It’s been one year since Sophie, legendary Scottish electronic music producer, passed away in an untimely accident. Sophie is a legend - her relentless talent has pushed an entire genre of music into the future, and her fingerprints will be on every pop track to come out for the next twenty years.
As an artist, Sophie was meticulous. The common misconception of electronic music is that their tools are shortcuts. Vocal modulation covers up bad singing, and tracks can be infinitely spliced to create a product that could never be played by live, human hands. But Sophie showed us the opposite - electronic music is a space of infinite control, limitless refinement. When crafting her songs, Sophie would create every waveform from scratch. This would be like a painter extracting her own pigments, or a baker milling her own flour.
Her loss is incalculable, and it feels deeply unfair a year later to look at her legacy spread into the mainstream without her here to reap the reward. Sophie arguably invented the genre of hyperpop, which is poised to overtake modern pop. Outside of her collaborations with Lady GaGa, Kim Petras, and Charli XCX, it’s hard to understate how much she did in so little time. Even Rupaul’s new album stinks of the stuff, and Ru’s music functions as a sort of barometer for what straight music will sound like in three years.
I thought I’d take a moment to walk you all through some of my favorite songs that Sophie made or produced.
SOPHIE - Immaterial (official audio)
As a representative of the trans community, Sophie embodied a radical form of joy - total gender euphoria. Her music brought the listener into a world completely unburdened by constrictions of sex or gender. She pictured a world where image and identity were fluid and totally within one’s own control. Immaterial speaks to this joy. The singer Cecile Believe rejoices in the final verse - “I can be anything I want, any place, any form, andy shape, anyway, anything, anything I want” - totally liberated and made whole by self-determination.
This song is Sophie’s most popular, and maybe her signature song in her absence. The high energy, poppy beat, the accessible melody, and the joyful message all make Immaterial an immortal hit.
Charli XCX - Vroom Vroom [Official Video]
Charli XCX and Sophie have collaborated on a ton of songs, but this one in particular speaks to Sophie’s ability to push an artist into new territory. Charli XCX’s career has always been defined by experimentation, but her songs were usually some variation of mainstream pop until Vroom Vroom. The song barely resembles a song at all, with Charli dropping into a verse that seems like the halfway mark for a totally different song. The tempo and key shift and turn and break without warning. When I listen to it, I picture myself riding a motorcycle in a leather thong, carrying a samurai sword.
Let's Eat Grandma - Hot Pink (Official Music Video)
Speaking of collaborations, this song just goes to show how Sophie pops up in unexpected places. I cam across this song on Spotify a few years back and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I listened to the rest of the Let’s Eat Grandma’s (cheeky name) album, and none of the other tracks had this same energy. It all made sense when I learned Sophie produced it.
SOPHIE — Faceshopping (Official Video)
The song, but especially the video. If Immaterial is the burst of joy of our new era, Faceshopping is warning It’s a warning to the straights that the new generation has no interest in traditional form or convention. As is common in Sophie’s work, the song centers around small number of phrases repeated over and over again. Like the Meisner technique, the phrases take on nuance and meaning with each pass, framed by glitching and exploding electronic backing.
My face is the front of shop
My face is the real shop front
My shop is the face I front
I'm real when I shop my face
If our faces, can be picked and changed at will, then they become another billboard for us to express some personal brand. Our identities aren’t just picked, they’re optimized, like a knob on a synth.
What I’m Consuming
I did three things this weekend. I wrote this blog post, I cooked a big pot of soup, and I played the entirety of the game Inscryption. It’s a card game, but it’s also an escape the room game, and it’s also a mystery, it’s….. so fucking good. It’s like someone took a scan of my brain and figured out all the things that would get me addicted and packed it into one game. Highly recommend.
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