslaved. This pernicious new legal framework, both a tangible building block of capitalist society and a searing metaphor for capitalism itself, cast black women as not only labor widgets in the slave trade economy, but additionally, and more horrifically, as sexual widgets.
To quote Jennifer:
Slave owners understood enslaved women to be delivering two forms of wealth, the wealth that those women produce in the fields, and the wealth those women produce in their bodies. The slave owner was reaching into that women’s future and saying whoever you give birth to belongs to me and my children. It starts with that assumption that one person can own not just your body, but all that your body can produce, the work of your hands and the work of your womb.
That’s not a quote from last April’s dinner with Jennifer. It’s a quote from a video she just recorded this week for the MacArthur Foundation—you know, the foundation that announces its prestigious “Genius Grants” every fall.
That is to say, this week, the MacArthur Foundation chose Jennifer as one of its revered geniuses, formalizing what friends from her long-ago days as a (self-designed) Third World Studies (!) major at Oberlin College in the mid 1980s have known all along. (To quote another old college friend, who texted me a link to the exciting, breaking news on Tuesday morning: “The inevitable…!!”)
Speaking of Oberlin: Here’s the great article they immediately published about Jennifer and her well-earned award in our proudly woke alma mater’s newsletter.
3) “[It’s] not exactly dub, but there’s a lot of dub elements in it,” former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore told Pitchfork for an Instagram series where cool musicians name their “Perfect 10” record.
“It’s just really minimal reggae.”
Moore picked reggae artist Tapper Zukie’s 1973 album (not 1977 as Moore says) Man Ah Warrior. It’ not an LP I knew, though now that I’ve been listening to it all week, I can say it’s not a surprising choice for the legendary art-rock guitarist. Sonic Youth’s spooky early records took inspiration from original 1970s dub; the band’s eponymous 1982 EP even had a song called “The Burning Spear,” presumably an homage to the great reggae dub artist. In fact, Sonic Youth’s band name itself was prompted by cutting-edge 70s reggae DJ, Big Youth.
Zukie’s spaced out swagger, emcee banter, and scattered sound effects certainly point toward the full-fledged elastic rhythms and studio trickery that would transform pop reggae into esoteric dub in the mid-70s when reggae artists like Junior Murvin spliced reggae jams with the avant-garde, and when even more adventurous artists like King Tubby completely rewired the genre into all-out hypnotic spells. But keenly, Man Ah Warrior’s party-up sensibility never fully abandons Jimmy Cliff-era reggae’s sense of bounce and melody.
I do hear what Moore means about Man Ah Warrior being idly lost between reggae and dub, though. The intimate LP rides its stripped-down guitar clanks, slinking bass lines, far-away piano chords, phased proto-loops, and drum-kit tinkering to the outer edges of traditional reggae’s pop song structures, leaning into meditative improv and echo. This is weird reggae for 1973.
Fittingly, the LP’s most pop-centered track, “Liberation Struggle,” (as opposed to one of its more overtly experimental tacks, “Hills of Zion-Dub”), captures Man Ah Warrior’s interstitial moment best, quietly slipping the furthest into the future as Zukie overlays the tune’s catchy I-vi see-saw chord progression with wandering vocals and intermittent sci-fi sine waves.
I wouldn’t give this record a pure 10; there’s too much throw-away pop here. But it certainly gets the highest score as a historical document of new music in the making.
*Footnote: As I approach a full year of doing these weekly posts, I’m feeling alert to larger themes, persistent obsessions (the WTA!), and secret story lines. Using a spreadsheet I’ve been keeping, I’m hoping to do a write up soon that draws a few conclusions about my year of mini-obsessions.
But quickly, Sonic Youth was my favorite band a million years ago back in college, and I’m pleasantly surprised to realize that today’s prompted-by-Thurston Moore-item marks the second time they’ve resurfaced on one of these weekly lists. Back in early February, I wrote about Sonic Youth’s other star, Kim Gordon, and her new video , though, more in earnest really, about Sonic Youth themselves.