Who is Poppy?
It seems like no one has the same answer.
This YouTuber-turned-singer makes a sport out of mystery, but with the release of her
2020 album, I Disagree, the woman behind the persona is starting to take off her platinum
wig.
Here's the real-life story of Poppy.
According to New York magazine,
"Poppy prefers that you not imagine her as a person who existed before her digital public
life,"
This digital life began in 2014, when the very first Poppy-branded video hit YouTube.
From the start, Poppy’s team went to extraordinary lengths to erase all evidence of her personal
history.
But more recently, however, the star has become a bit more candid.
“I’m Poppy.”
Poppy’s actual name is Moriah Pereira, and she's not the android she portrays online.
Before Pereira became Poppy, she was a brunette who performed YouTube covers of popular songs,
just like scores of other YouTubers before her.
In a 2019 NME profile, the star publicly broke character for the first time and admitted
that she was raised in Nashville, where she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom before
moving to Los Angeles to pursue her career.
Today, she owns a Sphynx cat named Pi to keep her company.
“Because your soul is mine!”
In her 2019 NME profile, the singer admitted that she would intentionally isolate herself
from a lot of things when she was younger.
This included public school, where she was bullied for being skinny and quiet.
Poppy further explained,
"I didn't have a positive experience [at public school], I barely said any words, so that
kind of opened me up, in a way, to be the target of everyone's teasing."
Poppy ultimately withdrew from public school to be home-schooled, and her social life continued
to deteriorate.
The singer primarily studied alone in her bedroom using the internet to help her learn
everything she needed to know.
She said,
"The internet was my teacher."
“Thanks for watching my video, I love the internet so much.”
Poppy's 2020 album, I Disagree, garnered a glowing review from The Needle Drop, which
is a crowning achievement for any internet-raised musician.
Nonetheless, Poppy's childhood dream wasn't to become a singer, a YouTuber, or a Hollywood
celebrity.
She wanted to dance.
According to YouTube channel Before They Were Famous, the singer practiced dance for 11
years before she ever started working on her voice.
Her father was reportedly a drummer who toured with the Rockettes and Cyndi Lauper, and Poppy
dreamed of becoming a dancer in the famed troupe.
Poppy never realized her childhood dream, but you could say she did one better.
There aren't too many Rockettes gracing magazine covers or making some serious YouTube bank,
and she's allegedly worth between $1 million and $5 million.
According to Business Insider, Rockettes make less than $40,000 a year.
“It fits!”
According to NME, Poppy didn't tell her family that she signed her first major label record
deal.
In fact, she moved to Los Angeles without telling a soul after inking a contract under
the name “ThatPoppy”.
She told NME,
"I kept everyone in the dark because I didn't want anyone to get in the way.”
Strangely enough, it wasn't the record deal that changed Poppy's life.
Rather, she succeeded in spite of it, not because of it, explaining,
"I went through the circus at that label, the changing of the representatives or whatever,
and I was coming to find out I was actually just in a really bad deal."
Poppy ended up meeting her longtime collaborator, Titanic Sinclair, whose real name is Corey
Mixter, through a mutual friend not long after her move, and the pair began making YouTube
videos together against the wishes of her label.
She told NME,
"They were like, 'Hey, we don't think we should make these videos.
Why are you making these videos?'
I was like, 'Why are you working at a record label?!'"
“You need to stop worrying so much.”
Over the years, Poppy struggled to find the right label.
She claimed that labels acted like Titanic Sinclair was the person in charge, even though
they were true collaborators and she was responsible for a great deal of their vision.
She said in the NME interview,
"Not to go into gendering it and having it be about being male or female, but typically
in a [business situation] like that [people] would look at Titanic for the ideas and the
commands."
It wasn't just Poppy's first record deal that went sour.
The star said that her second deal - which was with Diplo's Mad Decent Records - wasn't
that great either.
She told NME,
"It wasn't really a functioning label, which I can say now.
It was more of a tax write-off.
There wasn't a lot of consistency going on there."
Since then, the artist has inked a deal with Sumerian Records, which is best known for
housing hard rock, metal, and screamo artists like Asking Alexandria, Circa Survive, and
Black Veil Brides.
“Your voice is really interesting.
Is that a special voice that you do for your on-camera appearances?”
“No.
.Is yours a special voice?”
“It kind of is.”
“Oh!”
In 2018, Titanic Sinclair was sued by his former girlfriend and collaborator, Mars Argo.
According to The Verge, the lawsuit claimed that Argo, whose real name is Brittany Sheets,
suffered, quote, "severe emotional and psychological abuse and manipulation" at the hands of Sinclair,
and that the producer-director created Poppy as a quote, "Mars Argo knockoff."
Argo also sued for copyright infringement.
So, was Poppy a Poppy-cat?
According to Wired, Argo dated Sinclair between 2008 and 2014, the same year they released
Delete Your Facebook, which was shot on a stark white background and has the same sort
of deadpan dialogue as Poppy's most famous works.
Later in 2014, Poppy released her first, very similar, video.
The similarities between the pair are noteworthy, though it's impossible to tell who actually
owns the intellectual property, if Sinclair was truly Argo's collaborator.
Wired reports that Poppy began wearing her brunette hair in a platinum bob - Argo's signature
hairstyle - when she started working with the director.
The lawsuit asserted that, at various points, both women posed in bathtubs, with blood dripping
from their lips, with bags of chips, and wearing bunny ears.
The lawsuit claimed that Poppy even wore a leopard print jacket belonging to Argo.
Both Poppy and Sinclair have denied Argo's claims.
It didn't take very long for Poppy to fire back against Mars Argo's lawsuit, but Poppy's
response forced her to metaphorically take off the platinum wig and shatter her robot-like
public persona.
In a series of now-deleted tweets, Poppy claimed that Argo was trying to gain publicity with
her lawsuit.
Poppy also revealed that she had her own history as a domestic abuse survivor and claimed Argo
was deliberately collaborating with her abuser, tweeting,
"[Argo] is well aware of the anguish I went through.
In an attempt to manipulate me psychologically, Ms. Sheets is now collaborating and maintaining
an ongoing relationship with the exact man who took advantage of me when I was young
and vulnerable, while at the same time naming me in a lawsuit with allegations of domestic
abuse."
Mars Argo's lawsuit launched a million conspiracy theories in the YouTuber realm about Poppy
and her origins.
Some fans believed the pair were connected because of something as seemingly insignificant
as the length of a video.
One of Sinclair's friends uploaded a Mars Argo video called Everybody Wants It All that
was 3 minutes and 36 seconds long; Poppy reportedly used the numbers 3:36 in multiple videos and
recorded an unreleased song called Guns & Gold, which repeatedly features the lyric, quote,
"everybody wants it all."
Poppy and Sinclair settled their lawsuit without revealing many details.
Instead, Poppy and Sinclair agreed to stay away from Argo, Sinclair had to destroy any
compromising photos he had of the singer, and they collectively agreed to keep any trash
talk private.
As of this video, Argo has all but disappeared.
The star has only tweeted once since announcing the settlement and has steered clear of Instagram.
“My past is riddled with mystery and confusion.”
If there ever were two artists who seemingly floated on the same bizarre wavelength, it'd
be Poppy and Grimes.
In an NME interview, Poppy revealed that they collaborated on two songs.
One of these was Play Destroy, which was released in 2018 on Poppy's second album, Am I a Girl?.
Shortly after the release, Poppy squashed the good vibes by telling Billboard that Grimes
was a bully.
She claimed she was, quote, "bullied into submission" by the Canadian songstress and
her, quote, "team of self-proclaimed feminists," who pushed back the song's release for months.
She said,
"I got to watch her bully songwriters into signing NDA[s] and not taking credit for songs
that they were a part of.
She doesn't practice what she preaches."
Grimes fired back in a public statement, accusing Poppy of leaking the song, saying,
"You dragged me into a disgusting situation and won't stop punishing me for not wanting
to be part of it."
This was likely a reference to the Mars Argo lawsuit, which was hitting headlines around
the same time.
The second collaborative track never saw the light of day, though fans suspect it might
have been Grimes' song We Appreciate Power.
Poppy completely reinvented herself on her third album, 2020's I Disagree, which is influenced
by metal music.
The artist has drawn comparisons to a range of popular metal acts, including Slipknot
and Japanese kawaii outfit Babymetal.
In fact, this version of Poppy might be more in line with the star's actual feelings and
tastes.
The YouTuber certainly had a lot to be angry about over the previous few years: the bad
record deals, the Mars Argo lawsuit, the dissolution of her partnership with Titanic Sinclair.
In an interview with NME, she revealed that she used her music to cope with these feelings,
saying,
"I try to channel all of my anger steam into my art and maintain some form of composure,
even when I feel I want to end everything,"
Poppy later clarified that by "end everything", she meant the entire world.
That might sound dark, but Poppy clearly has a flair for drama.
“What’s happening to me?
Is Poppy OK?”
For someone who may or may not be a robot and clearly owes her career to the internet,
Poppy sure seems to hate technology.
In an interview with NME, the star revealed that she doesn't trust tech like the Google
Home, which she once tried to smash in a video after it fed her incorrect information about
herself.
She also claimed that, quote, "social media is ruining everything," despite the fact that
her career has only just begun to exist outside of it.
Could it be that Poppy, a product of the internet, has always hated the internet?
She told NME,
"I'm trying to move backwards.
I'm trying to get rid of my technology.
In turn it's going to make it harder to get a hold of me - and my friends mad at me - but
it's OK."
“Young girl makes crazy video on YouTube.
What happens next, you won’t believe your eyes.”
Weeks before I Disagree's 2020 release, Poppy shocked the masses by announcing that she
had cut ties with her former creative partner, Titanic Sinclair.
In a Facebook post, she wrote,
"I was never 'an accomplice' to this person's past actions like some believe.
I was a person who suffered similar wrong doings as one of his former partners brought
to light.
This person glamorizes suicide and has used it many times in the past to manipulate me."
Poppy then went on to reveal that the last straw was when Sinclair allegedly messaged
fans before trying to hang himself with an item that belonged to her.
She wrote,
"These are tactics that he used for years.
This person lives an illusion that he is a gift to this Earth.
He weaved himself into a storyline, wanting the public to believe he was a puppeteer,
which is so far from the truth."
Poppy also claimed that she felt, quote, "trapped in a mess that [she] needed to dig [her] way
out of," and that Sinclair was allegedly using her former friends, quote, "as his next experiment"
- which seems a whole lot like Argo's allegations.
As of this video, Sinclair has not publicly spoken out, but he's removed most traces of
Poppy from his Instagram account.
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