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      ‘Against the Current’ Review: Traversing the Tides

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      The director Oskar Pall Sveinsson follows Veiga Gretarsdottir on a 103-day kayaking journey around Iceland.The Icelandic kayaker Veiga Gretarsdottir has always gone against the current. In a literal sense, she attempted and succeeded in a feat that had never been done before: circumnavigating the 2,000-kilometer distance of Iceland counterclockwise on kayak. Gretarsdottir, now in her mid-40s, has also pushed upstream in her personal life; she is transgender and received transition surgery at 38. Much like this obvious metaphor — which the film gleefully underlines — Oskar Pall Sveinsson’s “Against the Current” feels cliché even with an intriguing subject.The documentary follows Gretarsdottir on her 103-day journey, as she traverses the tides, while also dealing with hormone injections, diet maintenance and decades of repressed self-expression. The film — which takes a rather ordinary approach to an extraordinary story — also includes scenic shots of Icelandic nature and talking-head interviews with Gretarsdottir’s parents, brother and ex-wife, with whom she shares a young daughter. These interviews become repetitive sound bites, and are often uncomfortable when family members misgender Gretarsdottir.It’s not difficult to be moved and impressed by Gretarsdottir’s life story, especially when she details the secrecy of her struggles, but the story falls short in tying these emotional threads with her athletic accomplishments in an eloquent manner. Transgender athletes have been a focus of discussion in the news as of late, and it feels like a greatly missed opportunity for this film to not attempt to position Gretarsdottir within this larger conversation. The doc briefly introduces news clippings about violence against transgender people, but it remains surface-level on that topic, too. Unlike its subject, “Against the Current” rarely pushes against convention.Against the CurrentNot rated. In Icelandic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      At a Queer Theater Festival, the Plays Are Brazenly Personal

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      The Criminal Queerness Festival offers three works that address subjects including addiction, fluid identity and social change.Dima Mikhayel Matta has written about her home city before with language like “In Beirut, the streets smell of jasmine and coffee, and the morning call to prayer mingles with church bells.”Was it lyrical? Yes, Matta, a queer playwright from Lebanon, said during a recent video interview. Was it also rosy? Yes.“In the past, I was writing short stories that romanticized Beirut,” she said, “because it’s ‘poetic,’ right?”Matta’s autobiographical play, “This is not a memorized script, this is a well-rehearsed story,” is one of three making its New York premiere this week as part of the National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents innovative new stories by L.G.B.T.Q. artists from countries that restrict L.G.B.T.Q. rights.And with that project, she made a decision: no more romanticizing.With Beirut, she wanted “to face how I feel about it, and how so many of us feel about it,” she said of the city that in the past year has endured crises including a massive explosion in its port, economic collapse, political instability and the pandemic. “Because it’s difficult to live there, and it’s becoming more difficult.”The festival runs Tuesday through Saturday outdoors at Lincoln Center and near the United Nations, and is part of Lincoln Center’s Pride programming, which also includes a concert on Friday by the multi-hyphenate artist Taylor Mac.Adam Odsess-Rubin, the National Queer Theater’s artistic director, founded the festival in 2018 with the Egyptian playwright Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, who had recently immigrated to the United States.“There was really no space for the kinds of stories I was trying to tell,” said Elsayigh, who now serves as the festival’s co-producer. “I wanted to create a space for stories about queer people outside of the United States and outside of a Western context.”This year’s plays — which also include the Mexican playwright Victor I. Cazares’s “﹤﹤when we write with ashes﹥﹥,” and a staged reading of the Iraqi playwright Martin Yousif Zebari’s “Layalina” — address subjects including addiction, fluid identity, and global and social change.In other words, they are not, Zebari said, works that he could present in his home country, where same-sex marriage is illegal and queer people do not have any protection against discrimination.“It’s really risky for the writers to share these plays,” Odsess-Rubin said. “They might fear persecution even emailing in the script.”But in interviews, the playwrights underscored that their works, while sourced from their specific life experiences in countries that criminalize queerness, contain themes anyone can relate to.For Matta, it was her complicated relationship with Beirut — a feeling that, she said, people who have lived in the same place for most of their lives can relate to.“The people who’ve attended my rehearsals have said they feel the same way about New York,” she said.Cazares, a Tow playwright in residence at New York Theater Workshop, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them, said that they had felt pressure in the past to produce work that glossed over the less idyllic aspects of life on the border.“As a queer Latinx playwright coming up in 2013, I was encountering a lot of resistance from other Latinx producers that did not want to produce work that was about drugs, guns or gangs,” Cazares said. “But that was my work, and it was also my lived experience of the border. I lived through a very violent drug war. You’re suffering through nights where you’re worried about your family.”Jose Useche, left, and Noor Hamdi rehearsing Victor I. Cazares’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCazares’s play, a love story set in Mexico, draws from their experiences as an addict and as someone whose family withdrew them from high school and shipped them off to a rural Illinois town to “go find Jesus Christ again” when they came out. (Cazares and their parents have since reconciled.)“It was a very personal story for me,” they said. “But it’s not something I’m reluctant to share. I want to destigmatize addiction and being H.I.V. positive. I want people who have had these lived experiences to walk away not feeling alone.”For Zebari, who is making his playwriting debut with “Layalina,” it was important to tell a nuanced story of the community he refers to as SWANA — Southwest Asian and North African.“As an actor, I never spoke up when I felt like my voice was filler,” he said. “But now, as a playwright, I can tell my story.”Odsess-Rubin and Elsayigh said that, in an ideal world, the festival would not exist because its plays would be produced elsewhere in New York. A recent study by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition found that at 18 major nonprofit theaters in the city, 81 percent of writers and directors were white.Cazares said that they have had opportunities in which “if I would’ve written the happy story, or the more marketable, let’s-all-sing-about-conchas-and-abuelita take, it would’ve been produced.”The festival’s audiences, the three playwrights acknowledged, likely will be mostly white. But they did have their dreams for who would be there on opening night. Cazares said their past self. Zebari said his father, though having him there would amount to coming out — something he hasn’t done, and isn’t ready for, with his family.Matta said, “I would take great pleasure if a homophobic, racist person ends up in the audience and is too embarrassed to leave, and has to stay for an hour of me basically sharing things that go against everything that person believes in.”“I’d find that very amusing,” she added. “My goal is not to make you comfortable. I am not here to explain why it’s OK for me to exist. I am here to transport you somewhere for an hour, and leave you with more questions than answers.”Criminal Queerness FestivalTuesday through Saturday; nationalqueertheater.org. More

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      ‘Changing the Game’ Review: Fighting for the Right to Play

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      Three transgender high schoolers confront the fraught world of student athletics in this documentary that takes a controlled approach.In 2017, Mack Beggs, then 17, won a state girls’ wrestling championship. Mack, a transgender boy from Dallas, had wanted to wrestle in the boys’ division. But in Texas, state policy mandates that students compete according to their sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. So his options were to wrestle girls or to not wrestle at all.Mack is one of three young athletes profiled in the documentary “Changing the Game,” which offers an earnest look at the way transgender teens around the country are fighting for self-actualization in the fraught world of student athletics.The documentary (streaming on Hulu) illustrates how rules differ from state to state: The skier Sarah Rose Huckman, who lives in New Hampshire, describes a policy that hinges on gender confirmation surgery; whereas at a high school in Connecticut, the runner Andraya Yearwood is able to compete on the team she wants.Outcry over transgender kids in sports manifests as a conservative talking point and in waves of discriminatory bills from Republican lawmakers. But rather than deconstruct the politics, history or parameters of this furor, “Changing the Game” hews closely to Mack, Sarah and Andraya. We see the ways in which bullying and outsized media attention gnaw at these teens, who face the public eye with astounding courage.As it follows its subjects, the documentary takes a conventional and controlled approach. The director Michael Barnett intercuts interviews with competition footage, training montages and slow-motion action shots. Throughout, a synth-heavy score insists on a motivational mood.A frequent right-wing argument is that transgender athletes make sports unfair. The documentary’s best and most challenging through-line shows where this claim falls short — particularly how, for young athletes, building confidence is more important than wins and losses. “Changing the Game” could have gone further, analyzing how fairness in sports is a myth to begin with. But the movie isn’t interested in rewriting the rules; it would rather introduce us to the brave young people who are.Changing the GameNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      The Beatific Re-emergence of Beverly Glenn-Copeland

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      For decades, Beverly Glenn-Copeland made music heard by a precious few. In the early 1970s, he trained in classical music performance, and then released a couple of folk albums. In the 1980s, he made new age keyboard music. For the most part, he worked in children’s television.That music has been rediscovered now. Glenn-Copeland began performing for enthusiastic audiences a few years ago, and his music is largely back in print. For Glenn-Copeland, who is transgender, this acclaim has arrived in an era that is far more welcoming than the one in which he was raised.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Glenn-Copeland’s music; his winding path to a receptive, ready audience; and how the right music can be a bulwark against cynicism and trauma.Guests:Taja Cheek, an associate curator at MoMA PS1 and a musician who performs as L’RainMina Tavakoli, who writes about music for Pitchfork and The Washington Post More

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      Patti Harrison Wants to See What She Can Do

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      Known for scene-stealing side characters, the comedian and actress is pushing past her limits with her starring role in “Together Together.”Patti Harrison, the actress and comedian, has taken one acting class in her life, an introductory course at Ohio University. “It was taught by a grad student and was very loose,” she said. “We mostly just did yoga.”One assignment was to perform an interpretive dance based on a poem. Harrison searched online for “dumb emo poems” and found one called “A Darkness Inside Me.” “Looking back on it now, I think it was about someone who’s an active shooter,” she said. “I did it as a joke, but no one took it as one.”Not many of Harrison’s jokes have fallen flat since. “Scene stealing” is one of the adjectives most applied to Harrison, who has appeared in alt-comedies like “Shrill,” “Search Party” and “Made for Love.” The downside of stealing scenes, of course, is that you generally don’t steal them on your own show. “I haven’t been in a million things,” she said. “And most of them have been really small, or guest parts.”This week, Harrison, 30, moves from one-offs and recurring parts to her first starring role in a feature film, in “Together Together,” one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The dramedy stars Harrison as a 26-year-old barista named Anna who is hired as a gestational surrogate by Matt, a single 40-something app designer (Ed Helms) who really, really wants a baby — as well as some sort of connection with the woman who’s having it.Ed Helms and Patti Harrison in “Together Together.”Tiffany Roohani/Bleecker StreetHarrison has already earned rave reviews, with critics describing her performance as “groundbreaking” and “revelatory”; The New York Times called the movie “sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful,” praising Harrison’s portrayal of Anna and her rapport with co-star Helms.“Patti was the actress for the part,” said the director Nikole Beckwith. “And to get her in her first leading role, I just feel like the luckiest person on Earth.”In a recent video interview, Harrison was in her home in Los Angeles talking about her childhood interests (there were many), the questionable roles she’s been offered as a transgender actress — “the first thing producers see in me is like, I’m trans” — and how “Together Together” came to be.The stories come fast and looping. Ask Harrison what she was into as a kid, and you get the full menu, in chronological order, from age 4 through high school: sharks; dinosaurs; insects/arachnids; Pokémon (“I was super, super into Pokémon”); video games; karate (“I was like, if I ever have to beat up 20 people at one time for absolutely no reason at all, I want to be able to do that”); guns; cars.“Together Together” came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHarrison, whose mother is Vietnamese, grew up the youngest of seven siblings in a rural, conservative town in Ohio called, of all things, Orient. “I looked at the census when I was in high school, and it said there were zero Asian people in Orient,” she said.In college, Harrison joined an improv group at the prompting of a friend. She felt an immediate connection — the tightrope feel of it, the magic moments springing seemingly out of nowhere. “It still triggers a lot of anxiety in me,” she said. “But when it goes well, it’s amazing. You can make up stuff, and things can seem brilliant on accident. People will imbue intention into everything that you do.”In 2015, Harrison moved to New York and began doing standup comedy. There, she found fellow funny people like Julio Torres (“Los Espookys”), Jo Firestone (“Shrill”), and Ziwe Fumudoh, who recently filmed the music video “Stop Being Poor” with Harrison for her self-titled Showtime variety series. “Patti’s comedy comes from such a pure creative place, where she never does exactly the same thing twice,” Fumudoh said. “She’s phenomenally creative and original.”In 2017, Harrison was recording a commercial when she got a call from “The Tonight Show” to do a bit for the show that night about her reaction to Trump’s just-announced ban on transgender people in the military. (“I was shocked,” she said in the bit, “because I assumed he already did that.”) After the appearance, things exploded for Harrison. “My agent was like, there’s all these people who want to meet with you now,” she said.“But at the same time,” she continued, “there were a lot of people I felt that had pigeonholed me into this idea of what they thought I was. They were calling me an activist without any prior knowledge of me other than this piece, because I’m a transgender person who had spoken on something.”So while the appearance got her noticed, it was a very specific sort of notice, at least at first. In those early meetings with production companies, Harrison was brimming with pitches like, say, the one for a show about a dog and its dysfunctional, codependent relationship with the little bird that lives in his rectum. (“I gave them my gold ideas,” she said.) But all they were interested in were “stories about trans girls coming out and getting rejected by their families,” she said, or having her come on shows to talk about the difference between being gay and trans.All of which made “Together Together” that much more special. Here was a story about a clearly cisgender woman — the plot revolves around her character’s pregnancy, after all — in which the relationship between the younger woman and the older man is much more nuanced than one sees in a lot of rom-coms. Not as much will-they-or-won’t-they, and more: Where does all this lead, if anywhere?“It really takes a lot of humility to engage in a story like this, and Patti is very humble, and always authentic,” Helms said. “But then she’s also one of the funniest human beings on Earth.”The film came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. “I didn’t know if I was going to go into acting more, or kind of lean into TV writing or comedy,” she said. “And I was processing a lot of feelings about my self-esteem, and body dysmorphia. But then I got the script, and it was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.”Beckwith, the director, had spotted Harrison performing on a late night show and realized she had found her Anna. Harrison had an “amazing, salty, a little spiky, humor and way about her,” Beckwith said, that went hand in hand with her vision of Anna as “warm, like Patti, but not a totally open book.”“Together Together” was shot in just 19 days in the fall of 2019, with limited chances for retakes. “The scene where her water breaks — that was our version of a stunt,” said Beckwith. “And we only had two pairs of pants, so we could only do it twice.”Playing the lead “was very scary,” Harrison admitted. “But if I had known how much work it was going to be, I would have been way more scared. I think I was shielded a bit by being stupid about it.”The script for “Together Together,” Harrison said, “was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHarrison is getting fewer pitches for trans-centric roles nowadays, and she is busier than ever. In addition to “Together Together,” she is appearing in the final season of “Shrill” and singing, dancing and acting in “Ziwe,” and recently she joined the cast of the feature film “The Lost City of D,” alongside Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum.Still, that doesn’t mean her days of being typecast are over. “Now I’m seeing a trend where people want me to read for stuff where I play a social media-obsessed millennial, this vapid turd person. So I’m moving away from offers where, ‘you’re a de-transitioning sex worker who finds that he likes his old lifestyle a little better than she thought,’ to ‘you’re one of the stupidest people on Earth. You only like social media and likes.’”The confidence Harrison gained from going “so far out of my comfort zone” has only fed her desire to move even farther out of it. What she’d really love to do is some sort of science fiction movie, the more action the better, she said, where she might indulge her childhood love of karate and get to say stuff like “zorbon crystals.” “I think there will always be a part of me that kind of fanboys out about action sci-fi,” she said, “just to see if I could do it.” More

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      ‘Markie in Milwaukee’ Review: Acknowledging Painful Transitions

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Markie in Milwaukee’ Review: Acknowledging Painful TransitionsThis documentary presents a portrait of a transgender woman’s life, her faith as an Evangelical Christian and her strained relationship with her family.Markie, as seen in “Markie in Milwaukee.”Credit…Icarus FilmsMarch 10, 2021, 5:08 p.m. ETMarkie In MilwaukeeDirected by Matt KliegmanDocumentary1h 32mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.When the documentary “Markie in Milwaukee” begins, Markie Wenzel, a middle-aged transgender woman, is in the process of eradicating the records of her own existence. When we meet her, nearly a decade ago, she’s beginning the process of “detransitioning,” which in her case meant legally changing her name, discarding her hormone treatments and wearing men’s clothes in public.Markie came out in 2006 at the age of 46, and her wife, her children and her church painfully rejected her. Shortly thereafter, she met the director Matt Kliegman, who was flying through the Milwaukee airport where Markie works. Kliegman struck up a friendship with her when she was newly open about her gender, and he began to film her. His movie is the result of about 10 years spent documenting Markie’s life, her faith as an Evangelical Christian and her strained relationship with her family.[embedded content]Whether transitioning or detransitioning, Markie invites the filmmakers into her life with tremulous vulnerability. The documentary plainly lays out the impasses she is facing. As a woman, Markie is more fully realized but utterly alone. If she lives as a man, she is self-denying, but her community no longer holds her at a distance.Markie is generous with the camera, and her candor lends the film power. She grants access to her personal archives, sharing tapes from her former life as a pastor and photos of her once-secret makeup tests. The film doesn’t waste her openness or her willingness to use the documentary as a kind of therapeutic space.But if Markie is undeniably compelling as a subject, the film doesn’t quite match her bravery and her willingness to explore uncharted territory. There are plenty of fly-on-the-wall observations, but little play or introspection besides what Markie is able to offer.Markie in MilwaukeeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Sandie Crisp, ‘Goddess Bunny’ of the Underground Scene, Dies at 61

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostSandie Crisp, ‘Goddess Bunny’ of the Underground Scene, Dies at 61She became a muse among the Hollywood avant-garde, appearing in movies, music videos and photographs. She died of Covid-19.Sandie Crisp in 2016. She appeared in music videos, movies and stage shows.Credit…Chuck GrantFeb. 4, 2021Updated 6:20 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Sandie Crisp, a transgender actress and model who, under her stage name the Goddess Bunny, served as a muse to generations of artists, gay punks and other denizens of the West Hollywood avant-garde, died on Jan. 27 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 61.Her death was confirmed by Mitchell Sunderland-Jackson, a friend. The cause was Covid-19, he said.For decades, Ms. Crisp was a familiar presence on the sidewalks of Santa Monica Boulevard and in the hustler bars that once lined it, where she dressed like a grungy diva and lip-synced songs by Donny Osmond, Judy Garland and Selena.In the 1980s and ’90s, she became a popular subject for artists who frequented that scene as well as their collaborator. Directors cast her in underground movies, and she appeared in music videos by Dr. Dre and Billy Talent. A nude photograph of her sits in the permanent collection of the Louvre.Her aesthetic, which blended the Hollywood noir of David Lynch with the punk offensiveness of GG Allin and Lydia Lunch, knew few boundaries. For one performance she dressed as Eva Braun alongside a man dressed as Hitler. An audience member leapt to his feet and punched her in the face.“Being able to shock and offend as a way of avoiding co-option by corporate capitalism — she was the muse for people pursuing that sensibility,” said the Canadian filmmaker Bruce La Bruce, the director, most recently, of “Saint-Narcisse” (2020).Ms. Crisp was equally renowned among drag performers, especially those of a rawer sensibility.“If you’re an actual drag queen, you know about the Goddess Bunny,” said Simone Moss, the founder of Bushwig, an annual drag conclave that started in New York and gave Ms. Crisp a lifetime achievement award in 2017. “She’s a part of drag history as much as Divine,” she said, referring to the actress made famous by John Waters in films like “Pink Flamingos.”Sandie Crisp was born on Jan. 13, 1960, in Los Angeles to John Wesley Baima, a lawyer, and Betty Joann (Sherrod) Baima, a secretary.Their child contracted polio, causing limited use of her arms and legs. Doctors prescribed a variety of surgeries and medical devices — Milwaukee braces, Harrington rods — but they caused only further physical damage. She used a wheelchair to get around.After the Baimas divorced, Sandie spent several years in foster homes around Los Angeles, at times subjected to abuse by doctors and at least one foster parent, according to Sandie’s account and that of her half brother, Derryl Dale Piper II.She returned to live with her mother when she was 11, and by 14 she was beginning to present herself as a woman, Mr. Piper said, a turn that brought conflict with their mother, who was deeply religious.Ms. Crisp left home after high school, moving to West Hollywood and joining a small community of punks, artists, homeless teens and hustlers. She made her mark almost immediately. Foulmouthed and dressed in sequined gowns that she often sewed herself, she insisted on being treated like a celebrity. Her penchant for telling wild tales about herself — like how she had appeared in off-Broadway musicals and dated celebrities — only made her more intriguing to her peers.Sandie Crisp was equally renowned among drag performers, especially those who lean toward a raw, edgy sensibility.Credit…Gibson Fox“She was such a visually extreme person,” said the photographer Rick Castro, one of many artists who hired Ms. Crisp to appear in their work in the 1980s and ’90s. “The way she carried herself, like she was a movie star, like old-school Hollywood royalty — she didn’t carry herself like someone who should be ashamed,” he said in an interview.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Hear Sophie’s 12 Essential Songs

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPlaylistHear Sophie’s 12 Essential SongsThe producer and performer’s short but influential career had a profound impact on the way modern pop music sounds. She died after a fall in Athens.Sophie’s fascinations with the musicality of hyper-feminized speech and the plasticky found-materials of late-capitalist consumer culture made their way into her music.Credit…Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for CoachellaJan. 31, 2021On Saturday, the forward-thinking pop producer and musician Sophie died after an accident in Athens. She was 34. “True to her spirituality,” her family wrote in a statement, “she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell.” The story was at once tragic and beautiful, full of pain, shock and underneath it all an almost otherworldly yearning. It was like a Sophie song.Sophie may not have been a household name, but over her short career she had a profound and transformative effect on the way modern pop music sounds. Since emerging with her frenetic breakout single “Bipp” in 2013, the Scottish producer, who was based in Los Angeles, went on to work with artists like Madonna, Vince Staples and Charli XCX. As a solo artist, Sophie’s pioneering music was perhaps poised for a larger crossover; her 2018 album “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” was nominated for a best dance/electronic album Grammy. Her influence can be heard in both the instant gratification of 100 gecs’ hyperpop and the energetic hooks of the K-pop boom.Sophie’s production brimmed with ideas. Where others perceived shallow surfaces, she saw oceanic depths — in the musicality of hyper-feminized speech, in the augmented honesty of artifice, in the plasticky found materials of late-capitalist consumer culture. She had a keen, wry ear for the overlap between the language of desire and the language of modern advertising, and her songs sometimes sounded like commercial jingles from other planets: “If you need that something but don’t know what it is, shake shake shake it up and make it fizz,” went the infectious “Vyzee,” ad infinitum.When she first arrived, shrouded in anonymity within the male-dominated world of electronic music, people wondered about Sophie’s gender. In late 2017, she announced, via interviews and the openhearted synth-ballad “It’s Okay to Cry,” that she was a transgender woman. Her early singles had reveled in the fluidity of femininity and masculinity, as well as softness and hardness, and suddenly it seemed that the aesthetics she’d toyed with in her music were related to the private process of becoming herself. There was beauty in that, and a palpable liberation when she stepped into the spotlight.“For me, transness is taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit so the two aren’t fighting against each other and struggling to survive,” she said in an interview with Paper magazine around that time. “On this earth, it’s that you can get closer to how you feel your true essence is without the societal pressures of having to fulfill certain traditional roles based on gender. It means you’re not a mother or a father — you’re an individual who’s looking at the world and feeling the world.”From her solo material and her production work for other artists, here are some of her essential tracks.‘Bipp’ (2013)In June 2013, on the Scottish electronic label Numbers, “Bipp” emerged out of nowhere — from a void as blank and alive with possibility as its cover art’s white background. The track felt as much like a club banger as a mad-scientist’s laboratory experiment. Hyper-processed percussion and cheerleader-chant vocals pinged off each other as though they were both made of Flubber. “I can make you feel better, if you let me,” intoned a choppy, high-pitched vocal, inviting the listener to succumb to the song’s strange promise of ecstasy.‘Lemonade’ (2014)A year later, Sophie released a track as explosively fizzy as a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos cocktail. “Lemonade” dialed up the more polarizing aspects of her aesthetic: The surface sheen was even more synthetic, the vocals even higher-pitched and the rhythm — which careened from a trap cadence to a sped-up pop hook — was as erratic as it was exhilarating.‘Hard’ (2014)Electronic music sometimes has a reputation for being self-serious, but many of Sophie’s songs crackled with oddball humor. “Hard,” the kinetic B-side to “Lemonade,” was among them. It was at once a slinky, vividly tactile ode to B.D.S.M. — “latex gloves, smack so hard” — and a sly joke on the gender binary, as an ultra-femme, helium-like voice intones, “Hard, hard, I get so hard.”QT, ‘Hey QT’ (2014)By 2014, Sophie had become closely associated with PC Music, a buzzy Britain-based collective of electronic musicians and producers who blend the cerebral archness of the avant-garde with the earnest, mass-catharsis of pop musical product. QT was a short-lived project that united Sophie with the PC Music figurehead and producer A.G. Cook, along with Hayden Frances Dunham, who was “playing” a pop star named QT who also happened to be the spokeswoman for an invented energy elixir called DrinkQT.The song is a jubilant sugar rush, but some skeptics wondered if Sophie and Cook were becoming too bogged down by ideas and irony, and in the process alienating potential listeners. Sophie confounded her critics even more, though, when “Lemonade” was used in a 2015 web commercial for … McDonald’s lemonade. “People were furious,” Sophie recalled in a Vulture interview a few years later. “But I don’t think that compromises anything in the music.” She added, “If you can do two things with it, give it meaning for yourself according to the perspectives you want to share and also have it function on the mass market, and therefore expose your message to more people in a less elitist context, then that is an ideal place to be.”‘Just Like We Never Said Goodbye’ (2015)When she gave her 2015 singles collection the cheeky, Warholian title “Product,” Sophie was once again winking at the perceived chasm between art and consumer culture. But its final track — the wrenching and glittery millennial-pop heartbreaker “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye” — was a preview of what was to come from her later solo material, and proof that as much as she indulged in ideas, she was also an expert conjurer of big, sincere emotions.Madonna featuring Nicki Minaj, ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’ (2015)In 2015, Sophie’s innovative sound had trickled so far into the mainstream that even the Material Girl herself wanted a piece. “Bitch I’m Madonna,” the enjoyably brash single from the pop superstar’s 13th studio album, “Rebel Heart,” remains perhaps the most high-profile track that Sophie worked on. Though she shared a writing credit with half a dozen other collaborators, and though the chorus’s here’s-the-drop structure is audibly time-stamped 2010s Diplo, the plastic-affect verses, bouncy pre-chorus and spirited self-referentiality bear the distinct marks of Sophie.Charli XCX, ‘Vroom Vroom’ (2016)Charli XCX proved to be an even more simpatico pop collaborator and muse. She and Sophie worked together on a handful of bubbly one-off tracks — “No Angel,” “Girls Night Out” — as well as the entirety of Charli’s experimental 2016 EP “Vroom Vroom.” This sleek and kinetic title track is built like a custom ride for Charli’s distinct musical personality.Vince Staples featuring Kendrick Lamar, ‘Yeah Right’ (2017)Though Sophie worked more frequently with pop artists than rappers, she produced two tracks on the sonically adventurous Compton M.C. Vince Staples’s 2017 album “Big Fish Theory,” including “Yeah Right” (which also featured contributions from the Australian D.J. and producer Flume). After Kendrick Lamar sent along his guest verse, Sophie told Paper Magazine, “We edited the vocals and tried to overproduce the song. They wanted it a bit more raw, but then they left it anyway and people liked it. Vince was playing it all the time.”‘It’s Okay to Cry’ (2017)The poignant first single from Sophie’s “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” was something of a coming-out party. Stepping from the hazy shadows of her early work, Sophie placed herself and her shock of carrot-red hair at the center of the project — singing lead vocal and starring in the song’s music video, which managed to be both vulnerable and vampy at the same time. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” she sang atop a glimmering synth arpeggio, “but I think your inside is your best side.”‘Faceshopping’ (2018)Like the thrilling “Ponyboy,” “Faceshopping” was an “Oil”-era take on the harder, more industrial side of Sophie’s sound. The song’s chanted, deadpan vocals are something of a callback to “Lemonade,” but here the language of consumption and advertising blends even more subversively with reflections on identity and self-creation: “My face is the front of shop,” she announces, “I’m real when I shop my face.” In Vulture, Sophie mused, “That’s a running theme in this music — questioning preconceptions about what’s real and authentic. What’s natural and what’s unnatural and what’s artificial, in terms of music, in terms of gender, in terms of reality, I suppose.”‘Immaterial’ (2018)A deliriously catchy, knowing Madonna nod (“immaterial girls, immaterial boys”) that doubles as a meditation on the connection between body and soul — what could be more quintessentially Sophie than that?‘Bipp (Autechre Remix)’ (2021)In 2015, Sophie established a personal credo about remixes of her work: She wanted none, “unless it’s Autechre.” Five years later, the British electronic duo sent back their take on “Bipp” with the note, “Sorry this is so late. Hope it’s still of some use.” Just days before Sophie’s death, it was released along with a previously unreleased B-side of her own, “Unisil.” Slow and sparse, the remix is a loving homage from two of her musical heroes, and proof that even Sophie’s earliest work still sounds like the future.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More