Poppy is like a long lost experiment by Andy Warhol. Speaking like an animatronic Edie Sedgwik, offering cryptic messages about infinity, fame, and how it feels to be human, all while ambient music drones behind her like she's the secret love child of Brian Eno, she conjures up memories of the very late '70s, when punk and new wave briefly gave way to synth pop, when Ultravox sang Warhol's old line about wanting to be a machine.
What's Poppy all about? She's not a retro act, but rather, she's carrying on a tradition that goes back to the pop artists of the 1950s and '60s who used advertising and comic books, or whatever was handy, to create commentaries on America. Indeed, one of the videos on her YouTube channel consists of her asking the viewer, "Do you like Doritos? Do you like Monster Energy Drink? Do you like Taco Bell?" Not exactly Robert Rauschenberg blasting off with his images of John F. Kennedy and the space race, but miles above the drivel one usually sees on the Internet. What makes Poppy so interesting is her absolute devotion to her role. She walks a tremulous line: she's just young enough and cute enough to attract YouTube fans, and strange enough to keep them fascinated. "Do you love me?" she asks. "Will you do whatever I say?"
Less than a few years ago she was a generic YouTube singer - Moriah Pereira from Nashville - trying to get noticed. She has since rejected that old identity in favor of her bizarre Poppy personae. Now, in a voice that sounds somewhat like the recorded messages you hear when you dial the local movie theater schedule, she informs us that she loves her fans, loves computers, and loves being famous. After releasing a handful of routine teenybopper anthems, she traveled to Japan to record Poppy.Computer, an effort cited by Rolling Stone as one of the 20 best albums of 2017.
The trick, and it's a smart one, is that no one listening to Poppy is old enough to realize her style is not so new and innovative. Gary Numan was singing about his electric friends 30 years ago, and David Bowie was putting on an alien persona long before that. When Poppy chirps, "I want to be famous so people recognize me in supermarkets," she may as well be one of Warhol's glib transvestites. Of course, the kids in Poppy's audience couldn't care less about geezers from the past, and the podcast people interviewing Poppy aren't aware of anything prior to 2012. But each generation demands its own version of this peculiar, otherworldly character. It used to be Devo, or Klaus Nomi. It could be Nico, or Kraftwerk. It becomes passé rather quickly and vanishes, but always returns.
The time is right for Poppy. With Lady Gaga beginning to look like a Staten Island mob wife, kids looking for an authentically outre character could do a lot worse than Poppy. With her glazed eyes and outlandish wardrobe, she makes most other YouTubers look like unkempt subway buskers playing for dimes. To her small but loyal audience, she's an entirely lovable, adorable, daughter of the Internet come to life. And while Gaga is too ready to weep about the pressures of her career, Poppy treats fame like an ice cream cone.
Sometimes she looks like Alice in Wonderland, if Alice were fascinated by smart phones and Instagram. Instead of the Cheshire Cat and Mad Hatter, she has a talking skeleton and a potted plant for company. Poppy has nightmares, though, which suggests all is not perfect in Poppy's world. She is sometimes menaced by a manikin named Charlotte (a stand-in, no doubt, for the plastic, hostile types in the media), and she refers to a mysterious "they," as if she's under the control of some cult. Her videos occasionally reference the devil; now and then she unexpectedly bleeds from the nose or mouth. Then, as cheerily as a kiddie show host, she'll announce, "I am validated by having your attention," or "I am empowered by creating quality content for the Internet."
Some search for secret messages in her videos, and others want to discover more about Poppy's past, as if they're eager to prove she's not a robot. These intrepid investigators are wasting time, for they should be enjoying her work for what is. Just the way she plays with words in her videos is intriguing; she makes it sound as if she's testing them out for the first time, deciding how to arrange them. ("Do you like this hat I'm wearing? Do you like it? Do you like this hat?") She is as gentle as a haiku, capable of an almost eerie stillness; when she does move, it's the way a girl from space might if she'd studied our habits by watching Japanese music videos. She might dress as a bunny or a vampire, dance with a giant muppet, or spend six minutes lacing her always exotic shoes. She also does a robotic "Mary Had A Little Lamb." Why not?
Today, Poppy is in that precarious position where she'll either have an explosive radio hit, or will stay where she is, floating though the YouTube universe until her act wears thin. There's something wonderful about her, though. Video director and musician Titanic Sinclair may be the architect behind Poppy, but if he is her Pygmalian, he couldn't have asked for a better Galatea. Sinclair had previously tried a similar angle with a YouTube singer named Mars Argo - he also released his own Weezer sounding grunge-pop EP called I Have Teeth - but in Poppy, who is purportedly 23 but looks 14, he's found the perfect cyberspace Barbie princess. Sinclair shoots her in loving style, with lots of pastel blues and beige. She's usually alone, talking directly to the camera in a voice that may or may not be modulated through auto-tune. Sometimes it appears Poppy's words aren't perfectly in sync with her lips, which adds to her ethereal presence.
Like most alien visitors and pop stars, Poppy is a bit of a holy fool. She's so innocent in appearance, yet so uncannily weird, that interviewers tiptoe around her, not wanting to inadvertently upset her. When a recent podcast host asked her dumb questions about sex, she smartly deflected them with childlike answers. It was quite a performance. I almost wish she could've met Johnny Carson. Yet, I can't predict how long she'll last. Bowie dumped the spaceman gimmick after a couple years, and Numan, though still active, had a short shelf life in America. Is Poppy crafty enough to reinvent herself when her current persona is played out? Will her fans grow with her? Is there more to her than weirdness? A previous Poppy project, 3:36, is ambient music designed to help people sleep, which suggests she has more on her mind than, say, the typical American Idol winner.
As for Poppy.Computer, it's a highly listenable hybrid of 1980s MTV era dance music (Think "Walk Like an Egyptian, and "Our Lips Are Sealed") and modern Japanese pop, presented by a young female who claims to have been "created," not born. "Poppy is an object," she sings in "My Style." "Poppy is your best friend." But if she's an object, she's not unfamiliar with romance. In "Computer Boy," which features the album's tastiest hook, she sounds joyous when she sings, "I fell in love with the man of the future/I have a thing for my laptop computer/the only one that brings me joy/is my computer boy."
The best of Poppy, though, may be found in those 40-second videos on her YouTube channel, particularly one called "I Love You So Much," where she lovingly caresses an old television set (or is it a vintage computer?). Squatting next to the monitor in a long dress and what appear to be heavily lacquered red platform shoes that might've been worn by an extra in Cleopatra Jones, her tenderness recalls a prediction by Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, that we would all one day worship machinery. It's not especially groundbreaking, this image of the girl and her beloved TV set, and you'd be right if you said the whole idea is rather heavy-handed and obvious, but Sinclair has such a clear-eyed approach that we forgive his sophomoric ideas. Frame it nicely, use pretty colors, don't take up too much of our time, and you can effectively recycle just about anything. At such moments you realize that, whatever is being rehashed here, Poppy and Sinclair are up to something worthwhile - and no other recording artist has put social media to better use as a whistlestop campaign.
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