There are woefully few grand narratives in pop music these days. Over the past 20 years, there’s been nothing even remotely similar to the thrilling scenes that defined late 20th-century Britain: punk, rave, goth, two-tone, Madchester, New Romantic, garage – genres that send hearts hurtling back to a certain time and place. Even grime – whose mid-2010s popularity explosion re-energised British music, fashion and politics – was essentially a reprise of the sound that blazed a trail through 2002. In fact, when surveying the pop landscape today, it seems the closest thing we have to an overarching ‘moment’ is still The New Boring, a term coined by writer Peter Robinson in 2011 to describe the beige, ballad-heavy wave of tediously inoffensive music – your Ed Sheerans, Adeles, Coldplays – that was smothering the zeitgeist at the time. By many metrics, it still is.
If this sorry state of affairs has you primed to grieve the end of pop culture, fear not – because it’s only half the story. A genuinely novel musical subculture actually has been unfurling over the past decade: it may not have revolutionised British nightlife, but it has steadily worked to reinvent pop music in its own image.
PC Music, the label founded by 33-year-old Londoner AG Cook (pictured above) that riled and baffled musos in the early 2010s with its trademark sound: a fusion of nauseatingly saccharine melodies and quasi-parodic riffs on the least cool sub-genres of 90s music (Eurodance, happy hardcore, bubblegum pop). It was part pop pastiche – wryly asinine lyrics, visuals that shone with hyper-polished unreality – but it was also its own thing, brimming with intelligence and iconoclastic idiosyncrasy. It was also startlingly contemporary: this was music born from the moment.
On its own terms, PC Music was a breath of fresh air. At the end of this year, the ever-contrarian label will celebrate its 10th anniversary by shutting up shop and next week marks their final music showcase: the Halloween-themed Pop Crypt (at London’s suitably named Outernet). But where to begin?
Their fingerprints are all over big-league pop in a literal way. As producers, Cook and his friend Danny L Harle (the pair went to school together alongside labelmate GFOTY) have collaborated with the likes of Beyoncé, Charli XCX (who completely reinvented her style to incorporate the label’s sound), Christine and the Queens and Carly Rae Jepsen, while the pioneering late musician Sophie, who was closely associated with the group, worked with Madonna. And their influence shows no signs of abating: last year Harle was spotted in a studio with Dua Lipa as she worked on her new album.
Away from the mainstream, PC Music has made the underground jar and gleam. The label is credited with creating hyperpop – AKA one of the past decade’s only genuine new genres, a style characterised by maximalist brashness, ear-wormy melodies and a kind of uncomfortable dissonance that recalls the sound of malfunctioning 00s tech.
Then you have the middle ground: the bread-and-butter of pop is increasingly PC-aligned. You hear it in Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s hit of last year, Unholy, with its cartoonish, clanging backdrop. PinkPantheress – who recently climbed the charts in the UK and US with Boy’s a Liar Pt 2 – sets sickly-sweet melodies against tinny drum’n’bass in a way inescapably reminiscent of the PC mode. Caroline Polachek, queen of left-field pop, works primarily with Harle, while Mercury-nominated indie darlings Jockstrap clearly owe a debt, and have cited PC producer Kane West as a key reference.
Yet the legacy of PC Music goes far beyond obvious sonic similarities. On his 2020 album Apple, Cook featured songs that were mid-tempo, ostensibly guitar-based numbers that bridged a gap between Oasis and Shania Twain. It’s this fixation on unloved genres – not as a guilty pleasure, but in genuine, if amused, appreciation – that has become a generation-defining trend, practised by everyone from Rina Sawayama and the 1975 to Lorde, who claimed her last album was inspired by S Club 7. There is an inherent humour – but not mockery – in this metamodernist approach. And because it’s an attitude untethered to any particular sound, its shelf life will not be short.
So PC Music can retire in victory. What started as a far-fetched university project by Cook and Harle has mushroomed into an entirely new frontier for pop music the world over. How’s that for a good story?
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