Poppy ~ Church Outfit [2⊘23]

Poppy’s fans are devout, rabid, resolute, and legion, and for good reason. Poppy’s has been a singular life and a testament to the courage and willpower many of us strive for yet often fail to realize. Her fans are aware of the conviction with which she creates her art and understand her affable intensity. Deeper still, her art divines a defiant soul, cause célèbre of the endless gyrations and reimaginings riddling her enigmatic online career, to her fans’ frequent awe and delight.

“I feel like we’re very much in an era where everybody is competing with each other to be exactly the same and to be the most relatable.
And I think that’s very boring.”

Poppy prefers to be as underdefined as possible, stating her existence began with the birth of her Internet persona, that she is ageless, and even unclear whether she is a girl or boy (“it’s a spectrum“) being adorned with the requisite facial bone structure of a truly lovely feminine Adonis. Her chosen online personality speaks mostly stark phrases, often in the third person, and with a near-robotic intonation that fairly screams simpleton in opposition (see Die Antwoord). Says Poppy, “Poppy’s world is a magical place, and it’s the most free part of the entire universe.” Her most current iteration, an androidlike Marilyn Monroe in a Marilyn Manson guise, displays a love of darkness uncrafted and oft unveiled. She is brazenly intimate, wears it well, and knows it too.

Musician Poppy with blonde pigtails in a white poofy dress with a beand new sharp axe brandished over her shoulders

“I don’t think you need to be on the outside looking in;
I think you should enjoy the outside.”

Poppy has been candid about the bullying she endured as a youth in public school. Shoved down stairs, belittled, and bombarded with indignities she attributes to her slightness and oft-silent, otherwise soft-spoken manner. She eventually relented to homeschooling as a reprieve from the needless childish cruelty. Thusly, with such a background, bathed in today’s moonlight, one might happily cloak their innate individuality in exchange for a dark ingenue, a mental mask in lieu of the physical alternative other musicians have donned, not without its own devious appeal and intrinsic creativity.

“I don’t think I’d want to be in my body if I was repeating the same thing over and over again. I’m only competing with myself. I will continue to write the story until I get tired of the book. Then, I’ll write another one.”

Music video “Church Outfit” is the dressing at death’s door, sensuous and strangely perverse, it invites controversy and condemnation as a provocation to the ritual enlightenment borne beneath the dark, solitary confines of a nailed-down coffin lid. The accompanying music, an elastified scratchpad of captivatingly crunch-bouncy bass, drawn-and-quartered over veiled screams of confession and testament to one’s choice of vested accoutrements on death’s arrival. Feel free to “leave your body and soul at the door.“

“Life is a commercial for death
And you’re hypnotized by the advertisement”