I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of genre in music lately. When people ask me what I make, or what I’m into, or what type of DJ I am, I struggle for an answer. Not because I don’t know what I like, or that I claim to have some elevated perspective beyond the need for such petty notions as genre or style. Mostly I think it comes down to an interest in putting disparate styles in conversation with one another, getting excited about the two-step swing of a broken beat techno track or bouncing additive synthesis exploration stretched across a frame of electro-trap-grime swagger. Usually I just say I’m into techno because that’s the easiest reference point for most people to latch onto, but any answer I give feels incomplete or somehow inaccurate. I don’t care too much about being able to label the music I love, and in fact I probably get some perverse enjoyment out of floundering for an honest response to the type of question that’s more often motivated by politeness than a genuine interest in a treatise on dance music aesthetics. But lately I’ve been trying to identify why it is that I bristle when people are overly ready to categorise and pigeonhole music into neatly defined sets, and – surprise! – it has to do with the political economy of electronic music.
Hyperpop gives us the perfect case study for the way that genre operates in late capitalism. Simultaneously a descriptor attached to some truly exciting, fun and adventurous music produced by a notably young and queer cohort of artists hile also being a term largely popularised in 2019 by a Spotify playlist of the same name, hyperpop as a genre label owes much of its significance to being retroactively attached to the output of artists surrounding PC Music, a label founded by A.G. Cook in 2013. Cook, SOPHIE, Danny L. Harle or any of the other artists in their extended circles never set out to ‘make a hyperpop track’, instead they were pushing pop production techniques and songwriting cliches past their limits into ever glossier, more idiosyncratic shapes. They were making pop music, and both valorising and subverting the dominant cultural forms with which their music was in conversation. Spotify’s hyperpop playlist started up in 2019 following the release of 100 gecs’ 1000 gecs and quickly became a popular and influential tastemaker in the space, bringing the PC Music oeuvre alongside a new wave of independent artists from the USA and beyond, and is largely responsible for establishing the bounds of the genre as it is currently understood today. Through the playlist, and by extension the term itself, Spotify as a platform draws boundaries around existing musical currents to group them into a fixed whole, and suddenly those currents and potentialities are cut off from their engagement with mainstream pop music, instead reformulated into a cultural niche that can be sold to consumers, rather than simply belonging to the broader pop milieu. The music’s ability to deconstruct and destabilise pop music from within is circumscribed, and what began as novel aesthetic experiments are repackaged as stylistic signifiers that can be marketed under the hyperpop umbrella.
If the function of culture generally, and music specifically, under capitalism is to be a commodity that enters a marketplace to produce profit, then the function of genre under capitalism is to identify – and in the act of identification, create – a segment of the market to which the musical commodity can be sold. By the time the language exists to describe and categorise a musical movement or tendency, the commercial capture of that movement as a site for the reproduction of capital has already begun. To what extent can one resist, or even merely delay, the enclosure of new creative possibilities by a capitalism that is extremely effective at reincorporating new radical aesthetic forms into itself, through resisting the stabilisation and ossification of genre boundaries in one’s artistic production? My instinct is to say that this is an aim that cannot be undertaken alone – creativity happens in conversation, and keeping spaces of creative possibility open is work that must be done collectively.
All of which isn’t to say that there can’t be interesting or exciting or simply enjoyable music that’s being made within the stable bounds of genre; rather it’s to say that, to the extent that we as producers, critics and subjects of culture are interested in critiquing or obstructing or, dare I say, going beyond existing cultural forms and their attendant economic and political configurations, we must attempt to operate in aesthetic spaces that are as yet beyond linguistic – and therefore hegemonic – capture. Draw disparate ideas and worldviews into conversation with one another through art. Embrace the wot-u-call-it of it all.