Okay, let's be real. I turn on a hyperpop track and my first thought isn't "Wow, what a complex musical composition." It's "Did my phone just glitch and start playing a dial-up modem, a dying smoke alarm, and a chipmunk all at once?" That's not a genre; that's my laptop having a seizure. Look, I get what the other side is going to say. They'll talk about "pushing boundaries" and "deconstructing pop." But deconstructing a building leaves you with a pile of rubble, and calling that rubble "innovative architecture" doesn't make it a place you'd want to live. Hyperpop takes the catchy, sugary elements of pop music, cranks them to a literally painful 11, smashes them with a digital sledgehammer, and calls the resulting audio debris art. A legitimate genre has rules, or at least recognizable conventions you can follow. You can trace a line from blues to rock to metal. You can hear the influence in the chords, the rhythms. Hyperpop's main convention seems to be "how aggressively can we distort this vocal until it sounds like a helium balloon fighting a lawnmower?" It's the musical equivalent of throwing every filter on a TikTok video at once and declaring you've invented a new film movement. It's chaos for chaos's sake. And let's talk about listenability, because music is, at its core, meant to be listened to. Not endured. I can appreciate experimental noise music in a gallery context, but hyperpop masquerades as pop—it wants to be catchy and mainstream. But you can't hum it. You can't feel a groove. Your body's natural reaction isn't to dance, it's to flinch and check if your speakers are broken. So no, it's not a legitimate genre. It's a production aesthetic pushed to a nihilistic extreme. It's the audio version of junk food: a hyper-processed, deliberately abrasive overload of empty calories that leaves you with a headache. Calling it "the future of music" is like saying the future of food is blending a candy bar, a pickle, and a battery acid smoothie. You can do it. But that doesn't make it a cuisine.