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SOPHIE 2016 in London
Photo: Joseph Okpako / Redferns
Pioneer, exceptional artist, revolutionary - these are attributions that are used inflationarily in obituaries for the greats of the pop world.
When it comes to SOPHIE, however, no superlative seems big enough to honor the legacy that the 34-year-old leaves to the pop world after her surprising death.
With her radical hyperpop she made maximalism a principle and broke the boundaries between mainstream and underground.
Madonna, Rihanna or Nikki Minaj - whoever collaborated with SOPHIE could be sure of the appreciative looks of the cool kids.
SOPHIE was
larger than life
.
In doing so, she personally stepped back almost modestly behind her pioneering productions.
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SOPHIE at the AIM Awards London
Photo: picture alliance / Photoshot
Socialized with rave culture and electronic dance music through her father, the Scottish native Sophie Xeon began her career as a DJ and in an electro-pop band called Motherland.
In the early 2010s she came into contact with AG Cook and Danny L. Harle through SoundCloud, who were to shape the sound of the coming years with their London-based avant-pop label PC Music.
After SOHPIE released the relatively conventional dance pop number »Nothing More To Say« in 2012, with the EP »Bipp / Elle« in 2013, she managed to jump onto the radar of pop critics, who then became passionate about their intangible confusion of sound and processed identities.
"It sounds as if SOPHIE is recreating 'DANCE' for the post-bass music generation from Jam City's futuristic sample pack and studio tricks," Pitchfork made the pathetic attempt to classify SOPHIE into existing categories.
By no means was anything recreate here.
In an endlessly ruminating pop world, SOPHIE created a previously unheard, independent sound.
"Bipp" was bass music with the bass turned out, like an endless break on the dance floor that the eagerly awaited drop simply doesn't want to follow.
The electrifying and nerve-wracking game of expectations became SOPHIE's principle.
She called her sound "advertising".
»Lemonade«, a song from their EP »Product«, which was released in 2015, even ran as advertising music in a McDonald's campaign.
Artificiality and authenticity, irony and seriousness, SOPHIE consistently turned these concepts through the distortion.
The grotesque symbiosis of high-spirited J-Pop, Eurodance and female vocals, pitched to the limit, shocked and finally said goodbye to common categories such as mainstream and underground into an age of the post-genre.
SOPHIE rejected attributions such as "Intelligent Dance Music" or "experimental" all her life because she perceived them to be elitist and predictable, more of a manly nerd pose than actually innovative.
Instead, she named Kraftwerk and the Pet Shop Boys as groundbreaking influences.
The combination of groundbreaking production techniques paired with catchy hooks helped both of them to achieve simultaneous recognition in the underground and on format radio.
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SOPHIE show at Paris Fashion Week in October 2019
Photo: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff / Getty Images
SOPHIE had the underground with her brutal shredder sound on her side from the start.
Instead of adapting to the mainstream sound suitable for the masses with increasing popularity, SOPHIE achieved an unbelievable feat: conversely, she ensured that the mainstream adapted to her sound.
As the producer of "Bitch I'm Madonna (feat. Nikki Minaj)", SOPHIE helped the Queen of Pop achieve an edgy sound makeover in 2014, and one year later she freed Charli XCX from her EP "Vroom Vroom" by collaborating on her EP Pop star pose.
That Charli XCX is one of the most interesting pop stars of the time is undisputed.
She is considered the star of the so-called »Hyperpop«, a style-diverse online scene that rebels against the heteronormative pop mainstream with queer artists such as Kim Petras, 100 Gecs or Dorian Electra.
This scene would be unthinkable without SOPHIE.
Because on this point, too, SOPHIE's position as a radical pioneer cannot be emphasized enough: she was nominated for a Grammy for her 2018 debut album "Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides" - a phonetic transcription of the sentence "I love every person's insides" as one of the first trans women ever.
The album was, as it were, her public coming-out, with which she ended the years of hide-and-seek behind the faceless alias SOPHIE, which at the beginning was still read as male by some media.
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SOPHIE 2016 at the Reading Festival in Reading, UK
Photo: Burak Cingi / Redferns
With »Faceshopping« she deconstructed the concept of
realness
and with the alienated Disney cover of Aladdin's »Whole New World / Pretend World« described an eerie and longingly awaited escape from the world.
In the video for “It's Okay To Cry”, on the other hand, SOPHIE showed himself to be so radically pure and vulnerable with red lipstick and a bare torso that it takes your breath away.
SOPHIE's versatility and diversity are unsurpassed, her accidental death much too early is an incredible tragedy.
Even if her legacy as one of the most important music producers of the 2010s will survive, the pop world weeps for a visionary who will be sorely missing.
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