06.04.17
It’s hard to explain Poppy to the uninitiated. But I’m going to try.
Let’s start with the edge of the Poppy rabbit hole: You see a woman in a YouTube video. She is blond and petite with the kind of Bambi-sized brown eyes you rarely encounter in real life. She seems to be in her late teens or early twenties, though her pastel clothing and soft voice are much more childlike.
Maybe you start with “I’m Poppy,” a video where she repeats that phrase over and over in different inflections for 10 minutes. That’s right. Ten minutes. She seems, by turns, bored, curious, and sweet. As it continues, you notice that her voice does not quite match the movement of her lips; it’s delayed just a beat.
You watch more. There’s a video of her interviewing a basil plant and two of her reading out loud from the Bible. In one, her nose spontaneously starts bleeding. All of her videos are like this: unsettling, repetitive, sparse. Imagine anime mixed with a healthy heap of David Lynch, a dash of Ariana Grande, and one stick of bubblegum. There are a few characters who appear in the videos besides Poppy—one of her recurring guests is a talking mannequin.
Most of her videos are too unnerving to watch from beginning to end for reasons that are hard to put your finger on. You find yourself scrolling to the comments in the middle of the more unsettling scenes, the digital equivalent of turning to a friend in the movie theater and gauging their reaction to the batshit thing you just saw onscreen.
If you Google more about Poppy or watch one of the Poppy explainer videos made by other YouTubers, you’ll find out that Poppy refuses to tell reporters her age. She claims to be from Nashville, but she gives little other biographical information. A cursory search will tell you that no one has been able to figure out who she is. Some fans speculate that, while an actress plays Poppy in real-life interviews, her videos and songs are computer generated, like a real version of the film S1M0NE.
The satanic and Illuminati symbolism in her work leads some to say she’s a cult leader. Others speculate that she’s being held against her will and forced to make YouTube videos. Whatever the case, she is an enigma, and she has cultivated a fan base that spends hours poring over her videos trying to glean clues about her identity and the deeper meaning of her oeuvre.
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Titanic and Poppy
The Fans
Poppy’s top videos attract a ton of attention: “I’m Poppy” has 7 million views, and the music video for “Lowlife” has 19 million. But the engagement she gets from her viewers is what’s really impressive. Each video has thousands of comments, and there are multiple subreddits devoted to her. Her fans’ explainer videos and reaction clips, with titles like “Poppy’s Hidden Conspiracy EXPOSED!” and “WHY POPPY IS IN TROUBLE,” are practically a YouTube subgenre all their own.
Despite her cotton-candy aesthetic, Poppy’s fan base is largely male. For some, the obsession has a sexual dimension. But much of the appeal for Poppy’s fans—they call themselves Poppy Seeds, naturally—is that her work is laced with what seem to be hidden messages and dark undertones. Some examples: In the description for the video “I Will Apply the Makeup” a handful of letters are capitalized. Put those letters together and they spell out the words “HELP ME.” The talking mannequin, Charlotte, has overdosed on drugs and violently attacked Poppy in her videos. Poppy includes an illustration of Moloch, a Canaanite god of child sacrifice, in her self-published book, Gospel of Poppy. She posted a thread entitled “Please help me” on Reddit, which read simply, “I’m breaking.” That message sent fans into a tizzy as they debated whether she was actually in danger or just pulling another stunt.
Poppy Seeds refer to Poppy as their “god” or “queen.” They buy pink triangle “membership rings” from her site and watch her videos over and over, playing them in reverse, pausing them, changing the pitch and frequency, trying to glean clues about what’s going on. Sometimes, manipulating the videos does reveal something, like a phones number or creepy dialog. Those little details stoke the fire.
Basically: Her work is internet catnip.
“I learn a little more about Poppy every day, but much like an unrequited crush at school, she is always at arm’s length,” Unexpected_Gangsta, the creator of the “Uncensored” Poppy subreddit, writes in an email. “Anyone who has tried to solve a well-known problem in math or logic will be able to understand this kind of hunger.”
Of course, Poppy is not for everyone. Last summer, she opened for Kesha at the Dubuque County Fair in Iowa. She played several YouTube videoclips and talked about Facebook passwords, how to use cotton swabs, loving gravity, and how “living on a planet is important to me.” It was about as Poppy as Poppy gets.
The crowd of Iowans—who were, let’s face it, there to see a high-energy but intellectually unchallenging rendition of “Tik Tok”—booed. Poppy smiled in response, seemingly indifferent.
I don't know who "That Poppy" is, but she claims to be an alien and I don't think Dubuque is ready for this
— Maha Blast (@MajaStina33) July 31, 2016
I didn't pay $50 to watch a child talk in a baby voice and lip sync @thatPoppy
— Mallory (@malmachir) July 31, 2016
That’s because her work is not for those disgruntled people. It’s for the handful of people in the crowd who were a little put off, yet intrigued, who later tweeted that they went home after the show, looked up more of her videos, and fell down her rabbit hole.
And it’s for the people like Aster Gladiolus, CNB (a pseudonym he asked me to use), a mega-fan who is spreading the word of Poppy all over the internet. He preaches what he calls Poppyism, a pseudo-religion based on the teachings of Poppy. He co-moderated a Poppyism Facebook page and wrote up a Google Doc called the “Gospel of Poppy” (unrelated to Poppy’s self-published tome of the same name, which she started selling through her website in April for $16), which includes prayers to Poppy and stories about how different people came to be über-fans. “On the game Final Fantasy XIV, for instance, I’ve made a character up to look like Poppy, and I go around playing as Her to get people interested,” he writes over email. “What I personally get from Poppyism, from Poppy, is hard to put into words. I simply feel like I should follow Her, in a part of me as deep as my soul. It’s fulfilling to do so, to pass down and enact Her will as best I am able.”
He says he’s in on the joke and gets that she’s a parody … but worships her all the same.
Naturally, there’s infighting among the Poppy Seeds. Fans regularly split off on Reddit, Discord, and Facebook when they don’t agree with the rules set down by the original group—or if they don’t think that the leaders of that group are true Poppy followers. “I once saw a thread that asked ‘What do all Poppy fans have in common?’” writes Unexpected_Gangsta. “The top answer is that we are all crazy. That is probably correct!”
That fervor is the very reason many enjoy engaging in the community. SamisSimas (offline, he’s Sam, a 21-year-old physics student), who runs the main Poppy subreddit, says the project first appealed to him for its “early-2000s surrealist YouTube humor and kind of nihilistic attitude.” But the further down the rabbit hole he went, the more profundity he found. “Over time the project seemed to grow into more of commentary on modern internet celebrity and pop star identity,” he writes in a message via Reddit. “But most interestingly to me is the commentary on how fandom works. Watching how people react to Poppy’s content, especially the more hardcore fans. The project seems very manipulative and intended to create a sort of false sense of meaning.”
And it’s not just obsessive Redditors whom she’s hooked. Poppy’s manager, Nick Groff, started working with her two years ago after someone at her former label, Island Records, sent him links to her videos. “I found myself confused,” he says. “And then I watched another one and I was even more confused, and then I watched another one and another one. I watched every video that she’d put up. That’s what we’ve seen with a lot of the fans who have become super fans: They find themselves stopping an hour later after watching 25 different visual shorts. That’s incredible.”
Groff—who has worked with the Black Eyed Peas, Avicii, and LMFAO—still seems to be in disbelief about the depth of Poppy’s project and its virality. “We have this massive range of audience, from your 9-year-old little girl who loves Hello Kitty to a 35-year-old adult who watches Comedy Central religiously,” Groff says. “She is an anomaly.”
Project Poppy
I’ve been devouring Poppy’s videos for months when Groff arranges for me to interview her. Frankly, I’m nervous. The conversation is almost guaranteed to get weird, and I’m not quite sure how to prep questions. Will I be talking to the artist who plays Poppy or will I be talking to Poppy the character? And, either way, will she somehow try to pull me into her performance art?
We first speak in late February, patched through on a call by the Interscope office. (Her manager, Groff, works for Interscope, but she’s technically not signed by them. Long story. In sum, Poppy has her own label and Groff reps them as a sort of side project.) She says she’s in a car parked outside of Echo Park on her way to a Japanese class.
Poppy is in character. As in her videos, her voice is whispery and feminine. She often refers to herself in the third person (“Comedy Central likes Poppy, so they gave her a show,” she says at one point). It is, to say the least, awkward. I find myself doing most of the talking. When she does answer my questions, her replies are clipped, like a shy child or a particularly creative chat bot.
Titanic
Apparently my interview with Poppy passes muster with Groff. (“It seems like you got what Poppy’s trying to do with this project,” he tells me, “or at least a semblance of what she’s trying to do with this project.” A tepid vote of confidence.) He agrees to arrange a call with Titanic.
Talking with Titanic is much more normal than interviewing Poppy. He tells me how he’s inspired by kundalini meditation techniques, Debbie Harry/Blondie, Alan Watts and Buddhist philosophy, J-pop, and the peek behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. The Poppy project is like a long meal, he says, and we’re only at the hors d’oeuvres. “I just wanted to tell the story that I was seeing in real life,” Titanic says, “and do it in a little bit more of a magical way.”
In their monumental effort to decode the Poppy phenomenon, fans have looked to Titanic and Poppy’s past. They’re on the right track. Because, to understand Poppy, you have to start with Titanic Sinclair. Though Titanic says theirs is a shared vision, his signature style is all over the project.
Titanic Sinclair, whose legal name is Corey Mixter, grew up in Michigan. He found minor internet fame in the mid-2000s making YouTube videos with a woman calling herself Mars Argo. The two of them, who were also in a relationship IRL, had a vlog series, Computer Show. In their videos, made on a bare-bones set, Mars and Titanic deadpan into the camera as they parody American internet culture. In their most famous video, “Delete Your Facebook,” the pair implore viewers to delete their social media accounts while riffing about how Titanic blew out his ear drum and joking about shooting up heroin.
Titanic and Mars moved to Los Angeles in 2012 to continue making videos and original indie-pop music. After several years living in California, Mars and Titanic broke up and dissolved the band. And then Mars Argo vanished from the internet.
It was around that time that Titanic met Poppy through a songwriter. In early November 2014, Titanic and Poppy released their first video, “Poppy Eats Cotton Candy.”
Though Titanic says the two projects are unrelated, the timing of his first collaboration with Poppy and the crossover in themes has caused some fans to speculate that Poppy is a continuation of the Mars project. (Or that Poppy stole Mars’ material or, in an even more out-there theory, that Poppy is Mars.) That’s why Poppy fans have leaked Mars’ home address and analyzed every bit of communication she still has with her fans. In March, Mars made a rare appearance on the Mars Argo subreddit to politely ask fans to leave her alone. “I am asking that you please stop uploading my unreleased videos & performances,” she wrote. “If I wanted them live, I would share.”
Mars isn’t the only one who is subject to fan digging. Though mentions of their real names seem to be censored from the comments section on Poppy and Titanic’s YouTube accounts, there’s a very active Discord message board, a shared Google Docs folders, and several private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing new Poppy material and, most key, swapping information about Poppy: her real name (Moriah Pereira), her age (22), where she was born (the Boston area, though she later moved to Nashville), old music videos and vlog posts, even yearbook photos.
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Meeting of the Minds
A month after my first phones interview with Poppy, I meet her and Titanic at a bistro in Los Angeles. I spend the days leading up to the lunch feeling anxious, mostly because I fear they’ll troll me in real time, and I won’t be able to keep up.
I’m still wondering about this as I sit down in a booth across from Poppy. She carries a small Minnie Mouse purse and, despite the sunny weather, wears a long turquoise coat with ruffles. The color of the jacket matches her pointy nails. Her hair is perfectly straight and blindingly blond. Without a doubt, she has the nicest skin I have ever seen in person.
She wears big pink sunglasses with reflective lenses. I can see Titanic in them, warped into a fun-house mirror reflection. He’s decked out in the Poppy aesthetic—light blue and white striped shirt and gem-encrusted loafers. Titanic’s online persona can be blunt. He’s not afraid to go after people for reposting material without permission and has picked fights with several artists on Twitter, including Halsey and Melanie Martinez. (He recently started selling a T-shirt on his merch site that reads, “Titanic Sinclair Was Mean To Me On Twitter.”) But on the phones and now in person, he’s kind and charismatic. He skips a handshake in favor of a friendly hug and pokes fun at himself when he bloviates.
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