“Back to 1999”: Exploring Speculative Nostalgia with Hyperpop

Hyperpop, a microgenre of pop music named and made famous by a Spotify-generated playlist, is a hyper-referential form. Sonically, it borrows elements from a wide variety of musical styles, while lyrically and aesthetically it calls upon various internet cultures and their attendant forms of content. As such, the genre is simultaneously capable of being lauded by the music press as the countercultural sound of the decade and praised by Fox News anchors as some of the best new music of the moment. All the while, the musical style is embedded in and shaped by the conditions of the music industry’s ubiquitous platforming. Drawing on a methodology of “philosophy through music,” this chapter interprets Hyperpop as a speculative form of popular music that both reflects and critiques the conditions from which it emerges. Although the genre’s form of revisitation fits somewhat seamlessly into an algorithmic culture bent on reproducing already-proven formulas, this chapter wagers that Hyperpop’s production aesthetics nevertheless contain a speculative charge. Through an examination of both the sonic and visual dimensions of the genre’s sampling practices, the chapter develops the concept of speculative nostalgia, a mode of deeply fictitious appropriation that is simultaneously (and crucially) invested in the conjuring of desired otherworlds. For, far from presenting the past as that which always was, the works examined in this chapter use history as a means of de-fossilising the present, suggesting not only that the now is not enough, but that it is possible to sound out speculative alternatives.