Our Malaysian world is a world of vertigo. 

Tanah Malaysia kita pusing berputar dan muzik menghulurkan maksud kepada kehidupanmu yang terpaksa dipolitikkan. 

The politicisation of hyperpop has unabashedly become a resistance towards politically-motivated crimes against humanity, acquiring the ephemeral freedom to express and utilising that as a political tool when politicians use our lives as tools for their unjust advocacy on censorship. Hyperpop requires the injection of politics and the championing of anti-authoritative rhetoric. The very premise of this hyperdigitalised and techno-mediated saturation of music revolves around the idea of glitched bodies acting against neoliberal structures and hyper-accelerationist configurations of capitalism. 

Glitching is the performance of perceiving the distinctive physicality between a human and a technological asset. Your body is glitched because your existence in this world is a rebellion against conformity. You oscillate between an assumed technological machine and a human because this characterisation is relevant in a Malaysia that is interlaced with technological abstraction and conservative policies. It illustrates the perceived brokenness and fragmentation of marginalised individuals through the lens of the rich heterosexual neurotypical. Embodiment and disembodiment and implications that move beyond this dichotomy, hyperpop reclaims the idea of brokenness and saturates it in music. 

The Malaysian hyperpop scene offers space for this construction of glitch. A space that is heavily scrutinised and demonised for being a glitched vessel that contextualises experimental music which naturally takes on an eccentricity that people in power do not understand and feel threatened by. This context is extremely relevant to Killamisha and her debut album ‘Underground Princess’ that attracted negative attention solely for utilising her freedom to express herself as a glitched body. The fascist idea of arresting an individual for expressing opinions through music and associating an edited Malaysian flag with their brand, stems from Malaysia’s refusal to acknowledge the diversity of music and how music will always be political, especially since the enforcement of fascist media policies forces the lives of Malaysians to be political from the beginning. 

Killamisha’s discography is the embodiment of a glitched Malaysia. The self-satirization and the high pitched treble sounds that floods her music has composed a truly genre-bending and paradoxical interpretation of stereotypical pop music. Accompanying this, the inclusion of local sounds into these unconventional sonic landscapes has made Killamisha’s music, a ‘genre’ that is so characteristically hers and no one else’s. It is the perceived unstructured gluttony of pop influences– ranging from Indonesian and Malaysian interpretations of ‘Dangdut’ to the mentioned treble sounds from SOPHIE– that circulates this distinct style of music that Killamisha operates through. 

In her latest singles ‘BANNED IN KL’ and ‘SENSASI SEKSAAN KUBUR’, she sufficiently utilised her unique sonic landscape to verbalise her frustrations towards the Malaysian populace. It is this exact action that defines rebellion through the conceptual narrative of glitch. 

Comprehending the errant nature of hyperpop in Malaysia is to first realise that your life as a glitched body is a product of a Malaysia that is averse to the ontology of art, music, and the overall performance of living that deviates from what is supposed to be ‘true’. This idea materialises in a few ways. 

Kuala Lumpur’s subcultural liminal spaces of esoteric congregation for the purpose of hedonistic fulfillment exist only below the implications of capitalist overcommercialization. This occurrence is once again the product of a Malaysia that disregards sonically audacious music. I’m not necessarily claiming that the push of hyperpop music– and perhaps the loose extension of this, hard techno– towards underground spaces is a bad thing. I’m claiming that the fact this happened, is a testament to how hyperpop music– and its derivatives– champions politically and socially ‘destructive’ narratives to the status quo dominated by puritanical culture that is further buoyed by racism and the rapid islamification in Malaysia. 

These ‘destructive’ narratives are not genuinely a problem. It is more so the fearmongering performed by conservatives that convinces you that hyperpop injects destruction. It is also important to recognise the political dynamics that exist in Malaysia and how insanely skewed this article is– and perhaps most of our reflections– towards conceptualising the left-right political dichotomy. Malaysian hyperpop does not necessarily champion socialist or politically postmodern ideals, it simply recognises the right to express. Unfortunately, this is very much a radical idea to perpetuate in Malaysia. 

Hyperpop is hedonistic not because of the adjacent drug use or the perpetual partying. It is the jousting between curating an identity that is presumably not accepted by the Malaysian community and the subsequent alienation that you derive from that. You then allow yourself to seep into underground spaces to reinforce this personality and to avoid the mutation into a soulless conservative individual who believes so strongly that the performance of sexuality is deviant and requires to be censored. 

Your life as a Malaysian is glitched regardless of how you perceive hyperpop or politics. Despite what you believe and what you hold true to your heart, the act of pixelating an image of a penis in the cinemas or the demonisation of any forms of art, affects your individual autonomy in Malaysia. 

Your very Malaysian life is the root of your unfortunate/fortunate glitch.

Written by Yashven Jayabalan