This was not the newsletter I scheduled for today, but it is the one that you’re getting.
In 2013, I was running the entertainment vertical at Refinery29, wrestling with bringing a little heart and soul to the celebrity coverage that kept the lights on. We did things that Refinery was never known for, like interviewing Zola Jesus or Mykki Blanco. (Alas, it never clicked well.) That year, journalist Nathan Reese and I put together our favorite songs of 2013 (FYI: still is a great list), and Nathan threw this little single on called, “Bipp.” I emailed him back like, “WTF IS THIS? IS IT FROM THE FUTURE?” He was like, “I know, right? It’s this producer named Sophie. No one knows much.” (At that time, we referred to Sophie as him—Sophie was extremely press shy, and currently not out as a trans woman who prefers no pronouns which makes sense, because we are all still trying to figure out if Sophie was indeed a human being and, you know, not a celestial).
I promised Nathan I would go see Sophie at SXSW, and despite having a 1pm slot in the middle of the day, in the afternoon sun, and danced my face off, shocked at this red-headed Scot playing what essentially amounted to Happy Hardcore, with chipmunk vocals and absurd BPMs. (We were instructed not to take photos. I tweeted, instead.) This person was making chewing gum-flavored rave music. Bass lines that quivered with psychedelics and belonged inside Windows ‘98 screensavers from an alternate reality.
So began my love affair with Sophie and Sophie’s fanged, blood-drawing approach to pop music.
Here is someone who used the language of the four-on-the-floor beats and rejected—no, morphed it—to fit a sinister/sweet narrative.
And now, the rub: yesterday, Sophie passed away, leaving a legacy so innovative and unusual that we may never see another of its like again.
The second time I saw Sophie was with my dear friend Hayden Manders at a secret show in NYC. It was a PC Music showcase, a British collective of like-minded individuals who took that classic rave aesthetic and queered it out, marrying it with fantastical digital image scapes that felt like Ecco The Dolphin meets drum-and-bass meets the inside of a Barbie Dreamhouse. Artifice is real, the real is what you make of it, the event promised.
Before Sophie started, the artist played a high pitched, incredibly resonant base sound for nearly five minutes, one that both pierced our ears and rattled our ribcages. It felt threatening. The frequency forced Hayden and I to tremble. We danced to it.
In “Hard,” one of the bangers on Sophie’s first LP (the same one that featured the aforementioned “Bipp”), a high-pitched voice ticks off all the things in her life that are just “so hard.” “Leatherette, party so hard/PVC, I get so hard/Platform shoes I kick so hard/But it’s just so hard!” The poppy vocals are accompanied with metallic chugs and whirs, forsaking anything organic and “live sounding” for computerized clunks and punches. It is almost aggressive—this sweet girlish voice innocently reclaiming the once-masc statement, “I get so hard.”
Sophie wondered: What if something was vapid and dangerous? What if music promised to hold you while it also stabbed you in the back? Say, if for every melodic high and cheery synth, we were greeted with something dark and sinister? (Electronic music has grappled with this question for sometime, from early British breakbeat to Happy Hardcore** to Bjork to Billie Eilish.)
In order to make sounds that felt absolutely otherworldly, Sophie eschewed sample packs and beats to craft homemade sounds that stopped sounding like synths and started sounded like new organisms. Let us make our own sounds, the music says. Ones flavored by the past but set in the future. Sophie made drops fall out from under you and synths bubble up. In Sophie’s mind metal sounded like rubber, and rubber sounded like metal. (I didn’t make this last part up, but I wish I did.)
The thing is, Sophie didn’t “come out” as trans in a traditional sense, with a press release and a Big Interview. Instead, Sophie made a first “official” appearance in a video, as the artist’s true self, lips painted, cheekbones augmented, with a futuristic backdrop that imagined a world outside of gender (“I think your inside is your best side”). And, I think trans people can speak to this better than I can, but her music sounds like it rejects the binary. As Sasha Geffen, author of Glitter Up The Dark, writes: “She posits micro-worlds like genre, gender, and classical conceptions of the human being as inadequate. They do not describe the present and they will not illuminate the future. What might, though, is a holistic expression of late capitalist reality, one that insists upon reflecting every individual’s entanglement with larger power structures.” In other words, the things that are meant to be “simple,” the pop music of it all—that’s where we can revolutionize. The line between commercialism and avant garde needs to be destroyed.
On Twitter, my pal Dances remarked that the passing of Sophie feels like the passing of J Dilla in some ways: a producer so talented and genre-defining that it will take years for the musical world to unpack the impact. Sophie only has one full album completed—but that’s enough to spark a legacy. (However Sophie co-produced, remixed, and contributed to dozens of different artists.) Think of an artist active now that you respect. They tweeted about Sophie yesterday—I promise.
**Happy hardcore is an oft-maligned electronic genre from the ‘90s that is extremely ecstatic and almost cringingly aggressive. I think about it a lot as having a weirdly wide impact for being, to most people, unlistenable, albeit extremely, uh, unique.
The last time I saw Sophie was in the fall of 2019, at a super, duper queer party in LA called Heav3n. Sophie DJ’d; the crowd was (and I’m being kind to myself) averaging about ten years younger than me. I grew up going to raves and listening to warehouse music—and I couldn’t help but feel jealous for the generation cutting their teeth to Sophie, whose blips and bleeps careen so close to the mainstream because of how damn catchy they are.
There is a certain amount of irony to being a pop artist. Pop, at its core, is the opposite of art, made to please the greatest swath of people as possible, to evoke a dumbly visceral response that promises to be simple. It’s why pop music and candy have such a symbiotic relationship: sugary sweet, cheap, made to appeal to a craving that everyone has somewhere inside, even though it isn’t as elevated as, say, ratatouille or a braised filet mignon (that’s what you do with filet mignon, right? Braise it?). Oh, and both candy and pop music are especially appealing to the youth, who love to digest something simply because it feels good.
But pop music also has the opportunity to critique, to reflexively look at its own packaging and remark upon how shiny it is, how superficial it has become. What else is “commercial” than being as widely accessible as possible? And, here’s the subversion, what if that meant the music was made for queer kids thriving in a warehouse, online, in chat rooms? If the medium is the goddamn message, we better start creating a brand new medium. This is what made Sophie a genius.
In Sophie’s most pop-forward song, “Immaterial” the artist plays on the notion of a material girl, but refuses to be confined, held down, defined. The song pulses and careens, with Sophie’s trademarked bouncy bass punching holes through the vocals. “I could be anything I want/Anyhow, anywhere/Any place, anyone that I want.” Take that, Madonna. (Sophie did co-write “Bitch I’m Madonna,” after all.)
Sophie isn’t utopian. The pop Sophie makes can be evil and sadistic. But Sophie’s music slingshots electronic music, not always willingly, into the future.
One day, we will be back to dancing, and pop music will be the thing that saves our souls. In the meantime, it’s okay to cry.