Embracing the Digital: Expressive Artifice in the SoundCloud Digital Underground This thesis explores what I call the SoundCloud digital underground, a flourishing online music scene which fuses hyperpop and SoundCloud rap. I argue that artists in the SoundCloud digital underground dispute authenticity and experiment with the digital and artificial in order to express themselves, and in doing so highlight the constructedness of all media. I borrow and reinterpret the term “expressive artifice” from subculture scholar Dick Hebdige to define and interrogate this process of digitally-enabled creation. My two case studies are vocal modulation in SoundCloud digital underground artists’ songs themselves and visual styles in artists’ music videos. In examining techniques of vocal manipulation, primarily glitch and AutoTune, I find that these artists derive their practice from traditions like the “vocal queering” used by trans and nonbinary hyperpop artists as well as Black R&B artists’ experimentation with digital technology and virtuality in their vocals. I follow new media scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notions of hypermediacy and remediation to think SoundCloud digital underground artists’ visual aesthetics in terms of what I call “hyperrremediation,” the incorporation of contemporary media forms into each other in a manner that disrupts immediacy and transparency. I conclude the thesis by taking stock of the state of the SoundCloud digital underground today, bringing in its newest incarnations and questioning what its future holds in the face of the vicissitudes of technocapitalism. Fleissig, Leo creator moore, madison thesis advisor Weheliye, Alexander G. reader Brown University. Modern Culture and Media sponsor 2024 text_resources born digital English Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2024 Modern Culture and Media theses media studies Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) In Copyright 10.26300/18dc-tt24