between britpop and brat i've been consuming a lot of SOPHIE eulogy content lately and it's affecting me more than i thought it would.
it's not a stretch to say that even outside of this period i think about SOPHIE at least once a day and have done for years now. often it is because i am listening to a song she produced, but just as frequently it is because i am shoving a distorted snare drum sound into a reverb with a very small room size and then distorting it more and smothering it with OTT to make it sound like smacking a steel pipe against the floor of a cathedral as recorded by a broken robot from the future.
i do this because SOPHIE did it first, because i want to capture even a fraction of the joy and energy she put into songs like HARD and ponyboy and faceshopping. i'm not alone in this, just as often as i think about SOPHIE because i am ripping her off, i think of SOPHIE because i am listening to someone rip her off, whether it's umru or leroy or dylan brady or death's dynamic shroud or any of the shallow watered down copycats that creep into the top 40.
when i think about SOPHIE's death i just think: why couldn't we just have this one. so many of us die every year, as tiktok commenters are happy to remind anyone brave enough to be visibly trans. SOPHIE's death is impossible to be mad about because it wasn't for any reason. you can't turn it into a rallying cry. she wasn't a martyr. it was an accident. of course, nobody dies for a reason.
i think about this because we live in a time absolutely bereft of visionaries. as much as i love brat, its greatest flaw is that it is a painfully backwards-looking album. as i listened to it i kept a log of all the spire presets i recognized. the future somehow still sounds like it did in 2004. but SOPHIE's future was different: when she produced for charli she made it sound like nothing else on earth.
i started writing this before the new SOPHIE song came out and i'm still thinking about it. i don't know how i feel about it. it's not blowing me away. it sounds like her, but it sounds like her at her most conventional, like when she produced for vince staples and basside. it's a far cry from her deranged final single. but also it's a reminder that in the time she's been gone, everyone has raided her bag of tricks. if she'd stayed around i have no doubt that she would have stayed light-years ahead of the competition, but instead we get a version of her frozen in 2021, before tiktok was awash in 30 second tutorials on how to make the fizzy pop sounds from lemonade and "SOPHIE snares" and those little rubbery synth fills she loved to do.
it's also a reminder, though, that there was more to SOPHIE than just reckless sonic experimentalism. i think often of this quote from A.G. cook's sophie eulogy:
Sophie was and always will be a wedding DJ. There were cute photos of her DJing weddings as a pre-teen, and one of the most joyous DJ sets we did together was for her sister’s wedding. It’s funny to think of us striking a balance between our own tracks and the ethereal ‘mainstream’ selections that are considered acceptable at weddings, but Sophie loved to win over crowds, to make people dance, and she had a vast knowledge of music from different eras which she could deftly weave into her own world. Amongst her USBs were some backup folders simply labelled 70s, 80s, 90s that I remember falling back on for various nights and afterparties when things needed to get a little matrimonious.
and that's what really made her special. she was not just at the cutting edge of sound design and song structure, she was also, unlike so many others in a similar lane, a party person. she made something that you've never heard before sound irresistibly danceable. a fascinating exercise is to compare her early work with that of her contemporaries: a thorough comparison of "BIPP" and untold's "stop what you're doing" (a song i also like) will reveal immediately that this is what set her apart from other sonic experimentalists. in a culture obsessed with individualism and "self-expression" and the idea of making art only for yourself, she made music for us, which is not mutually incompatible with making music for herself. after all, she was, and always will be, one of us.
