Pop-metal star Poppy showed support for Britney Spears and called out the music industry’s predatory behaviour in a new interview.
In a new interview with The Forty Five, pop-metal star Poppy called out the industry’s predatory behaviour and showed support for Britney Spears’ amidst the star’s controversial conservatorship battle.
Speaking about her own musical journey, the star explained the industrial logic behind signing young stars who might be easier to manipulate.
“There’s such an ideal for people at record labels to sign people that are very young, ‘cos they don’t have a ton of confidence, and they’re very easy to prey upon, to mould, and to shape,” she explains.
Taking her own example, she continued: “My parents were very uninvolved in anything that I had relating to music, and it actually worked in my favour to some degree [because] I didn’t have somebody pushing me to sign. That’s the unfortunate thing about the music industry,” she says, “it’s made up of a bunch of predatory men.”
The star, who was nominated for a Grammy Award for her single ‘I Disagree’ — which calls out authoritarian figures in the upper echelons of the music industry — also said that the current conversation around Britney Spears’ conservatorship resonated with her as well.
“When I think back to that time, I think of it as being very dark, very sad, very depressing,” she says of her own experiences of signing with a major label at 17, as opposed to the oft-reported 20 years of age.
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“I was very stuck. Nobody helped me. Somehow, I was able to get out, but I signed a very bad deal with very bad people. It’s really sad how predatory the industry is, and I’m glad the Britney story is shedding a light on some things. It’s terrible she has to even go through that.”
In 2019, she parted ways with her longtime collaborator Titanic Sinclair. Though she didn’t name him in her statement — released on social media — she called out ‘manipulative patterns’ of behaviour during her time making music.
““I met this person at a young age and things were seemingly good for a while until echoes from his past were too loud to ignore.” she wrote at the time. “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.”
You can read more about this over at the Pop Observer.
Check out ‘Her’ by Poppy:
