How to grieve Sophie

04 May, 2026

On February 1st, 2021, we learned that the musician Sophie had died the night before, a simple slip and fall. The news hit everyone I know like a shockwave. In part this is because Sophie was a trailblazing trans musician. Her sound is harsh, synthetic, and bright; with the exception of the human voice, every sound in her projects is constructed from thin air rather than samples. She made industrial bangs, slow bubbling, and "advertising-core" into something not just abstractly beautiful, but actively affecting — and everyone else took notes. It's hard not to feel, then, that Sophie should have been part of the future she set in motion. This is compounded by the way that trans celebrities rarely die so suddenly, so sensationally, of natural causes rather than hate crimes. But I think the cornerstone of it all was the uncanny, yet moving way Sophie's label describes her death:

True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell. She will always be here with us.

I don't know if this language is bad, per se, but it's deeply unsettling. If it were about a fictional character, this metaphor would be criticized as heavyhanded and reheated — except, of course, it's not, and that's all very uncomfortable. There's a poetry to it (the words "full moon" tend to do that) alongside non-poetic redundancies like "accidentally slipped and fell". It's all very jarring. When I asked my mentor TC Tolbert for feedback on a poem I wrote about Sophie, a predecessor to the first poem I got into a real magazine, I included this text as an epigraph. TC's response was that I should cut the epigraph, because s/he thought it completely disrupted the mood.

All this to say, it was this text (both its content and its strange rhythms) that was the final ingredient we needed to publicly mourn the inimitable Sophie Xeon. And so we did, and to some extent so we still do.

When I think of music and public mourning, I think of Kendrick Lamar's song "Mortal Man", the conclusion of To Pimp A Butterfly. Despite some rough moments¹ it's both the culmination of an incredible album and an effective revival of Kendrick's idol Tupac Shakur. This takes place as a mock interview, a weaving-together of questions from Kendrick and cutups from then-unpublished interviews with Pac. For a moment the great rapper's ghost returns. Then the music swells, Kendrick says the final word of the album — a bewildered "Pac?" — and just as quickly as he came, he's no longer with us. You can relisten to the song, of course, but the fact that you've heard the words before makes it feel less like a seance and more like ventriloquy, the boring sort of living forever that we already knew about. That only makes it more startling that, through public mourning, Kendrick briefly made Tupac feel genuinely alive again.

Staring at the numinosity of "Mortal Man", it's hard not to feel that Kendrick made a musical form that could only be about Tupac. There certainly couldn't be a work like "Mortal Man" but about Sophie, who did interviews so infrequently, and for whom the whole affair might seem like being pinned down or trapped in an image. No, we might like to find some lost piece of testimony for Sophie, some kernel from which another "Mortal Man" could spring, but nothing suggests itself.

Sophie did leave a sort of unreleased testimonial, though, in the form of an unfinished second album. One wonders whether Sophie's brother, preparing a posthumous album out of what she left behind, was moved by the same impulse that moved Kendrick to reshape Tupac's lost testimony. Sadly, the posthumous album doesn't have the same juice as "Mortal Man". It's effective as public mourning, it's comforting, and it certainly doesn't tarnish anyone's legacy, but it's just not a rise from the grave. Sophie was a distinctive and constantly evolving producer, and it's hard not to imagine that she would've touched up her own work differently. This isn't anybody's fault; if anything, the thing to blame is our own attachment to the image of Sophie, the unshakeable belief that no matter what was released we'd respond that it didn't feel like her. And so we're here, relistening to "Faceshopping" on repeat, aware that the dead remain dead.

Caroline Polachek's "I Believe" is one of the many, many explicit tributes to Sophie, and my first listen to it was the most disgusted I've ever been by a song.

"I Believe" opens with an urgent whisper, a hook that will be repeated: "Look over the edge, but not too far." I found something cheap about this, and to some extent I still do. The phrase is followed by the stench of overinterpretation, the fanficcy miasma of what bell hooks called "reading for extraction" applied to the text of a human life. "Leaning too far to take a picture of the moon" does not meaningfully summarize Sophie's life or death — it's just a thing that happened, a physical process, an unluckiness. To ascribe importance to it, literally as a grammatical command to Sophie, is at best futile, and at worst a gauche move that implies that this was Sophie's hamartia, the final crest of a current that overwhelms her life's story. How fucking dare you, Caroline Polachek? How dare you skirt right up to the line of scolding Sophie Xeon for falling off a building? How dare you graft that narrative onto her life? How dare you exhume the earthshattering death of a real person with a real future in the form of a twee, vague morality-tale about moderation or wonder or some other symbol that's of no use to Sophie or any of us in the all-consuming wake of unreasonable death? How dare you promise me that you are going to grieve Sophie, and then subsequently greet me (literally within the first few seconds of the album) with a recasting of senseless, random death into a one-sentence story about a human foible?

This feeling hasn't entirely dissipated. But I do think I at least understand it. If we could, we'd all make a "Mortal Man", an earnest recapturing and reignition of the testimonies of the dead. And so we scramble for that testimony, some assemblage of heretofore-unseen words that can link past and present and allow us, against the odds, to feel that the dead still speak, that we might wake up tomorrow and hear their voice saying yet more new words, just as they are saying new words now. For whatever reason, Polachek could not find such a testimony, or could not reshape it right.

So she kept searching, and found the next best thing: "True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell. She will always be here with us." Strange, unsettling, abrasive language about a hyperpop musician whose music was often strange, unsettling, and abrasive in the best ways, a musician who tempered the overbaked poetries of advertising with her rhythms, preferences, and talents. This image of the artist looking up and slipping, overcomposed yet true-to-life, was a sort of new release from Sophie, a sort of hyperpop anthem co-produced with dumb luck. A readymade. Vulgar and off-putting, sure, but then so is a urinal, even after it's signed "R. Mutt".

I still can't bring myself to earnestly enjoy "I Believe". But I understand now that, like "Mortal Man", it is the merging of a sort of testimony and a sort of cutting-up. The combination is overwhelmingly distasteful to me, but it helps to realize that the source of that overwhelm is, in some way, an expression of Sophie (and her love of overwhelm). I might even see it as numinous, a gift from the inhuman Other. "...It's spirits," says Tupac. "We ain't even really rappin', we just lettin' our dead homies tell stories for us. Or as Sophie writes on "Immaterial":

Without my legs or my hair Without my genes or my blood With no name and with no type of story Where do I live? Tell me, where do I exist?