The Alien Resonances and Queer Obscurities of Hyperpop’s 100 gecs

Abstract

This article pairs 100 gecs’ aesthetic praxes of obscurity alongside hyperpop’s extension of electronic music’s alien sonorities to explore how the musical and the otherworldly come to transpose and transform the self through anonymous or opaque modes of production, receptivity, and transmission. I suggest that Dylan Brady and Laura Les’ commitment to sonic, visual, and connotative obscurity is not only the force behind their viral success but is the spell that casts their music as particularly queer, as their aesthetic choices challenge the strictures of neoliberal personhood and the epistemological demands for rational transparency. I will first establish a cosmology of hyperpop through music, sound, race, and sexuality studies that tracks the genre’s obscure technological, magical, and nonhuman influences to explore how hyperpop is both an extension of the uneven distributions of power across varying positionalities of identity, while nevertheless offering a means to disrupt concepts of the human outside a politics of recognition by embracing the (im)materiality of the body. I will then analyze 100 gecs’ debut album 1000 gecs (2019) to attune to how the duo make themselves alien to structures of the human through queer and trans embodiments and resonances. Overall, I contend that hyperpop offers an avenue for understanding what it means to extricate the alien from the political, social, and linguistic-based schemas that manage concepts of the human under cisnormative racial capitalism and attend more closely to how logics of the alien escape, distort, and transfigure the human towards possibilities of sounding and living otherwise.