It’s not always a natural fit for a producer to cross the line from soundboard to microphone, but in SOPHIE’s case, we’ve all been waiting since her single, “Bipp,” in 2013 for her to surrender to the inevitable solo album that has at last come in the incarnation of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. Proving that there must be something in the water in Glasgow (where CHVRCHES–with a new album of their own–also hails from), it took many years for us to at last unearth some semblance of her “true” identity, with music critics eventually coming to find SOPHIE’s real name is Samuel Long, and that’s about it. In fact, in 2016, music critics were still using “he” as a pronoun to describe her.
Proving that pop stars are often very literally a composition of 0s and 1s with a dash of high-pitchedness, synths and grafting of traits from cultural icons before them (this is, by the way, the exact premise of the highly visionary 2002 film from Andrew Niccol, Simone), SOPHIE is the trans goddess we’ve been waiting for to not only intersect the sexes, but the breach between pop music and technology (sorry, Grimes, it ain’t you in the end, and especially not after that Apple commercial–even though SOPHIE is all for the interbreeding of art, advertising and commerce).
In the past sounding more Europop in the vein of Aqua (specifically on “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye”), SOPHIE forsakes all of that “pleasantness” for a straight-up auditory onslaught that is surely leaving Björk cowering in her boots (in addition to Lars Von Trier).
The most straightforward (read: least “busy”/sonically complex) song on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is its first, the one that immediately establishes false intimacy with the triteness of its title: “It’s Okay to Cry.” The accompanying video allows us our most truly intimate glimpse yet into who SOPHIE is, aesthetically. Set against the backdrop of a shifting sky, we can’t honestly fathom that SOPHIE could be genuine in our jaded world of “irony.” And maybe that’s part of her game, making us question how serious she is and/or forcing us to go back to a time when people whispering things like, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way/But I think your inside is your best side,” was taken at face value. Known for her subversion of lyrics with this type of inside/outside innuendo (as made most evident on “Faceshopping”) that makes you overly analyze pop lyrics, SOPHIE is a walking advertisement (she once said she would describe her music as “advertising”) for how close we are to total detachment from our bodies, espousing the sort of avant-garde theory that posits we’ll be able to live on in other “shells” so long as there are downloadable disks of our “selves”–our personalities. Which can be unfortunate for those many who do not have a personality.
In SOPHIE’s case, that self is one that aggresses with sweetness, as is the case on the unlike anything you’ve ever heard “Ponyboy,” which lyrically and visually experiments with the notion of pony play, as she demands degradation: “Make the pony bite the bit/Spit on my face/Put the pony in his place/I am your toy/Just a little ponyboy.” This comfortableness with being vitiated speaks to our own collective comfortableness with the same. So willing are we to be the ponyboy to society.
Shouting orgasmically on “Faceshopping,” “Oh, reduce me to nothingness, oh yes, yes!,” SOPHIE essentially parodies modern existence, because that is what we must boil everything down to in order to get to the core of anything real anymore, so manufactured as this life has become. But SOPHIE has made fantastic use of that manufacturedness, a pop star that is truly a product of this time (SOPHIE called her first album, a compilation, Product, by the way). An amalgam of every 80s pop star with a splash of Aqua, Björk and The Knife, the plastic, bubblewrap sounds of SOPHIE’s music heighten the combination of high pitches and serial killer-sounding threats in a more baritone voice (e.g. “Ponyboy). And that’s the point, to arrest and assault our senses in a way that we haven’t really been by any other modern artist. As SOPHIE said in her early era of performance (the SXSW period), “I’m very interested in trying to access the immediacy of sound. Divorcing physical sound from its musical and cultural connotations. I really see it happening when for example you go to hear a band like Autechre play. People start screaming purely from the joy of experiencing sound… Sensory pleasure.” This focus on sensory pleasure also comes with pain, however (like any pleasure, right? Specifically being in love and then being tossed aside). SOPHIE doesn’t give us her sugary sweet, processed vocals straightforwardly anymore, as she did on “Bipp” or “Lemonade”–this time she’s coming to attack all your emotions (what’s left of them) with the sort of abrasiveness that isn’t as “cute” as it was on, say, “Bitch I’m Madonna” (which she co-produced with Diplo).
However, there is a rare moment of frenetic serenity on “Is It Cold In the Water?” Slowly unraveling the sonic motif of the track, SOPHIE sings at almost a whisper level (à la “It’s Okay to Cry”), asking the question that signifies she is going to plunge into the depths anyway, risk it all for the sake of something transformative. And, in the end, it pays off as she describes, “I’m liquid, I’m floating into the blue” (or, as Lana Del Rey would put it, “I’m out of the black and into the blue”).
“Infatuation” continues the tone of ambience albeit with a much more sinister subject matter: obsession. More specifically, an obsession with truly comprehending and “knowing” the person you’re in love with, as if that’s ever a possibility when no one can know anything about another thanks to the curse of solipsism. To accentuate the point, when SOPHIE performs the track live, it is accompanied with the visual of a squid treading in dark waters, for that’s what it is to attempt trying to fathom anyone, least of all someone you think that you know well just because love is involved. She inquires, “Infatuation/Who are you?/Deep down/I wanna know.” But you can’t.
With sharp and galling beats that often outshine the sugary sweet vocals that pay homage to the likes of “helium voice” early 80s Madonna, “Not Okay,” the briefest track on the album that serves as a sharp juxtaposition against “Infatuation,” suggests a sort of feminist/drag queen bent as Sophie assures, “Girl/I believe in you/So, baby, come and try.”
“Pretending,” something of a re-creation of the feeling you get when you’re made to be hearing the sound of whales communicating with one another, addresses both the ideas of the fake world we inhabit as well as an inability to break through the walls put up by people not just in general but, in large part, thanks to the accoutrements of technology. Thus, SOPHIE asks, “How long do I fantasize/Make believe that it’s still alive/Imagine that I am good enough/And we can choose the ones we love?,” further adding, “Will we ever say the words we’re feeling/Reach down underneath and tear down all the walls?” Likely not, unless we can get SOPHIE to communicate for us through sound.
A sendup on Madonna repeating, “A material, a material, a material world,” SOPHIE revamps the 80s staple (which Madonna rendered ironic anyway in the video’s narrative) in the form of “Immaterial,” repurposing the theme to the struggle of the trans woman, or anyone at war with gender identity. Likening the notion of gender to being immaterial as well as the treatment a trans person gets (our own government wanting to make them invisible) as they make their way into the sex that they always saw themselves as SOPHIE sings, “Without my legs or my hair/Without my genes or my blood/With no name and with no type of story/Where do I live?/Tell me, where do I exist?” This harkens back to the tenets presented in Martine Rothblatt’s From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form and Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality, which SOPHIE has mentioned as an influence. As Sasha Geffen put it in her profile of SOPHIE, “Rothblatt draws a line from gender trouble to artificial intelligence, postulating that mind clones—digital copies of human brains—may well flourish as the next iteration of humanity. It’s a heady concept, and the technology to realize it isn’t quite there yet, but it makes sense that it’s a trans woman posing such a theory. If you can find your way out of one system—gender—you’re better prepared to find your way out of all the rest.”
And on that note, we live in increasingly synthetic times. That SOPHIE’s brand of syntheticism can elicit a reaction gives those of us who aren’t completely terrified of the transition into the future some hope that feelings might still exist there, in that realm of the fabricated. SOPHIE’s reverence for the pop music space–its history and its “rules”–also makes her a greater force to be reckoned with than anyone else in the current void of pop (’cause Ariana Grande really isn’t the answer, especially being heteronormative as fuck for someone so into the LGBTQ community).
SOPHIE thus knows the importance of the visual despite a sort of dissociative approach to the body, commenting, “The pop music video is one of the most powerful communication tools we have. Most people have access to a phone, and you can click a video and absorb it in three minutes. If it’s potent enough, you can take in the message or have some sort of experience in multiple dimensions, the music with the image.”
With or without a music video, every track SOPHIE puts out literally bursts with this desire to be understood through sound (case in point, “L.O.V.E.,” a single from 2015). And, as stated in a recent piece for Vulture, in reference to the final revolution requiring multilingual understanding, SOPHIE offered that maybe this radical change a-coming “will be musical.” Communicated through sound. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides seems like a useful pawn in that theory.
Putting a cap on the nine-track album (everyone is so brief these days–hear: ye or Everything Is Love) is “Whole New World/Pretend World,” a somewhat sardonic take on Aladdin‘s version. Synthesizing the the motifs of transitioning fully into 1) a new gender and 2) the fake worlds furnished by screens, technology and even the mind itself, SOPHIE also goes analog in terms of depicting how our lust for an alternate realm also exists in the often false idea of losing ourselves in another person, wailing “I looked into your eyes, I thought that I could see a whole new world.” Turns out, it was probably fake, underscoring SOPHIE’s larger statement, “That’s a running theme in this music— questioning preconceptions about what’s real and authentic. What’s natural and what’s unnatural and what’s artificial, in terms of music, in terms of gender, in terms of reality, I suppose.” And well, I suppose, love, most especially in these times, is always artificial and, if nothing else, merely a reflection of one’s own unwarranted self-love.
