Poppy Is Dead; Long Live Poppy

In the horror show of 2020, some turned to yeast. I turned to Poppy, the multimedia artist and viral phenomenon, from back when we could still call things viral phenomena.

It seemed apt to devote some time to the internet It girl during a time when live music was relegated to Facebook and stand-up comedy was stuck on Instagram, when dance parties had relocated to Zoom and a museum visit was only possible via Google Street View technology. In contrast to the rest of us valiantly trying to squeeze our lives into internet boxes, Poppy was a creature and denizen of the notional space beyond the screen; the internet was her venue and plaything.

She turned out to be exquisite company. I set myself the task of watching every one of her available and canonical videos, videos in which she tap dances, hula hoops, peels and eats a banana, stares at you, counts $100 notes, speaks admiringly about Tide laundry detergent, sleeps, clutches a dog, demonstrates how to load a gun, wonders aloud about butterflies, stares at you some more, jumps up and down for 10 minutes, and, most infamously, introduces herself over and over and over again.

A friend told me she used to fall asleep to Poppy reading Genesis 1–13 from the Bible, and, truly, there was a strange comfort to be found in a video like “Am I okay?” in which Poppy purrs reassuringly: “Everything’s gonna be okay. Don’t worry about it, you’re gonna be fine. I think everything’s gonna be okay.”

One video in particular has been experiencing renewed popularity recently: “How to Apply Your Mask,” from March 2017, in which Poppy demonstrates, with narration, how to wear that polypropylene face-blanket that became part of our daily lives in 2020. “Place the elastic bands around your ears like so,” she instructs. “Pinch just above the nose for a snug fit. And now you’re ready to go show off your new mask. You look great!”

A representative sample of the sentiment in the comments section: “She knew. She knew. She knew…”

Eventually I arrived at a video titled “Is It Working?” uploaded about a year ago, in October 2019. It’s designed to be viewed on a V.R. headset and, like so many of her other videos, is equally bizarre and beguiling.

Poppy, lit by strobing lights in abysmal darkness, looks you straight in the eyes and addresses you in her specter-thin voice: “Is this confusing? Do I have you hypnotized? Will you do anything I say?” You should be feeling dizziness, discomfort, she says. “Do you understand what’s happening?” She walks away, then back again. “It’s time to leave.”

It was, in a meaningful sense, Poppy’s last video ever. That Poppy is dead now—according to her, anyway.

In February, Poppy was backstage at the East Williamsburg concert venue Brooklyn Steel, her vital signs looking relatively healthy. She introduced herself as “Poppy version X.”

In her former life, Poppy had supernaturally straight blond hair and a pastel-hued aesthetic that accentuated her pocket-size kawaii proportions. That was, in her words, “Poppy version zero.” On the day we met, her look was closer to dominatrix Lolita: crimson makeup encircling feline eyes, black and crimson hair in four pigtail braids, crucifix-patterned fishnet stockings.

For years, Poppy revealed next to nothing about herself, maintaining the persona of a spacey but supremely fashionable fembot and telling hapless interviewers she was “from the internet.” But, at last, Poppy is letting the world glimpse the real Poppy.

Well, to a point. “I stand by my belief that everyone is wearing a mask in entertainment,” she said, in the intimate, barely-there coo that induces paroxysms in her worshippers. “I know that’s true for myself right now.” In the pre-pandemic beforetimes, she meant metaphorical masks, obviously, not literal ones. “Any time there’s a recorder or a camera or microphone presented in front of somebody, you’re not getting 1000% them. You’re not getting the mask off. It’s just a different form.”

Okay, even so, this was a shockingly revealing remark by Poppy’s standards. Perhaps, I hoped, it would be possible to get a better sense of the real-life human person formerly known as Moriah, and a clearer perspective on what she has achieved as an artist—including “Poppy” as one of the slyest and strangest art projects of the internet age.

She was in Brooklyn as part of the national tour for her album I Disagree. (Not long after our interview, her international tour would be postponed, for obvious reasons.) It’s technically Poppy’s third album, though she told me it feels more like her first. Lyrically, the record is filled with obsessive references to blood, teeth, death, and annihilation. The deluxe edition, released in August, continued the theme, the track “Kaos x4” featuring the taunting sing-spoken refrain, “I’m happy that the world is gonna end.”

Befitting a release from Poppy’s new, proggy label, Sumerian Records, musically it’s a manic hybrid of death metal and bubblegum pop, sounding like a T-1000 in a mid-air collision with a Powerpuff Girl. Or, if you like, a battle between two competing versions of Poppy. The opening track alone is musical chaos, an agitated mix of pick-scraping guitars, a sunny interlude straight out of Pet Sounds, and more unhinged guitar, all capped off with a sunshiney J-pop coda.

The record is more aligned with her personal musical tastes, she said, growing up as she did in thrall to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Trent Reznor. It’s also, she said, a reflection of turmoil and discontent behind the scenes of the high-gloss Poppy image. “I feel like it all came to a head, and like what I have been absorbing in the past three years was finally what came out, you know?”

Moriah Rose Pereira was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1995. The earliest signs of her future obsession with shape-shifting and the slipperiness of identity: She was four when her older sister dyed her hair for her—a forbidden act undertaken when their mother was out grocery shopping. Her hair was red at first, then purple.

Courtesy of Poppy.

She was the mascot of her sister’s roller derby team—too “fragile” to participate in the sport itself—and dreamed of being a Rockette. But despite being drawn to the spotlight, and in considerable contrast to her future self, at school, she wanted nothing more than to be invisible. She was the last to arrive in the morning and first to leave in the afternoon. And she was teased, constantly—about her slightness (there were jibes about anorexia), her sideburns. “I am Latina, among other things, so I have pretty dark hair,” she said. “Kids used to call me ‘gorilla girl.’”

I pull up a couple of old school photos of Moriah on my iPad. In one, she’s forcing a not-very-convincing smile. “My mom would always be mad ’cause I would never smile. So that was me being like, All right, mom, this one’s for you. But I’m also like, Get me outta here.” She transitioned to homeschooling, withdrawing into herself more than ever. Her prevailing memory of her formative years is that of being alone in her bedroom. Her teacher, she previously told NME, was the internet.

She says she left home at the tender age of 15, disconnecting from her parents, later signing with a record label and moving to Los Angeles. (According to the sleuths of Poppy Wiki, she made the move in the company of a best friend. Not true, Poppy tells me. She went alone.) It was goodbye to “Moriah.”

She wrote music every day in L.A., but her musical career was a nonstarter. Her label evidently placed her in the too-hard basket and forgot about her. Meanwhile, with no particular master plan other than to amuse herself and her new friends, she started making oddball videos with a new collaborator. Poppy had met Titanic Sinclair through a mutual friend. He resembled an anime character, with silver hair and a gaze that managed to be both penetrating and lugubrious. Sinclair would later describe Poppy, at their first meeting, as having exuded the visionary quality of David Bowie. They became partners in art and in life.

In November 2014, the first canonical Poppy video, directed by Sinclair, was uploaded onto YouTube: “Poppy Eats Cotton Candy.” It featured her eating cotton candy.

The label people, she says, so inert in all other matters, announced their disapproval. Poppy responded by eventually splitting from the label and redirecting her pent-up energies to the videos full-time. Within a week, her viewer numbers shot up, and the Poppy phenomenon started to take off. Uploaded in January the following year, “I’m Poppy” was a 10-minute video of Poppy saying “I’m Poppy” 666 times, according to her fans.

“I’m Poppy” set a template for the hundreds of videos that followed, videos whose unfathomable weirdness evoked Dada as much as David Lynch, with enigmatic repetitions and discomfiting silences that felt like an internet-age descendant of Samuel Beckett. They were mesmerizing visually—the clinical sets, the increasingly outrageous fashions—but also aurally, with Poppy’s made-for-ASMR tones providing a soothing counterpoint to the synthesizer score, which sounded like Angelo Badalamenti in an outer space massage parlor. It was magnificent YouTube content that seemed to be sending up the very notion of YouTube content, something that would feel as at home in an episode of Black Mirror as at LACMA.

You might say that the surrounding buzz became an essential part of the art too. Soon, Poppy was being called “the best person on the internet” (BuzzFeed) and the “Warhol of the YouTube era” (New York magazine). (They had a point with the Warhol thing. Compare: Andy Warhol eating a burger to “Poppy eats a meal.”) The New York Times marveled at her “hologram-perfect skin” and voice “like Betty Boop’s on benzos,” while a Wired profile, or perhaps the closest thing to a profile possible, offered this trance-like summation, best read in a brainwashed monotone: “Poppy means nothing. Poppy means everything. Poppy is exactly what she purports to be. She is Poppy.”

Today, a reported half-billion YouTube views later, Poppy insists that, at its core, the project was straightforward. It was simply about seeing the world as “happy and cute.” It was about wonder—portraying it, provoking it, promoting it as a world view.

“It truly is just the naive version of me when I was younger, you know, tapping into what it was when the world was being looked at through rose-colored glasses. When I was very idealistic, before my mind or thoughts were dirtied by anything that was on the outside. It’s Poppy seeing things for the first time—products or animals or plants or whatever it is.”

It’s a very Poppy answer, glossing over the output’s depths and darknesses. “Of course, there were games along the way,” she allows—the closest she gets to acknowledging those complexities.

But then, the elusiveness of the project was kind of the point too. Poppy was saddened by all those cyber-detectives trying to uncover her real identity and puncture the mystery. There was a very brief but wonderful time when, for example, ancient yearbook photos of her hadn’t yet surfaced online. She compares it to the 2017 Hollywood Reporter article that revealed the identity of pink-convertible-driving L.A. icon Angelyne. “I was a little bit bummed out that people don’t want to just let something like that live in the world. They want to dig in and get to the bottom of it. Let it live.”

Increasingly, Sinclair came across as the auteur of the project, Poppy’s spokesperson, controller, and keeper. In joint interviews, he casually broke the fourth wall, chatting uninhibitedly to the press about artistic intentions while Poppy remained frozen in character. According to Poppy, that puppet/puppeteer dynamic carried over unhealthily into real life.

Some of Poppy’s fans began perceiving what felt like dark clues in the videos, speculating that Poppy was Sinclair’s hostage, that the videos were secret cries for help. On one level, that stuff was just another intentional and satirical layer of the project. (As recently as last November, Poppy had told NME: “The narrative that we created in order to tell the story of the first album was very much Titanic is the bad guy and he’s the leader, which I think is funny because it’s not true.”) But, Poppy tells me, she realized later that the conspiracy-theory-mongers were picking up on something quite real: “I think [Sinclair] had a positive intention at first, but then it just became too controlling and I think people online sensed it a lot sooner than I did.”

At the same time, the Poppy character itself began to feel like a straitjacket—creative anathema to someone with a constant need to move forward. “One of my biggest fears is regressing,” she said. “I don’t want to ever be moving backwards. I need to always be going forward. I even have a problem when I have a layover.” Not only that, but Poppy was realizing that the internet and social media, her chosen venue for artistic expression, was becoming an increasingly ugly and toxic place.

Poppy wrote I Disagree with Sinclair, but also, apparently unbeknownst to Sinclair himself, some of the record’s lyrics, she now says, were about him. It was a small but symbolic act of defiance. Of the whole period, Poppy said, “It just got to a point…when the air just felt very heavy. I felt like there was a shift coming.”

The shift happened, finally, at the end of last year. In December, she took to social media to announce the professional breakup with Sinclair, with then uncharacteristic candor. It was not an amicable split. “I was trapped in a mess that I needed to dig my way out of,” she wrote, “and like I always do, I figured out how to handle it. I encourage those of you who feel trapped in a situation whether it be similar to my previous one or not—to take the first step, because that is the most difficult one.”

During our interview in February, Poppy did not mention Sinclair by name, instead referring to a “previous collaborative partner” and “certain people.”

Not long after the split, in May, Poppy released a statement in a since-deleted tweet saying that an unnamed ex-boyfriend had leaked photos of her sans makeup online, along with unreleased material. “This is an attempt to make me feel small, insecure and exposed,” she wrote. “Those tactics aren’t going to work.”

Recently given the opportunity to respond to the statement, Sinclair didn’t deny such accusations. “Poppy is a true living enigma,” he wrote in an email. “She was my best friend, my business partner, and my lover for half a decade and not once did I call her by her legal name.”

“I’m disappointed with how she decided to treat me in the end,” he added. “And I have to live with how I reacted to accepting (and ultimately respecting) why she did it in the first place.”

An hour after our interview back in February, Poppy, or a version of her at least, lay in a casket at Brooklyn Steel, her eyes closed, arms across her chest. Around her, a small gathering paid their respects, taking turns at saying a few words each. The funeral ceremony was Poppy’s characteristically twisted way of killing off her famed former self once and for all, closing a chapter and beginning a new one.

Poppy’s longtime fans—her “Poppy seeds”—remain devoted. She’s grateful for that, but also excited about reaching a whole new audience. As much as it was for the fans, the ceremony was for her too, a way of laying a version of herself to rest and letting go. She talked about her old persona, and what was known as the Poppy project, with an epitaphic finality. “She had her life.… I don’t think there’s a part of me that will miss it,” she said. “I feel like it served its purpose.”

True to form, she told me more recently in an email, she has used the pandemic as an opportunity for trying new things. “Everything I have been telling myself I would like to learn these past few years, I’ve had a second to get into. My boyfriend taught me how to ride a motorcycle, I started making clothes, I bought roller skates…”

She’s uploaded new videos too: straight-faced makeup tutorials that bear little resemblance to the mischievous Poppy of old, but which paradoxically suggest that she’s newly comfortable with her own fleshy reality. “I think it comes with age learning to love what makes you YOU,” she said.

What did it all mean? If you take her word for it, Poppy came along to make the world feel happy and cute and sweet and nice. It was an admirable theme, if a little incompatible with the confronting events of this year. The new message that Poppy wants to impart and embody is less wide-eyed, more worldly, and far more 2020-appropriate: “Don’t be afraid of the unknown,” she said. “It’s okay to burn things down, and start over.”

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