Over the past decade, A. G. Cook’s hyperpop label PC Music has helped change the face of pop. And yet, one of the company’s final new releases, British singer Hannah Diamond’s Perfect Picture, is representative of its position squarely outside of the mainstream.
Diamond is a meta-pop star for the 21st century, a visual artist whose heavily retouched images dovetail with the content of her music. She’s certainly committed to the bit, creating club-friendly bangers with unpredictable melodies and vocals that are chopped up into a robotic stutter that suggests the imperfection of humanity. Lyrically, the songs on Perfect Picture find her in a constant state of anxiety about her looks and public perception.
On the title track, the word “click” has a clever double meaning: the act of taking a photo and strangers viewing it (and judging) it. Diamond recognizes the commodification of our insecurities, and the album’s most cutting moments convey the difficulty that famous women in particular have in escaping their social media personas. “You love me with no FX…I know in my mind you don’t need to be complex,” she sings, her voice drenched in Auto-Tune.
Beneath the seemingly positive tone of tracks like “Affirmations” and “Unbreakable” is a woman struggling to meet the current moment of hustle culture. In a spoken passage on “Affirmations,” Diamond mutters, “I’m a businessman and a CEO.” But the girlboss façade is belied by the mantra “keep repeating to myself,” a kind of sloganeering that’s knowingly undercut by the fact that it’s offered in service of selling a polished image.
Of course, Diamond’s critique of online culture and its effects on our self-perception aren’t new. The crucial difference here is that she locates herself inside the machine, without claiming she can escape the traps she sings about. Diamond constructs a world of exaggerated femininity without drowning in irony. As a result, Perfect Picture suggests that hope remains a possibility.
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