The debut album by the mysterious electronic producer Sophie – actually a compilation of two previously released singles and four new tracks – comes in a variety of formats, and not just the usual download, CD and deluxe vinyl options. According to Sophie’s website, Product has also been released as a variety of objects, purchasers of which get MP3s of the songs as well. The shoes, sunglasses and quilted jacket have apparently already sold out, leaving only one item available: it retails for £50, is described as a “skin-safe, odourless and tasteless platinum silicon product”, and looks suspiciously like what would once have been tactfully called a marital aid.
An artist is releasing his album as a kind of addendum to buying a sex toy. Well, of course he is: Sophie – who in reality seems to be a male, London-based producer called Sam – is an affiliate of PC Music, the label/sub-genre that, depending on your perspective, is either responsible for “some of the most compelling pop music in living memory” or “a vapid art project by a handful of rich kids”. Although signed to the respected dance label Numbers, he co-produced PC Music’s best known single to date, QT’s Hey QT, and shares the label’s interest in sped-up female RP vocals, the bubblegum end of dance music – happy hardcore, Europop, the kind of turbo-powered commercial trance with which the Clubland tours used to fill the arenas of the north – and pop’s relationship with consumerism. There is much layering on of irony, giving interviews in funny voices and spouting of blank-eyed, sub-Warhol aphorisms: he is influenced by “shopping – things prohibited in hand luggage”, and says the name Sophie “tastes good and it’s like moisturiser”.
PC Music has been hailed as a resolutely modern development in a musical world obsessed with nostalgia, but listening to Product, what’s striking is how old-fashioned the ideas at its core seem. Everything it has to say about pop music’s inherent disposability, its glossy artifice and its parallels with advertising is quackingly, forehead-slappingly obvious – Sophie has totally worked out that pop isn’t merely the name of a musical genre, but the nickname of a kind of drink as well, hence the bursting-bubble sound effects and kids’ voices repeating the title of Lemonade and the “shake it up and make it fizz” chorus of Vyzee. It’s also hackneyed to the point of seeming pensionable.
It’s nearly 50 years since the Who released Sell Out, complete with fake advertising endorsements on its sleeve and songs flogging deodorant and baked beans: half a century during which a plethora of artists have toyed with ideas satirising the depthlessness of pop and the notion of music as marketing. Of course, in recent years the music industry has changed in a way that gives those ideas a contemporary relevance: we live in an age where dance events are slathered in corporate branding, recorded music’s monetary value appears to have collapsed, the real new pop idols are YouTube stars of indeterminate talent and the hollow, DayGlo sound of EDM has swept the US. But if the business is different, Sophie and PC Music have nothing new to say in response, not a single idea that hasn’t already been explored to the point of exhaustion. The idea of wryly drawing an analogy between your music and bland consumer goods by calling your album Product, for example, has already been had by, among others, the Sex Pistols, Seattle-based collective Beat Connection, Pop Will Eat Itself, rapper Big Chief, Test Department, screamo band Delvic, Euro dance duo Sound Factory, the indie label Angular, the indie label Fast Product, Emergency Broadcast Network, the Black Dog, Markus Keinzl – best known as one half of downtempo duo Sofa Surfers – Buzzcocks, and Phil Collins’ jazz-fusion side project Brand X, although in absolute fairness, none of them came up with the wheeze of giving their album away when you bought a dildo.
With its clanging lyrical references to Warhol, you get the feeling that Product thinks it’s in a grand tradition of idiosyncratic, arty and enigmatic pop detournements that includes the work of the KLF, ZTT Records and the Flying Lizards. At its tinniest and most irritating, what it really recalls is the oeuvre of Jonathan King, who spent the 1970s releasing one knowingly awful novelty record after another under a variety of aliases while wearing a permanent smirk suggestive of a man quite disproportionately pleased with himself. Rather than Justified and Ancient or Two Tribes, the true antecedent for something like Sophie’s Hard (bored-sounding posh girl recites list of vaguely suggestive things over clattering beats, clangs, squeaks, whoops, the synthesised “Hoover” noise derived from Joey Beltram’s 1991 techno track Mentasm and a hook that sounds like an audio mnemonic of the Intel Inside variety) might be St Cecilia’s noticeably less lauded 1971 smash Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air), a record King claimed he produced in order to prove that something so annoying that even he couldn’t stand it would still be a hit.
Curiously, the tracks that smugly seem to be going out of their way to get on your nerves aren’t the most infuriating thing about Product. The stuff detailed above makes up the rump of the album, but it’s not the whole story. There are a handful of instrumentals, which, if not terribly substantial, are at least intriguing: L.O.V.E. sets cut-up female vocals over an atonal electronic screech to unsettling effect, MSMSMSM disrupts some noirish dubstep atmospherics with a frantic happy hardcore riff, as the Aphex Twin might have done had dubstep been around when he was making some of his more whimsical albums. Moreover, the album is bookended by two genuinely brilliant pop songs. Bipp’s perky vocal is isolated over music that sounds like an old hardcore anthem falling to pieces: the rhythm has almost vanished, the bassline churns nauseously, the big hands-in-the-air synth riff echoes mournfully in the distance. Even better is Just Like We Never Said Goodbye, its lovely tune shot through with melancholy, its yearning quality somehow amplified by the fact that the beat you keep expecting to kick in never does: the whole thing feels like an intro, anticipating something that isn’t going to arrive.
These are great songs that raise the question: if Sophie can do this, why does he bother doing all the other stuff? Why waste your time with all the knackered posturing, the tee-hee-it’s-meant-to-be-annoying irony, the trite stuff about pop’s relationship to consumerism, a topic about which he clearly has absolutely nothing novel or interesting to say? If you can make intriguing, futuristic pop music, why not just do that? The charitable answer is that without all the accompanying affectation, PC Music wouldn’t have attracted the attention it has – considerable enough that Sophie ended up with a co-production gig on the last Madonna album. The uncharitable answer is that he thinks it’s a bit below him, that he’s less interested in making pop music or celebrating it in all its neon-bright, two-fingers-to-good-taste glory than in sneering at it.
