The unseen influence of the music industry has distorted hyperpop to the point where it no longer recognises its own reflection. The fact that there was, and never will be, an agreed answer to that question is proof that the internet has the ability to transform the identity of subcultures at an alarming rate. When hyperpop-adjacent artist and pop star Charli XCX tweeted: “what is hyperpop?” last year, such an innocent handful of characters belied a greater cultural dilemma to be reckoned with. By the time the larger music industry is desperately feeling for a pulse, the “genre” has already gone cold. Through picking it apart in an attempt to capture its essence and bottle it, the pale imitations that are sold back to us can replicate the sound, perhaps, but none of the feeling. The same pantomime villains make their appearance: the major labels, the streaming platforms, the journalists who excavate these underground subcultures and bring their sound to light. What the internet creates, it also destroys.
This time, it feels that no one wanted to miss hyperpop’s party-in fact, they got there unfashionably early.īilly Bugara, a creative director at SoundCloud, curator of the Digicore playlist, and journalist embedded in the communities and scenes that would become hyperpop, remarks that its first flush “was like the Wild West, and now it’s kind of gone corporate, in a way.”įollow hyperpop to its short but sprawling lineage of internet ancestors in the last decade alone, from vaporwave-largely accepted as one of the first entirely online genres-to the likes of bedroom pop and cloud rap, and you will see that the fate which has befallen hyperpop is nothing new. The internet knows no borders, from the lawless freedom promised by vaporwave all the way to SoundCloud rap’s early days as an internet genre untapped and unexploited by the music industry who were trailing behind its evolution. But now, music scenes are no longer defined by city limits. We saw it with grunge and countless scenes before it when the internet was just a pipe dream. If the term itself doesn’t already invite an eyeroll, with the artists themselves being first in line shrug it off as “cringe,” there is a sense that already, hyperpop is bleeding into something else before the world has truly understood what, exactly, it was in the first place.īeing pedantic over the genre classifications is nothing new. Already, its coverage has been extensive, including a deep excavation from The New York Times, with many of its leading lights now working with major labels, from 100 gecs being absorbed by Atlantic to 16-year-old glaive signing the dotted line for Interscope. Growing at a meteoric speed, the scene that has been brought to light from obscurity and has become the latest fascination of fans, critics, and the music industry at large, is hyperpop. Unlike its IRL precursors, it’s unlimited-a continually evolving sound.
Without feeling the earth under its feet, without a physical epicenter to call home, internet music belongs to anyone and everyone. Yet compared to the likes of grime, which was anchored to the concrete jungle of London’s council estates, or the regional Brooklyn drill scene tethered to a localized community of artists, the freeform internet genres have a considerably shorter lifespans. Vaporwave, nightcore, chillwave, cloud rap… this online index is sprawling, stemming from the same source, the same radical promise, and all, in some distant way, connected to the next. In the last decade alone, there has already been a dynasty of genres established in the online dimension, as quickly dug up from the underground and crowned as the sound of the moment as they are dethroned, confined to nothing more than a distant, slightly cringeworthy memory. In the virtual world, Rome was built not just in a day, but on a school night-but was any of it made to last? Do it because you can do it because you’re bored.
Today’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s lo-fi what was the sound of the future is already a passing reference point. Burning bright and burning out, sprinting to keep up with the all-you-can-eat consumerism that has defined the way we engage with music. Born from the open-source ambiguity of the online world, the last decade has seen genres accelerating from the void at a breakneck speed, chewing up an internet’s worth of influences, and spitting them out again. For the first time, we are watching music scenes and microgenres with life cycles that play out entirely on the internet.
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