Poppy recalls wanting to be a Rockette as a child and grew up dancing,[2] which she did for 11 years.[3] Her father was a drummer in a band,[4] the name of which remains unknown, and she recalls watching his band play when she was very young.
Poppy's YouTube channel was created on October 6, 2011, and her earliest video is from November 2014, an abstract skit called Poppy Eats Cotton Candy, directed by Titanic Sinclair. The videos are described by their producer Sinclair as "a combination of Andy Warhol's pop accessibility, David Lynch's creepiness, and Tim Burton's zany comedic tone".[4] The channel has been discussed by other YouTubers, including PewDiePie,[32] Social Repose,[33] Night Mind,[34] The Film Theorists,[35] and the Fine Brothers on their React series. She starred in an episode in which she reacts to children reacting to her videos.[36]
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.
Keep Googling and you’ll learn about her collaborator, Titanic Sinclair. He’s an LA-based artist known for making his own videos, which share Poppy’s minimalist aesthetic and opaque scripts. He directs everything on Poppy’s YouTube channel. “Ah, I see now,” you think. “It’s just a weird online art project orchestrated by this guy, a critique on the shallowness of pop stardom and YouTube celebrities.”
That makes sense. Kind of. But then you find a music video and hear Poppy sing. Maybe it’s something from Bubblebath, her 2015 EP, or her most recent track, “Computer Boy,” released May 19. Her music has appeared on Scream Queens, charted in the top 10 on Radio Disney, and been featured on Now That’s What I Call Music! 58. She’s also done ad campaigns for Sanrio and Steve Madden, and, recently, a Snapchat show for Comedy Central. Somehow, that all makes everything weirder.
Poppy’s fans seem to hold two conflicting opinions about her: that she can parody YouTubers and bubblegum pop stars and be venerated like the very celebrities she lampoons.
An hour or so has passed since you watched your first Poppy video. You’ve probably decided that, good music or not, she has wasted enough of your time. You’ll watch a funny cat video to scrub her kawaii nightmare fuel from your mind, check Facebook, and sign off your computer for the day.
But then, maybe a few days later, you come back to her YouTube channel. Something about the videos stuck with you; something about them disturbed you. Poppy is built to be mesmerizing. Hers is a new brand of celebrity at the nexus of one-off meme maker, legitimate pop star, and avant-garde artist. The more you learn about her, the harder it is to tear your eyes from your screen as she pushes you to follow, to comment, to subscribe. And so you do, hoping that maybe it will bring you one step closer to understanding her.
This is the magic of Poppy, a star for today’s internet, exquisitely designed to dig her pink fingernails into your brain.
But the question remains: Who is Poppy?
If you believe what she tells you, Poppy just materialized.
That’s not quite right. But we’ll get to that.
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 phone 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.