SOPHIE

I haven't put SOPHIE's music back on. I haven't been able to, and it will probably stay that way for days, if not weeks. With one exception, however trivial: “It’s Okay To Cry”. I must have already listened to it a dozen times since the news broke of the tragic, premature death of one of the most visionary minds in contemporary electronic music. And even if it doesn't make me physically cry, it helps soften the blow, helps me better process the loss of a voice that, like very few others in the last twenty years, pushed the conversation forward on multiple fronts, proving to be the interpreter of an overflowing, often misunderstood, but ultimately caring, love-dripping humanity. It's absolutely fine to vent your grief, to give it the space it deserves: it's hard, but it's Sophie Xeon herself who tells us that, deep down, our interiority is our best side.

 

The accusations of the past sound utterly ridiculous now — the idea that the desire for anonymity and the adoption of such a distinctive “moniker” amounted to “appropriation of the female gender,” whatever such a claim is even supposed to mean. Even more specious were the noisy outcries raised against the sound introduced in tracks that are now essential, such as “Lemonade and Bipp”, so paradigmatic that it permeated the upper echelons of mainstream (from “Bitch I’m Madonna”, the most brilliant single released by Veronica Ciccone in the 2010s, “B Who I Want 2 B”, included on the latest album by superstar j-pop Namie Amuro) as well as reshaping an independent universe that, through distortion and decontextualization — well beyond the kawaii— traits that defined 2000s/2010s pop, has found a new meaning for the adjective “extreme.” This, and all the talk about accelerationism, about the possible (anti)capitalist theories underlying the sound of Xeon and her friends at Pc Music (from which the sound itself took its name), is all wrapped in a thick layer of cotton wool and loses any importance whatsoever. In the face of a poetics that soon transcended (without ever forgetting) its origins, idle chatter can do very little.

 

A single video, the act of literally baring oneself, is enough to set things straight and make explicit what could already be sensed from the very beginning. With a mask that, deep down, was never truly a mask, and a voice that finally finds the right context to free itself of every filter, “It's Okay To Cry” arrives and dissolves every doubt. About the person, about the artist, about the messages: ever since the imagery queer appeared obliquely, hidden in the folds of the singles collected on “Product”, but with the new record, and an identity displayed with gentle pride, the machine driven by SOPHIE shifts into fifth gear, accelerates, and never stops again.

An icon is born, no longer just the standout producer who gives new momentum to potential “starlets” chewed up by mainstream machinery (“Vroom Vroom” by Charli XCX is by now a classic of the genre), but a fully-fledged artist, in command of her own vulnerability, of the most intimate threads of her being, no longer confined within easy dichotomies, but free to express and expand herself as she pleases, unshackled from every restriction. “Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides”, which would follow shortly after, on the back of an exhilarating run of singles (“Faceshopping” and its lyrical elaborations undoubtedly steal the show), brings to light the producer's poetic essence, her compassionate touch that reaches the whole world from a wholly personal space of expression.

 

Allusive without being hermetic, intimate but never solipsistic, the songwriter's pen sketched out clear images, of a future that finally marches backwards and embraces the present, revealing all the beauty of a life in transition, of a journey that need not have predetermined destinations, but can (suf)fer to a halt wherever and however it sees fit. She was certainly not the first transgender artist to pour her own experience into music, but perhaps none before SOPHIE had told it with this candour, with a sense of normality (in its most euphoric facets as much as its most sinister ones) that rejects every form of banality, and instead sees in otherness (whatever form it takes) simply a fact, not a sob-story to feed to the curious. If the music had already won people over, now it's the whole package that seduces, moves, conquers. And if the grief that followed her death (not only from the international queer community, rarely as united as it was in this case) means anything, that conquest, however quietly, was already advancing in leaps and bounds.

 

It hurts to know that “Unisil”, a previously unreleased outtake from “Product”, is the last testament of a mind that, like very few others, defined the 2010s. It hurts to realise how much a fatal accident has robbed us of a personality, a savoir-faire, an icon, in a landscape that struggles to produce true icons at all. Looking up at the full moon, from now on, will feel different. It’s definitely colder in the water now….