SOPHIE Built a Whole New World Last Night
A never-before-published review of SOPHIE's 2018 "debut" live performance
Her face was the front of shop: SOPHIE at Elsewhere, 2018
Editor’s note: At this time, in lieu of reviewing the posthumous, self-titled, purportedly “final” SOPHIE album released this evening, I’d like to publish this piece instead. This was a never-printed Village Voice reportage of SOPHIE’s “live debut” (re: non-DJing) performance at Elsewhere in Brooklyn, NY on February 8, 2018, which I was lucky to attend. I wrote it in 2018, dusted it off today, fixed some language to be less ignorant, and gave it a better title. The entire set was comprised from the not-yet-released Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.
The rapping/declaiming performance artist Bully Fae — SOPHIE’s opening act at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere last night — was an acquired taste, but my favorite bit was when they turned parallel parking into a sex act. There is a lot of delayed gratification in delicately pulling into and out of the same spot trying to get it just right isn’t there? “Movement is how you make a city come/cum” is how Fae put it. And furthermore, “There is no greater perversity than feeling you're keeping an entire city from coming/cumming at once.”
SOPHIE herself has possibly taken this philosophy to heart, at least musically. Mostly known for pop deconstructions that are equal parts twinkly and gnashing, the 32-year-old, Scottish-born L.A. producer first scored huge in 2013 with the bubbly “Bipp,” a dance tune so irresistible that few noticed it didn’t really have any drums. Then she rose to prominence alongside A.G. Cook’s prankish PC Music collective: Hannah Diamond, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, and other fictional-seeming entities with names like Kane West and Lil Data. In 2014, SOPHIE and Cook capped PC Music’s banner year with the blog smash “Hey QT,” the theme song for eponymous mystery QT, revealed in the video to be an energy drink, not an artist (and doesn’t exist outside of it in either form — like Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” it’s the lone QT track).
The producer enlisted various PC Music catfish to sing in altered helium tones on her own singles, like on GFOTY on the clanging “Hard.” It’s unconfirmed whose chipmunked voice graces her astounding Prince tribute “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye.” On 2015’s singles comp PRODUCT, these plasticine, uncanny-valley ditties were offset by dissonant bursts like the haywire teakettle explosive “L.O.V.E.,” but even for a deconstructionist, her set last night was short on much resembling pop.
Taking the stage to booming shards of industrial static in a black latex hood with long gloves and a matching skintight outfit, SOPHIE debuted the punishing “Whole New World” while familiar emotional terms flashed on the screen behind her and her backup singers/dancers FlucT: “Feelings,” “Promises,” “Me,” “You.” Find the right comments section and you’ll be told it’s the title track from her upcoming proper debut album, but the punishing noise and militant repetition of the words “Whole! New! World!” last night made “L.O.V.E.” — her previous line-in-the-sand set opener at PC Music’s PopCube extravaganza in 2016 — sound like Carly Rae Jepsen.
Having now worked with major icons from Madonna (“Bitch I’m Madonna”) to Kendrick Lamar (on Vince Staples’ metallic “Yeah Right”), it’s entirely possible that the SOPHIE solo project will become a dissonant rebuke to the candylike melodies she previously dispatched (2014’s “Lemonade” even found its way into a McDonald’s commercial). The bulk of last night’s set was dedicated to chunks of aural brutality that may or may not gel into songforms on record; the stomping, fetishy “Ponyboy” might’ve been earth-shaking white noise if she hadn’t already put it on YouTube, and even then the claustrophobic heaviness left little room for melodic elements. Onstage, she and FlucT recreated the choreographed video almost exactly. Later in the set, a significant amount of time was allotted to a laser show scored by an all-percussion instrumental bit that could only be described as billiard balls banging into each other while being ripped apart like Velcro. It was closer to Tri Angle avant-gardist Rabit than any of her own prior work.
The new songs themselves largely eschewed tune in favor of scrambled slogans. One with the alleged title “Faceshopping” moved around words in the phrase “My face is the real shop front” like fridge magnet poetry. (It was paired visually with a CGI version of SOPHIE’s face inflating, swirling, and being cut up, the performance’s vividest link to her recent announcement that she’s a trans woman.) Another, which is likely called “Immaterial Girls,” was musically the only dance-pop song of the night, but also hinged on its title being chanted over and over, alternated with both “girls” and “boys.” Much of the “singing” was performed courtesy of the FlucT duo, Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile, but the exception (to just about everything last night) was the closer, an almost-Disneyesque (talk about a whole new world) ballad called “It’s Okay to Cry” that SOPHIE released last October as a multi-step coming-out. It was her first known vocal, her first video, and her first public reveal of her face at all; there were never any SOPHIE press photos prior. Its release and attendant confirmations cleared up years of press speculation accusing her of “feminine appropriation.”
“It’s Okay to Cry” is a tender, shaky, vulnerable tune unlike anything SOPHIE had done prior (and on this show’s evidence, unlike much else on the forthcoming album either), and, other than a FlucT interlude where they appeared to be interpolating Morris Albert’s “Feelings,” featured the only true singing of the night, more or less recreating its audacious video with a red, frilly dress replacing the nudity.
While the new songs themselves lacked the sweet-and-sour frisson of the eight singles repackaged into the essential, incredible PRODUCT, they appear to push the same dynamic into new directions, barricading phrases as openhearted and nearly Celine Dion-esque as “I believe in you” and “here in my heart” behind protective walls of ear-bleeding noise and words like “money” chanted over and over. It’s no surprise that there’s a human being under all those digitized layers of performance, but SOPHIE’s current agenda is showing her far and wide audience exactly how much sonic armor is required for one transwoman to put up a self-protective front.