Bipp

SOPHIE

Numbers

SOPHIE is now so unanimously revered that it’s hard to remember a time when no one knew what to make of her neon-lit, turbo-pop universe. After a sneak-entry with the electro-house 12″ Nothing More to Say, the Scottish producer went nuclear with her next three singles – Bipp, Lemonade and Msmsmsm – which together offered an all-encompassing vision of futuristic delirium, a sound so bizarre yet so fully realised that it simply had to be acknowledged: finally, here was music that sounded fucking new! At the time, though, few of us dared to stan. The suspicion that there was some kind of mystifying conceptualism behind the project was a turn-off for journalists worried about being hoodwinked – was all this helium-voiced exuberance ultimately vacuous? Or worse, was it just a piss-take, manufactured to make us all look stupid?

Neither was true, of course. Five years later and Bipp has lost none of its impact: a fizzing fantasyland populated by alien squeaks and sighs and weightless melodies cast from plastic, chrome and silicon – materials of the now-and-future bent into danceable shapes, just as steel and battery acid fuelled the techno machine music of the 80s. At the same time, Bipp captured an emerging nostalgia for an era not yet boiled down into “remember when?” clichés – the cheap-and-cheerful sincerity of 90s Europop, with its brittle, multi-girl harmonies: “I can make you feel better, if you let me!” The faceless robo-lover of our dreams promises us sheer pleasure and nothing but: a six-second sugar-high and chemical dependency, dopamine-jolting phone alerts and immediate fulfilment, over and over, endlessly. Bipp contains the shadow of both excess and comedown, attractive and repulsive in equal measure, like full-blown addiction. And SOPHIE nails this modern malaise like no one else, speaking to us as both object and subject: the perfect double agent. After all, before she revealed herself as a glamorous, fully human avatar for crypto-commercial nu-pop, she was licensing Lemonade to a McDonald’s advert – and getting away with it. Fast forward to 2019 and SOPHIE is the only artist in the world who can play an Amazon-sponsored music festival and make it look like a winking inside joke. Just as Andy Warhol’s canvases of Marilyn Monroe managed to both underline and undermine the power of celebrity in the 60s, SOPHIE’s Bipp exists as a mirror-like meta-commentary on the 00s, celebrating all that we reject. That’s genius, and we’re powerless to resist.

Chal Ravens