MUSIC
Finding Chicago Bop in Today’s Hyperpop Tracing the affinities between two Chicago genres.
BY BOBBY VANECKO
I
feel like the best way to describe it would be nostalgic, but new-sounding at the same time. There are moments in some of the songs that may remind you of something you’ve felt, seen, or heard before. But the song as a whole feels like its own thing.” Andrew Goes to Hell, a songwriter, producer and vocalist from the southwest suburbs of Chicago, is describing hyperpop—the term commentators have used to describe the new vanguard of electronic music taking shape across Chicago and around the world. According to Billy Bugara, co-founder of online label deadAir, it’s “just contemporary future pop… It’s taking pop music to levels it hasn’t been, as far as experimentation, creativity and embodying the modern sentiment in general.” But this can take a dizzyingly broad range of forms: as Chicago Reader writer Leor Galil puts it, hyperpop is “a frustratingly imprecise umbrella term that refers to a growing pool of stylistically disparate pop experimentalists.” And if hyperpop’s sound is difficult to triangulate, then its origin is even harder to pin down. The mainstream stories that have popped up to explain this new genre typically attribute its founding to the Spotify playlist that coined the term in 2019, to the 2019 debut album from the band 100 gecs, or to the label and musical collective PC Music, which dates back to 2013. All of these groups share common sounds and production techniques, such as sped-up tempos, high-pitched vocals, blown-out synths, and other futuristic electronic flourishes—and much of it is popular in Chicago. But despite these connections to the city, one overlooked influence on—and predecessor to— today’s hyperpop music is Chicago bop,
ILLUSTRATION BY KEVIN MOORE JR.
a type of rap music that was pioneered in the city in the early 2010’s by artists like Kemo, Stunt Taylor, and Sicko Mobb, and producers like DJ Nate, Mudd Gang, and the late LeekeLeek. Nine years ago, in a Pitchfork article on Chicago’s bop scene, writer Meaghan Garvey described the genre as “buoyant, upbeat and heavily reliant on autotune rap-singing.” Today,
the description seems like it could double as an account of hyperpop. “I imagine history will flatten what Chicago rap sounded like in the first half of the 2010s into top-to-bottom doom and gloom,” Garvey wrote in an email to the Weekly, “but that wasn’t really the case. In all the early tapes from guys like Keef and Durk, there’d be these
moments of total exuberance, like ‘Save That Shit’ on Back from the Dead in 2012. That specific sound—which was sort of tinny and chintzy and to some people, probably really annoying—was popping up in tons of new Chicago songs I’d find while trawling Youtube, and I became a bit obsessed with organizing it into something coherent, because it was APRIL 7, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
