Who is Poppy? Meet the YouTube pop star who may not exist
Who or what is Poppy?
She’s one of the biggest YouTubers around, with an odd backstory and even odder videos. But with a new short film released on the premium YouTube Red service today, and following a global tour including a sell-out gig in London before Christmas, you should become acquainted with the performance art popster.
Why is she famous?
Poppy's videos have been viewed more than 250 million times in the three years since she posted her first still visible YouTube video, Poppy Eats Cotton Candy (2.46 million views). Nearly 14 million of those views are of a single video, I’m Poppy, where she repeats her name for 10 minutes without stopping – which may have attracted the growing autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) community, which hunts out relaxing videos that some say put them in a trance-like state of serenity.
I don’t get it.
Most people don’t – and that’s the point. Poppy’s deliberately obtuse, a classic performance artist who has created an outlandish alternate persona in the vein of Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie and Lady Gaga. She frequency references death and the occult in her videos, usually shot in front of a stark white background, in an attempt to blur people’s perceptions of her even further. She’s in on the joke, though: in interviews, she sometimes refers to herself in the third person.
But who is she really?
She’s a 23-year-old singer from Boston, called Moirah Rose Periera, who moved to Los Angeles at the age of 15, performed at various YouTube conventions between the years of 2012 without much success, before partnering up with director Titanic Sinclair, real name Corey Michael Mixter.
Oh good, another fake name.
Stick with it: it’s good. Poppy and Titanic Sinclair reinvented Periera’s entire style: she became an odd, surrealist, robotic, platinum blonde pop star who does outlandish things like interviewing basil plants and makes friends with a talking mannequin, who keeps reappearing in her videos. Though no one really knows what’s going on, the best guess is that Poppy is a piece of internet-based performance art; a collaboration between Periera and Titanic Sinclair (who has previously used YouTube to create odd viral characters).
Poppy’s persona even confused her manager, Nick Groff. “I found myself confused,” he told Wired Magazine. “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.”
Who likes her?
It’s a combination of pre-teen girls and older men, who like watching videos of attractive women. They call themselves Poppy Seeds – again, poking fun at the trend of naming your fans as a collective group. They’re obsessive (creating avatars of their idol in video games so they can play as her) and also notoriously picky about their fellow fans, laying down a complicated set of rules that fans are required to follow, like a religion – which, coincidentally, one mega-fan has created: The Gospel of Poppy.
Will I like her?
Who knows? Performance art is a bit like Marmite: you’ll either love it or hate it.
What’s the point?
To keep you watching. YouTube prioritises “watch time” (the amount of time a viewer continues to watch a video) when deciding what is a success on the platform, and Poppy’s oddball antics keep you watching just to see what weird idea comes next. There’s also an odd conspiracy theory among some of her younger, more dedicated fans, that some of her videos and songs are computer generated, like a Westernised version of Hatsune Miku.
Who’s Hatsune Miku?
A computer-generated pop star who is one of the biggest musicians in Japan. But that’s a topic for a whole other time.
Are there hidden depths to Poppy I’m not seeing?
Yes: to some, she’s also a clever commentary on the culture of modern celebrity, particularly skewering YouTube. Her videos are peppered with all the common tropes of YouTubers: to like, comment and subscribe, and to keep watching. Wired Magazine said: “Hers is a new brand of celebrity at the nexus of one-off meme maker, legitimate pop star, and avant-garde artist.”
Why should I care?
Because YouTube is the future, and your kids are watching it. More than 1.5 billion people regularly use YouTube, and it’s rapidly approaching television as the biggest interest of our time. Indeed, younger viewers are more likely to spend time watching YouTube than they are traditional television. And besides, Poppy’s invading all aspects of culture. Her music (she’s released an album called Poppy.Computer, which included a world tour with a sell-out date in London, and her songs have appeared on the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation CDs) is becoming increasingly popular.
YouTube has even given her a premium, paid-for series on its YouTube Red service. I’m Poppy (not to be confused with the 10-minute video of her repeating her name over and over) is a 24-minute video that is released today. YouTubers’ attempts to move into longer, more traditional forms of television have found mixed results so far (Miranda Sings, one of YouTube’s most idiosyncratic stars, didn’t successfully make the transition to a full-length sitcom funded by Netflix, and Grace Helbig, one of the biggest names in vlogging, struggled when given her own traditional television show), so you’ll have to judge for yourself whether it’s any good or not.
How can I watch?
You can watch I’m Poppy on YouTube Red, or can watch her short-form videos on her normal YouTube channel, thatPoppyTV.
