STREAM "FANFARE" BY DORIAN ELECTRA

dipping my toes into dorian's new album, hyperpop, and how we currently view pop music

Hi, sorry I’ve been absent for so long. I wrote a novel and I needed some time to recharge my writing batteries or whatever. Hopefully I’ll have something to say about that soon, but for now, thanks for reading this newsletter! <3

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“Fire” (2002), Liza Lou

I saw Dorian Electra live in Los Angeles at the Fonda, opening night of the Fanfare Tour, during a trip with an unkindly tight schedule and a few hours after my plane had landed. This schedule made it so my friends and I arrived very close to the concert’s start time, which had vaguely worried me, as it was a General Admission affair and I’m short enough that standing in the back is usually a guarantee of standing on my tiptoes the whole night and trying to act cool about it. Upon walking into the theatre, though, we realized that it was not packed but slyly thrumming, and there was enough space for us to get in the middle of the floor or even the front, if we wanted to push through people and be assholes (I always consider doing this but never do). The openers’ names were not said or maybe just unclear to me - this always happens? - and as we’d sat up in the balcony area, unmoving and feeling awkward because of it, I’d nudged us all to go downstairs again for the Dorian part, because despite our digital tickets labeled BALCONY it didn’t seem like it was a big issue. Also, imagine listening to hyperpop in the dark in an aging velvet chair and not even swaying. It’s weird. You have to dance, bro. There were these teens to our left side who were obviously flanked by their parents, which was equally endearing and entertaining to me, watching these obviously older people sit there with their chins in their hands, donning determinedly neutral expressions as Uffie performed “Oopsie” with max bass.

My friends bought really expensive drinks from the bar; I’d never been to the Fonda Theatre before, but it was kind of perfect for their album Fanfare, with its aging reds and golds and peeling wall art with beautifully intricate illustrations inspired by Hieronymus Bosch. The crowd was what you’d expect (baller). I expected moshing. There was no moshing (disappointing). The performances were amazing, perfect, no notes. There was an interlude where a person dressed as a clown sang opera for two minutes. I was delighted that Dorian performed every single song on the album, and then some.

This is the part where I realize that you probably haven’t listened to Fanfare, or at least, not all of it. I PROMISE I don’t mean this like: no one listens to cool stuff anymore and i have such elevated taste in music and hyperpop is for intellectuals, actually- I mean it like: most of Fanfare’s songs have less than 500,000 streams on Spotify and the top songs haven’t yet reached 2,000,000. Which, relative to all of music on streaming, is not bad, right, but, also, in trying to convince my friends to buy tickets with me, I was made aware of the fact that they didn’t know who Dorian Electra is. Like, at all. Hi. This essay is partly about that feeling. The oh-wait-I’m-in-a-very-small-circle-of-the-internet-that-keeps-track-of-hyperpop-releases-in-2023. It’s also about how you should listen to Dorian Electra. Stream Fanfare, ‘kay?

I legitimately thought they were bigger than that. That’s how the Internet is, now, I guess, because of evolving algorithms (for example, on Tik Tok, we sometimes feel like discourse is bigger than it is because your feed is giving you the 100 people talking about it, over and over, but 100 people on the Internet is really nothing, of course). I was like, They did a remix of Lady Gaga’s Replay! They’re a household name, okay!

I want to dive into the album itself for a minute, though. Who is Dorian Electra, you may ask. Maybe you do not ask. I’ll tell you anyway. Dorian is a gender-fluid (they/them pronouns) musical artist who I first found through their feature on Charli XCX’s song “Femmebot” back in 2017. I remember loving this song (still hits) and being like, Who is this? Even as a seventeen year old, apparently, I was looking up the features on a Charli XCX album and doing deep dives on them. Kim Petras! Caroline Polachek! Tommy Cash! Brooke Candy! I was doing awesome, thank you.

Dorian’s first album, Flamboyant, was a hyperpop record with songs about the bending and reinvention of gender and sexuality. It’s very good. It’s manic and neon and crunchy and horny and super danceable. Dorian in this album does this thing where they warp their voice with pitch-shifting or auto-tune, and they “change characters” (this is the only way I can describe it) between songs or between moments in songs. The title track is a good example of this. It’s delicious. They also do this in their sophomore album, My Agenda, whose narrative involves analyzing 4chan/incel/far-right culture as well as general niche Internet culture and taking it into a campy, hardcore, white-noise space. It’s also very good. It has some wild features that make me kick my legs and giggle.

Dorian has always worked within the realms of cringe in tandem with queer & trans pride, while managing to always make it work. I think their ability to project a lack of shame and absurdity is part of this. I find it empowering. From a Dazed interview: “‘I get really bored of things that aren’t extreme in some way,’ Electra confesses. ‘The things I get the most excited about are the things that are so uncool that nobody wants to touch.’ … ’I don’t like taking things too seriously,’ they explain. ‘Having self-awareness but also deep sincerity. It’s that whole beyond based and cringe thing. Like, you’re not afraid to be cringe in what you’re doing.’” Also, Dazed describes their second album’s vibe as “a kind of sonic LARPing”, which I enjoyed reading very much.

Fanfare is their third album, and like their other two, has a concept it’s trying to circle around while also kissing it on the mouth. Fanfare’s main character is a pop star, one who is the center of idolatry and capitalistic greed and ambition and, also, sex. The album again digs into gender and sexuality and Internet culture, though in a less direct way than the other two. Dorian goes harder with the idea of stupidity as irony as camp, working with the ideas of stan culture and modern, young expressions of maximalism. I love that there’s a character, here, a part they’re playing, adjacent to Electra Heart or something. I love a narrative like that in a pop album. A juicy little story.

Fanfare has a lot of incredibly smart lyrics and lot of intentionally nonsensical lyrics. Listen, I trust Dorian as an artist and I also know that in their other work, they like to say things with double meanings, to lace their earnestness with extreme sarcasm, to twist established phrases and ideas into something else, often in the sense of reclaiming. There’s an earnestness in a lot of these songs that is wonderful to me - it wouldn’t be camp without this - but there is also a lot of playing with the directness of mainstream pop music, saying things exactly like they are, stuff that makes no sense but that rhymes or that completes a nice melody. In the opening song, “Symphony”, Dorian sings “Na na na na na” in this voice that’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, like they know. In the song “Lifetime,” they sing, “This life will be a lifetime. Your life will take a long time. Cradle to grave pipeline.” Which, yeah. Exactly. Yes. I love it. It’s a play on the regard of pop as “stupid” but also using that as entertainment. Pop is often like that, to me. I adore it so much because of its pure candor, its unabashed seriousness when things are not that serious, its generalization that can reach anyone. The way a hit song that plays on the radio can be loved by anyone, anywhere (and also equally hated, but hey). This is something specific about hyperpop, too, this pushing towards a freedom through having pure fun, something I see in 100 gecs when they make a song about getting their tooth removed or when Charli makes a song about how sexy her car makes her feel. More of that. We should all be at the club, actually.

Personally, I love generalization in lyricism (famous last words)! I’m smiling at you. The interlude in “Lifetime” that means nothing. Inspired. On my first casual listen of Fanfare, I was like, Oh, I can’t connect with this. I don’t know how I feel about it. I’ll let you in on a secret: I didn’t really listen to Dorian very much before Fanfare. For some reason, I wasn’t willing to give them a real chance. I saw “Man to Man” on my recommended and listened to that, sometimes. It’s on my Lawlight playlist or something. I was a casual enjoyer. But upon another listen, and some further reflection - and maybe I’m just insane but I don’t think so okay Dorian is very smart - it’s like, Ah, it’s on purpose. Annoying statement, right. But it is. Whether or not this appeals to you is your opinion, though, and I understand the disgust towards things that declare their importance through being intentionally unimportant, I guess. Though I only mean this in terms of Fanfare’s lyricism. The melodies and production of the album are impeccable. And, often, when I paid attention, some of the lyrics were incredibly written, and not just ironic. I JUST LOVE GENERALIZATION THAT’S SO GENERAL IT TURNS BACK INTO SPECIFICITY! This is kind of like how sometimes camp comes from something that is so earnest that it arrives full circle into irony. In the track “Sodom & Gomorrah”, Dorian sings, “Deuteronomy / Give my ass a lobotomy” and then “Fulfill me up like a prophecy / Put the fear of God in me”. That’s peak. The song and music video tackle the commodification of disaster and, also, gay disaster, but also perpetuates this cycle, a Dorian classic. Perhaps other people don’t want to live in this maze of sardonicism versus honesty, but I love it. I love the maze.

Just because pop music involves big ideas or big themes - love! hate! death! - doesn’t mean it isn’t capable of nuance. I think Fanfare is… cleaner than Dorian’s other albums, somehow, like they’d honed in on one specific target instead of a couple and hit it every time. Like, Flamboyant is incredibly made, sure, but it has this airiness to it, this exploration, while every note of Fanfare feels intentional, pointed, the result of years of thought. Every song feels necessary. I think this is why I’ve seen fans (or Anthony Fantano lol) dislike this album in comparison to the other two, though I think it’s their best work. It seems like people are mourning the loss of a specific character like there was in Flamboyant or My Agenda, saying it’s less focused, though, um, the character is there, it’s just Pop Idol and not Incel Redditor, which is less interesting on paper, perhaps, but the songs are great. I can see how it feels on-the-nose in its analysis but that may just be the issue with analyzing celebrity and musical stardom at this point because everyone wants to talk about it. I do think that Dorian manages to find a niche in this analysis through the cockiness of their persona, the brashness, the self-obsession, and the directness about consumerism in 2023, but, again, this stuff is hard to pull off. I think the campiness of the album makes it work, though. Again, in typical Dorian fashion, the album involves living within the things it’s critiquing and celebrating it. Arguably, this does not progress things as much as antagonism would, but, also arguably, there’s something powerful about sitting within your oppression and going MINE NOW :3 And, also, there’s a lot in there that is maybe less easy to predict: the themes of religion and idolatry and intertwining those to play with modern celebrity. Stardom as self-love! Nothing wrong with that!

“RENDIJAS” (1984), Mercedes Pardo

Dorian, like a few other well-known artists in the hyperpop space (and we’ll get to that term later) is critically adored, most of the time, and has a cult following that seems to me to be mostly Gen Z. Surprisingly, they’ve never been reviewed by Pitchfork, which both annoys me and makes sense to me. Pitchfork is not necessarily interested in hyperpop or things like hyperpop until it is, which I know happens because even with critics’ apparent love of Dorian or 100 gecs or Charli XCX, they’re still not considered widely “objectively good” and hyperpop is kind of a meme. Also, reviewing music on a larger scale is complicated and weird these days, and a review on a Dorian Electra album they thought was whatever would probably not get as many clicks as anything else. That’s a whole other conversation, though.

Hyperpop sometimes elicits this reaction from people that’s so funny to me. It’s always “it’s too much” or something around those lines. It’s just random noise, etcetera. I mean, yeah. Sorry my brain is just too big? I’m kidding (I’m not). Sure, I know what it sounds like to people not into it. Playing 100 gecs for my Boomer parents in the car would probably have the effect that giving a Jolly Rancher to a Pilgrim would. But, like, just open up your mind, dude. There’s hyperpop that isn’t that weird. It’s not all banging pots and pans (It should be. Sigh). Go listen to Charli XCX! She was in the Barbie soundtrack! That’s approachable! Go listen to Caroline! To Slayyyter? Oh, I lost you.

I’m not going to give you a lesson on the history of hyperpop or how it became a term used on that mildly famous Spotify playlist, because I’m lazy and you can find this out for yourself. I think I personally like it because I wasn’t allowed to listen to anything but Kidz Bop, ABBA, and electronic Latin dance pop when I was a young kid, and haven’t stopped listening to Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster since I discovered YouTube, like I’m trying to reclaim my musical childhood or something. It’s not that deep though, all right. I just think “Telephone ft. Beyonce” was the peak of songwriting and it’s all been downhill from there. The thing about hyperpop is that many people have since turned away from the term towards things like “glitchcore” and “digicore” and “I don’t like the idea of genre” and that it’s cringe, now. I don’t mind it. Obviously the categories of genre are useful in ways that are vastly different than they used to be, but I feel that the word “hyperpop” allows people to group this new movement of music and build a community. Take it or leave it. You don’t have to use it. Personally I feel that hyperpop has few rules except a need for sonic maximalism. When I listen to hyperpop, I often feel like I’m being injected with something adjacent to chemical waste. In a fun way. In a sexy way. In a crazy way. That appeals to me.

Anyway. I think a lot about how pop music works and how the charts for it have musical movements that seem to be both moving forwards and backwards and how hyperpop has definitely influenced something, if not everything, because Charli XCX has managed to become a big name, hasn’t she, and she has done this while being the face of hyperpop for a lot of people. I like the older Charli stuff a bit more. Her recent album CRASH was underwhelming to me: slick and well-made, sure, but not as interesting as prior work, and certainly not as good as the Vroom Vroom EP, which is a SOPHIE-produced masterwork and was rated 4.5 by Pitchfork back in 2016, in contrast to the 8.0 they gave CRASH recently. I’m sorry to keep bringing up Pitchfork, okay, I just think they’re a good way to gauge what critics feel and also, in this case, how shifts in the cultural view (here this is mostly online) of an artist sort of creates more respect for an artist like Charli. Charli certainly worked for it, but I’m bored now. I think we can go farther. That’s also part of hyperpop, for me- pushing the idea of music further.

I’m just like, Hm. Why no Dorian acknowledgement on a large scale, especially for their first or second albums, which crossed so many boundaries? I don’t mean this as fishing for representational pity- I don’t think that Dorian’s work is good just because it’s gay, but it is undeniably good, and undeniably gay. So what gives. I think that if Pitchfork reviewed 100 gecs’ new album and gave it an 8.2 when that album has a similar thesis as their first and is arguably less experimental than Dorian’s, though they’re in the same vein, then I’m confused on the fixation on 100 gecs specifically. Or whoever else. Is it the lack of sexuality giving people an ease of access? Is Dorian actually too gay for you bitches? They and 100 gecs are very different artists, but, well. I wonder.

There’s talk that Fanfare is Dorian becoming derivative of themself. People (who, you ask) sometimes talk about hyperpop being a trend, a blip of a musical movement, which I don’t think is true. They also talk about hyperpop being a snake that eats its own tail, not actually as progressive in technical terms as you may think. I guess we’ll have to see. It’s a relatively new thing in the canon of music. People are still making hyperpop, though it still lacks mainstream popularity. Is Fanfare a unintentional parody of Dorian’s work and hyperpop as whole? Not quite. Maybe I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt (strangely, I think the same way about Midnights) but it seems to be the point of Fanfare to be a sort of Dorian-Electra-thesis. I don’t think they can do this again on their next album without going truly backward, but this album works as it is, in my opinion.

I like the rock leanings, the traditional pop leanings. People in these spaces also talk about people being “scholars of pop” which doesn’t always equal good music, of course, but Dorian understands this on a seemingly emotional level. It seems as if they just gravitate towards what they love. I’ll compare their album to another recent cult pop release for a moment: Something To Give Each Other by Troye Sivan. Look, I love Troye Sivan, right, but his newest album is so SMOOTH compared to Fanfare. My dislike of this is definitely a taste thing, too, but Fanfare is also so SMOOTH compared to other Dorian albums, which is hilarious to me because my friends who aren’t into hyperpop gave it a listen before the concert and were like, omg this is just white noise? when I thought it was more accessible! I’m like, goddamn, Dorian, you made this so perfectly and they still don’t want it! Just let loose, then! Don’t retreat inward! Go farther!

Maybe I just enjoy an underdog, though. I’ve looked at fans’ reactions to this album (they’re like, it’s mid) and have felt more compelled to stan. Maybe this feeling is what Fanfare is about. In this weird-ass interview, Dorian says something along the lines of how wanting a larger purpose is inherent to being human, and how now we don’t have Greek gods to use as Barbie dolls to showcase how we view society and social interactions and so on, so we use celebrities and our critique and praise of celebrities to show what we value in society. We use celebrities as examples of what to do or not to do. We use celebrities as our vehicles towards self-expression. It’s kind of sad, kind of awesome, isn’t it!

So, like, what am I trying to say here. Stan Dorian Electra? Yes. Yeah. That. But it doesn’t exactly matter, does it? As someone lurking in pop standom spaces (never posting but avidly listening with a perverse sadomasochism) I was shaken for the first time in a while to have an album seemingly so primed for these people but also so disliked. Maybe hyperpop has changed too much. Maybe hyperpop has stayed too stagnant. Caroline Polachek is a cult pop star right now, but I wouldn’t say her music is advancing pop any more than Dorian’s, though I’m of the belief that her music does advance more than anything else, though perhaps on a smaller scale. In some ways both of these artists have walls in terms of persona and fanbase that they can’t surpass easily (gender, aesthetic, online culture). I was in that crowd at the Fonda Theatre like, if only people understood you, Dorian. If only they weren’t so close-minded. LOL? Is this what other people feel about other, “cooler” genres? Underground raves? Is some deity checking my ass? I’ve felt this way before, surely. I’ll feel this way again. Is this true standom? Have I been wading through passive fandom for years and finally found my true calling, listening to this song?

I mean, on some level, this is what Fanfare is about: this artist isn’t my friend and I feel like I’m doing something “communal” by shouting them out to my dedicated fanbase here of two whole readers, or to my friends who listen to me talk about pop music. The real ones. I want artists to have the freedom to make what they want. I also want artists to be able to notice the level of impact they have on people even if their fanbase is smaller, like Dorian’s. I wish my streams were directly hitting their brain somehow. It doesn’t translate to dollars and it doesn’t translate to serotonin. It doesn’t translate to much at all. What does it mean, then? Where are you all playing your music? Do people prioritize lyrics, anymore, and old pop sentiments and techniques (what are those, anyway) or do they simply like a vibe? Is music only background noise for a lot of people? Has it always been this way? Maybe. I sound pretentious as hell, I know. Isolated, maybe. Perhaps I need to get out more. I’m constantly trying to make myself remember that other people aren’t like, reading a thousand articles on Rina Sawayama or analyzing Slayyyter’s Gimme More Remix or whatever, and that a lot of people like casual listens. They like easy listens. Dorian is not an easy listen. Dorian took work. I didn’t even like Dorian much at first. I also had to listen to Fanfare several times before I actually started to love it. Maybe people don’t want to put in that work, anymore. They want the song to hit on the first listen, much like how movies on Netflix need to be good within five minutes or else people change it to something else. The streaming disease! I know many people put in the work, though, I know, I see it, and everyone has their favorite, but- I just. I sound like an old man when I say this, but who just sits there and listens to music and does nothing, anymore. Do people do that? Am I crazy? I analyze pop songs like religious studies majors analyze the Bible. This isn’t an effort to sound like I’m not like other girls, though if that’s what it sounds like to you, so be it. Heart emoji. But I have to believe people have passion for a certain artist or two, right? People can’t just be floating through time playing the Spotify top tracks playlist on low volume. I mean, it’s fine if they do that. I feel like that’s also valid, right, but then again, art can be critiqued and should be critiqued and I wonder if I should expect more from people from time to time.

And this isn’t me saying you have to love Dorian, either, simply because they’re under-appreciated in my eyes (#streamfanfare though). It’s more like, hm. I want people to look further into finding new music and things, I guess? And branching out? And trying to understand music they don’t like, especially if it’s capital w Weird to them, and why they don’t like it before writing it off as bad and going back to like, 1989 TV (which, listen. I’m a Swiftie [gunshot sounds] but I’m so tired, everyone. Please). How do we move on from here? How do we keep going? I’m open to ideas.

People try to say that hyperpop isn’t a real movement, that it’s thin, unmoving air, see-through, asking where the party is. I’m like, Bitch, let’s make the party happen! No one wants to make the party happen. Have passion! Have taste! Even if it’s strange or mainstream! Either! Both! It’s all good! I just want desire. There are parties happening, though, in my peripherals: the rise of artists like Peso Pluma, for example. I think eventually the way we consume music will have a breaking point - it certainly has big cracks forming even now - and it’ll change again and perhaps it’ll be better. Perhaps it’ll be worse. But then there will always be people who will make things even with little gratification that push the boundaries of art and music, because that’s art, baby. That’s human nature! I’m happy to see hyperpop still going, personally. I’m amused that people are tired of it, like there’s something else to look for. Bitch, who else is doing it like the best of hyperpop? Some artists are bad, yeah, and super cyclical by now, but some people are certainly doing it. And the influence on “mainstream pop” is undeniable, though I think I’m watching pop music try to go back in time over and over, right now (Listen to the radio when you next ride a car. You’ll know what I mean). Again, I think the system will break because people kind of hate it, I think. I don’t believe that most people are like, Yes! Give me another weird cover of an old song and play Cruel Summer again! (I’m sorry to Cruel Summer. I love you but I’m tired.) The new Mitski hit is an example of this. People still have desire for interesting music, though it’s hard for interesting music to reach people. It’s also the sea of media we live in, of course. The vastness of the catalog. No one can collect behind anything because everyone loves a billion different things. We’re too spread out! What do we do! I don’t know. We’ll see. At least I have Fanfare.

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• i liked this dorian interview

• i made a hyperpop playlist if anyone wants to get into it? HA?