Insides, Un-Insides, and Beyond: Pop Music’s Posthuman Jester

As frustrations with the American social paradigm and resulting protests sweep the nation, advocates find themselves asking: how can information that denounces American hierarchy be distributed without being suppressed or misrepresented by its beneficiaries? With her seminal album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, Scottish music producer SOPHIE gave a compelling answer by carrying on a centuries-old tradition of subversion: parody.

This paper explores the importance of parody in communicating subversive ideology without sanction, using music by the late hyperpop pioneer as an exemplar and the historical archetype of the Jester as a philosophical entry point. This archetype refers to the court jesters of the medieval age, whose unique ability to speak truth to power so long as they did so humorously (known as Jester’s Privilege) allowed them to transgress social and political sanctions that would have otherwise accompanied such disregard for hierarchy. I characterize contemporary Jesters such as SOPHIE, who utilize new forms of mockery to unsettle modern hierarchies, as taking on the roles and responsibilities of these historical individuals.

Using this framework, I analyze SOPHIE’s genre-defining album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, for its use of parody in its transgression of philosophical norms. To that end, I identify her lyrical themes, which center around extending the self into the digital realm, as aligning with Posthumanist philosophy, extending her mockery beyond tropes of pop music into traditional notions of gender, embodiment, and reality itself. Such radical ideas would normally be dismissed as fantastical, even delusional. But by utilizing Jester’s Privilege, SOPHIE communicated her ideas through the Trojan Horse of humor, making them innocuous to the constraints of hierarchy.

Keywords: Musicology, Philosophy, Comedy, Parody, Hierarchy, Gender, Hyperpop, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Sophie Xeon

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