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Publication: Michigan Daily, , University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI
B-Side
The eclectic iconography of hyperpop
Sunday, October 4, 2020 - 2:59pm
Cover art by Mikey Joyce and Dario Alva Buy this photo
Courtesy of Bradley Bledsoe
Ben Vassar Daily Arts Writer
For all of the playfulness and anarchy that characterize hyperpop music, we hardly ever talk about how its associated visual culture contributes to its allure.
For hundreds of thousands of twenty-somethings barred from clubs this spring, Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now, dropped on May 15, offered a reprieve. Its unabashed expressionism on songs like “pink diamond” and “anthems” injected life into the dull day-to-day of quarantine. In addition to all of its musical richness, every song on the album has a music video, introducing an equally decadent world of visuals that contributes just as much to the album’s effect.
Charli isn’t the only artist playing with audiovisual overload at the moment. 100 gecs have come into prominence in the last year off this same kind of maximalism, an artistic gesture that seems suited to the psyche of the six-hours-of-screen-time-a-day individual.
Over the summer, hundreds of fans made pilgrimages to the site of the tree on the cover of 100 gecs’s debut album, 1000 gecs. In July, seemingly in response, gecs dropped a remix album, 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues that featured the same tree surrounded by a diverse cast of characters from a broad range...