Mother of Hyperpop: SOPHIE “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides”
SOPHIE
“Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides”
(Transgressive / Future Classic /M SMSMSM)
Hyperpop was one of the big buzzwords of the 2010s. And one that you can’t mention without mentioning PC Music in the next sentence. From 2013 to 2023, the British label cleaned out our ear canals and removed all traces of what had accumulated there in terms of ideas about mainstream and subculture. It wasn’t always pleasant. But it was liberating.
“It seems absurd that you can just call someone like Sophie.” That’s how I opened my 2018 review in Musikexpress about “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.” After all, at that point, hardly anyone knew her identity, let alone her face. Previous singles like “BIPP” and ‘LEMONADE’ sounded so different—glitchy, nerve-wracking, inescapable—that it was naturally assumed that SOPHIE must be a producer dude. All the more triumphant, then, was her public coming out as a trans woman with the video “It’s Okay to Cry.”
With her upper body naked in front of a cheesy sunset that slowly transitions into a rainbow and finally into a starry sky, SOPHIE literally floats above it all, detached from gravity and all attributions. Artificiality and authenticity, irony and sincerity – SOPHIE consistently twisted these concepts through the distortion pedal. It was to be expected that she and her PC Music colleagues such as A.G. Cook, Hannah Diamond, and Danny L. Harle would quickly win over the underground scene. But SOPHIE achieved something that no one could have predicted: Instead of conforming to the mainstream as her popularity grew, she managed to get the mainstream to conform to her sound.
Today, I find it absurd that the Musikexpress editorial team simply handed over one of the rare interviews with one of the most important artists of the last 25 years to an intern—thank you again for that! In 2018, however, it was impossible to foresee that “Oil of Every Pearls’ Un-Insides” would pave the way for a completely new pop sound that would merge with the pop culture mass hysteria of the Brat Summer in 2024. And that Charli XCX’s “brat” would unfortunately be a musical obituary to her mentor and inspiration SOPHIE with “So I.”
In 2021, SOPHIE died in an accident under mysterious circumstances at the age of only 34. I hate to tell yet another queer heroine story as a tragedy—but it is one. SOPHIE received a Grammy nomination for “Oil of Every Pearls’ Un-Insides”—the first trans woman in the history of the award to do so. Rest in power, SOPHIE—your legacy will live on unmistakably!
