If they don't play Khia at my funeral, I'm not going.
Photo: Marcus Coblyn | Words: Joey Hollis
Mouths cling too close to the microphone letting lipstick stain its sheen surface like grey clouds turned pink at daybreak. In the smoking area, a thousand synthetic teenagers try to stand up only to find their thighs stuck together with bubblegum. They fall down. There is no foreplay in the 'PU$$Y' palace. The bass has already begun. Orgasms stutter on. The beat drops. Pay me, lick me, fuck me, fly me first class, etc. The death knell of hyperpop is sounded not by the end of PC Music, but by the release of yet another four-on-the-floor anthem about rimming. Sex, money, drugs, power… now what? The last decade has seen a glut of hyperpop-inflected ghettotech, plastic-sounding pop-friendly hits, and sudden flashes of lewd brilliance buried in heavy club rhythms. But where do we go now?
The claustrophobic clit rap of 'NUMBER 1 PUSSY' is an early peak for the EP which otherwise provides diminishing returns on the queerclub formula; a formula now so ubiquitous as to be classed not as weather but as climate. Two decades after Khia's 'My Neck, My Back' and a decade on from hyperpop's first bout of lewdity, the lost promises of erotic liberation now appear shuffled back into a stack of self-same midi files. That is not to say there are not moments that recapture the delirium and the ecstasy of the tail end of this cultural moment, but where 'PU$$Y' does so it achieves this largely by looking backward not forward. The track 'GSPOT' begins with the sonic signatures of Jungle, complete with the breakbeat, the siren, and the shepherd's tone, but it quickly falls back to its dominant production techniques: one-syllable rhymes repeating over the fourth beat of the stalwart techno kick.
Despite its happily vapid sonic similarities to every other uptempo club track about yiffing or drinking piss, 'PU$$Y' remains ludic and sensuous enough to justify its run time. 'DONT U WANT IT ALL?' Big Wett asks, provoking her own response in the affirmative. However, not every new song can actually be an orgasm. Instead, you might spend whole decades aurally edged till the next qualitatively new song about serving cunt comes out. "Are you in the scene, do you do Ketamine?" Are you too numb to notice when the track changes? There is a morbid dissociation stalking the night-life. A workman walks by carrying a pink torso. The storerooms are full of hearts. Plastic pussies line the high streets. This is the city of spare parts.
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