Cutting Ties With The Dark Side of The Music Industry: Poppy

Many musicians finds themselves in a tough spot where they are told what to do and they a deprived of their creativity to an extense that everything begins to fall apart in terms of emotions and aspirations, but some artists have managed to cut ties with these devils of the music industry and made their way into an honest succesful career, one of the most recent is Poppy.

Poppy’s career went from being an internet pop star meme, to an honest artist that looks back happy of not being tied to a persona anymore.

She says:

I’m leaving it for the listener to decide what genre it is. [When] we went into the process of making the album, we just wanted ultimate freedom and no rules. I feel like we accomplished that.

Poppy

That is what is the most gratifying thing for Poppy during the making of this album, as if it were the first piece of music that was purely satisfying her creative demands and nothing more.

When asked about her previous team’s opinions on her creative decisions she said:

I think they didn’t understand [the art], but they pretended to understand it because they thought it was cool. But they actually didn’t understand that they were the exact things I was talking about. As far as the [music] industry as a whole goes, I don’t want to give it too much credit, but it definitely inspires a lot of what Titanic and I create. I think from past experiences with past teams that I have worked with, I found a lot of inspiration for this record. Specifically, my song “BLOODMONEY” was like an 11th hour song.

Poppy

However it ended up being more than just some people she worked with. Not long ago she parted ways with Titanic Sinclair, which was her partner in her music career, and made a strong statement in which she claimed that he was very “manipulative patterns”. “I was trapped in a mess that I needed to dig my way out of – and like I always do, I figured out how to handle it,” 

In the end the album is a very interesting proposal that comes from very strong feelings, and it makes us wonder, how many more artists are bound to a world where they don’t belong?

The album as a whole is just about not stepping to anyone and disagreeing with people in positions of power and not accepting “no” for an answer or “you can’t.” And sometimes when people tell you [that], or at least when I’m told that I can’t, it makes me want to have it more. It’s all about burning down the music industry in a way and stepping out of any box that anyone might have tried to lock me up inside. The message is empowerment, not gender specific. Just empowerment.

Mirroring Black Mirror

There is an episode in the Netflix’s Series “Black Mirror” that tackles this issue about the music industry exploiting an artist, and it’s impossible not to see some similarities with real artists such as Poppy. In the episode, Ashley O played by Miley Cyrus is a very famous pop singer that is only being used for the purpuses of other people, up to a point where the people behind her career believe they no longer need her as a person, just her mind in order to use her compositions and make the necessary adjustments for a pop audience.

Ashley O’s real personality is much more honest and sad than her ideal look that is being sold. While it’s very literal and on the nose, it’s very real.