Poppy Says Grimes “Bullied” Her During The Making Of Their Song “Play Destroy”
This Halloween, YouTube performer and internet star Poppy released her second full-length album, Am I a Girl? One of its best songs, the brilliantly chaotic nu-metal/bubblegum mashup “Play Destroy,” included a noteworthy collaboration with Grimes, whose own fascination with dissonant pop sounds and the aesthetics of tech culture would appear to make for a natural combination. But in a new interview published today by Billboard, Poppy says their collaboration was anything but, accusing Grimes of “bullying” songwriters and misusing non-disclosure agreements:
“I was kind of bullied into submission by [Grimes] and her team of self-proclaimed feminists,” she says. “We planned the song coming out months ago, and she was preventing it. I got to watch her bully songwriters into signing NDA and not taking credit for songs that they were a part of. She doesn’t practice what she preaches. It’s really upsetting to work with a female that is very outward about a topic, but behind closed doors, it’s the complete opposite. It’s actually very disheartening to people that are actually feminists and supporters of other females.”
Grimes, who just released her own new single “We Appreciate Power” yesterday, has yet to respond to Poppy’s claims.
Other parts of Poppy’s interview suggest that she and Grimes have some shared views on the dystopian future of artificial intelligence. Grimes has described “We Appreciate Power” as “written from the perspective of a Pro-A.I. Girl Group Propaganda machine” and intended to make society’s “future General A.I. overlords” less likely to “delete your offspring.” Poppy told Billboard that she thinks modern smart devices are sucking data into the cloud and “using it to program the A.I. robots, and I think they are going to take over. … But you have to, I believe, surrender to them and embrace it, because when they get too powerful they’re just going to try to kill those people that tried to go against them.”
Spooky! Read Poppy’s full interview about Grimes, A.I., and the making of Am I A Girl? here.
This article originally appeared on Spin.