Think back to the tail end of the aughts. As pop entered a new, hyper-synthetic era (Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Black Eyed Peas etc) and as social media, smartphones and the larger context of Web 2.0 spread into every facet of our lives, a cultural sea change took hold. While so much music of the ‘90s - from drum ‘n’ bass to Busta Rhymes to Björk - looked to the future either with wide-eyed techno-optimism or with anti-tech dread, 2010 felt like an event horizon. Suddenly, the future had arrived, and it was weirder and more mundane than anyone expected.
PC Music met the moment with a pop music that raised the stakes while daring listeners to decipher how serious it all was. The label was founded in 2013 with a single upload to the relatively-new SoundCloud (founded in 2007, but only reaching popularity with 1 million users in 2010), quickly followed by 40 more that all achieved what, at the time, was called viral success. The music defiantly pitched its tent in a zone of questionable taste, with genre allegiances somewhere between Europop, K-Pop and schlocky corporate tie-ins. Alongside unexpected allies like Rebecca Black and Farah Abraham (whose 2012 concept album My Teenage Dream Ended remains a landmark work of outsider art) Hyperpop was officially born.
Writing for RBMA, Kish Lal astutely noted Hyperpop’s sibling relationship to vaporwave, which reappropriated elevator music, smooth jazz and the like, but had by 2013 reached a creative decline: “Hyper-minimalism, pastel palettes and satirical samples were core to the male-centric experiment in counterculture. The end of vaporwave signaled a collective weariness with un-danceable and arrogant music and there was a yearning for something new.” Again, we can observe the sea change as the first decade of the new millennium wrapped, with nostalgia giving way to a direct confrontation with the now-present future. In his 2010 book Retromania, Simon Reynolds interrogated and lamented a shift towards the archival, the revival and, of course, the retro in the first years of the aughts, asking “is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?” It was a salient inquiry, but even Reynolds couldn’t see what was coming. That same year, Skrillex released “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” kicking off the EDM boom and signaling that perhaps we hadn’t reached a cultural end-of-history.
Some of EDM’s glossy bombast seems to have directly rubbed off on the first Hyperpop artists. Sophie once told an interviewer “I try to imagine a hyperreal world of sounds that we’re used to from blockbuster films and that kind of thing… Sounds which cartoon-ize and exaggerate naturally occurring sounds.” But while EDM simply seeks to jack your adrenaline, A.G. Cook also evokes the conceptual expansiveness of John Cage. Recall this quote from his book Silence: “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Cook’s music approaches the concept of “pop” the same way. In his works, there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure, or a mere commodity. Everything is available to engage with, to enjoy, to savor just as it is. Discussing the connection between the PC Music roster, he described an “attitude where they’re not separating high and low culture,” and this fertile permissiveness allows us to hear pop, kitsch and cultural detritus with new ears, just as Cage encouraged us to hear noise and our environment as a kind of music.
“I was annoyed a little bit at how electronic music was being represented, especially within pop music, and also in avant garde music. There was always this separation, this distinction, of ‘man vs. machine’ or acoustic being the opposite of electronic in this funny way. Or mainstream pop having nothing to do with experimental music for some people. I kept encountering this, and seeing this rich overlap that could happen.” His critics didn’t always agree. In a Fact Magazine “Singles Club” roundtable discussion, Alex Macpherson laid into “Hey QT,” the label’s first major breakthrough: “Oh God, it’s that time again. Pop reinterpreted by people with a deep disdain for pop is by its own admission a worthless enterprise, and this is a particularly egregious example of the genre.”
Living through those early years, it was indeed challenging to parse. QT - the nebulous collaboration between Cook, Sophie and singer Hayden Dunham, presented itself as an energy drink brand, and hosted an event called Pop Cube in collaboration with Red Bull that blurred the line between fashion show, industry gala and performance art stunt. Just like the drinks they were riffing on, the music was challenging by virtue of how sickly sweet it was. “Hey QT” and other PC Music releases were, all at once, replete with ultra-catchy earworms, decadent enough to trigger kneejerk snideness and intentional enough to force real engagement. Whether you liked the music or not, you were going to have an opinion.
Today, Hyperpop is just pop. A.G. Cook is the lead producer for Charli XCX and has collaborative ties to many of the most respected pop artists working today. The same was true of Sophie prior to her tragic passing in 2021. For Cook, this means that he’s now in a mature phase where, having broken ground, he needs to build upon it. On his new album, Britpop, he proves himself to be, definitively, much more than a prankster. The album sits with the work of Pet Shop Boys, Kraftwerk and The Knife in a lineage of ultra-slick pop whose shiny surfaces contain bottomless depths. It offers a new perspective on the legacy of Hyperpop and an entry into the canon whose heartfelt expressiveness and sonic adventurousness are too rich to glibbly write off. We look forward to hosting A.G.Cook at Knockdown Center.