Fluxblog
November 1st, 2017 12:41am

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Poppy “My Style”

Poppy’s YouTube channel is an amazing piece of deadpan pop art that’s hilarious, ominous, mesmerizing, confusing, cute, and unnerving all at once. It’s a bit hard to explain – sometimes it’s modern dada, sometimes it’s a biting parody of the cult of personality, and sometimes it’s just straight-up funny. It’s always beautiful, but the aesthetic is deliberately sterile and surreal. The tone is somehow both serene and anxious. There’s a cloying sweetness to the character, but it’s undermined by Poppy’s vacant affect and the constant suggestion that this whole thing is a cult and you’re in danger of getting brainwashed and indoctrinated. There’s a lot of potent ideas in the mix here, but it’s all so off-kilter that it never comes off as a didactic critique. Mostly it’s just bizarre and fun.

Poppy’s music is just as clever and well-crafted as her videos. This actually took me by surprise – I’ve enjoyed the videos for a while, but usually skipped the songs because I figured they’d be kinda flimsy and less interesting than the sketches. I was very wrong. The songs on Poppy.Computer are consistently catchy and fun, and you don’t need to have ever seen a Poppy video to enjoy it. It certainly helps if you’re into artists deliberately fucking with you, though.

The lyrics play the same head games as the videos, but whereas many of the videos are maddeningly oblique, there’s more of a wink in the songs. “My Style,” maybe the best track on the record, is where she lays out the basic ideas: Her aesthetic embraces random contradictions, she’s a product, she loves you, she will destroy you. Truly, no one has ever sounded cuter while threatening to break your neck.

Buy it from Amazon.

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