SOPHIE Restrospective

Photo by Renta Raksha

SOPHIE’s music meant an awful lot to me, and I was devastated to hear of her passing last week.

I am really thankful for the opportunity I got to write about her legacy for New Statesman. You can read the full article here. It covers SOPHIE’s incredible rise across her career, and her ability to break boundaries just by being herself. Here’s the opening:

“I could be anything I want.” This is the gleeful, defiant lyric at the heart of “Immaterial”, one of SOPHIE’s most cherished songs. The late Scottish-born electronic artist was an expert at deconstructing pop forms and playfully piecing the bits back together. Here, Madonna’s “Material Girl” is inverted, stripped of the physical. The corporeal – our bodies – are tossed away entirely: “Without my legs or my hair/Without my genes or my blood/With no name and with no type of story/Where do I live?/Tell me, where do I exist?”.

“Immaterial” instantly became a queer anthem when it was released in 2018, just months after SOPHIE publicly came out as a trans woman. It was destined to be played in sweaty basement nightclubs just as much as in lonely darkened bedrooms. The song stood as a personal document of transness, a means of “taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit so the two aren’t fighting against each other”, as the musician put it in an interview. But it also continued SOPHIE’s incredible ability to break boundaries – the boundaries between pop and the underground, between sarcastic and sincere, between art and advert. Why be one thing, when you can be anything you want?

One thing I didn’t talk about was the song JUST LIKE WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE, which is probably one of my favourite songs ever written. It was the moment when I realised just how much depth and power the was behind what SOPHIE was doing, how he could make you giggle one second, and cry the next. It’s genius.