Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

A few weeks after giving that interview, as the overwhelming success of her single, “Apocalypse Dance,” and its accompanying thirteen-minute Alice in Wonderland — themed music video portended her stratospherically successful year, Molly Metropolis disappeared.

Molly was gone just as we were truly getting to know her. Five hit singles from her outrun electro — infused †and dance floor — centric debut Cause Célèbrety ‡gave Molly pop stardom and global name recognition. Her public presentation resembled Marilyn Monroe’s opaqueness disguised as translucence, before Marilyn died and was de-mystified. Like an Old Hollywood starlet with a name and backstory invented by a studio bigwig, Molly “seemed to invite you in, but then you realized you’ve had hours of conversation with her and you don’t really know anything about her.” §The only difference was that Molly made up her name herself. During a time when pop singers like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears cultivated down-to-earth public personalities and signed away their last shreds of privacy to MTV’s reality television factory, Molly wanted her persona to be like parties at Holly Golightly’s apartment: crowded and so fun you forget you never really spoke to the hostess. ǁ

After the premiere of the “Apocalypse Dance” music video, and amidst conflicts with her record label about her delayed second album Cause Apocalyptic , Molly Metropolis updated her Twitter account more frequently with pictures of her dance rehearsals and workout sessions. She retweeted fans and, in true Stars! — They’re-Just-Like-Us fashion, she grumbled about hangovers: “11-11-09, 2:16pm @MollyMetro Stayed up late celebrating the ‘Apocalypse Dance’ video premiere. Too. Much. Red. Wine.” She also Tweeted quotations from her favorite philosopher, Guy Debord, often unattributed: “11-16-09, 5:33 a.m. @MollyMetro I’ve written much less than most people who write; I’ve drunk much more than most people who drink.” Sometimes she altered Debord’s words to meet her own needs, for example, changing, “Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit,” to “11-14-09, 4:25 p.m. @MollyMetro People are told they have a choice between love and a garbage disposal unit. I say fuck love, fuck garbage, EAT POP INSTEAD.” After popular celebrity gossip website Oh No They Didn’t posted a story about record execs cutting some of her touring perks after she badmouthed them to Rolling Stone, she tweeted from the first page of De-bord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle : “12-03-09, 10:22 a.m. @MollyMetro I obviously can speak with complete freedom. Above all, I must take care to not give too much information to just anybody.”

Although most of her fans didn’t identify the real writer of some of her Tweets, savvy readers could’ve picked up some revealing hints about Molly’s inner life from her choice of quotation sources. Gawker.com wrote a short piece titled “Is Molly Metropolis a Secret Guy Debord Fan?” The answer, of course, was yes.

Elle put Molly on their December 2009 cover. She returned the favor by giving interviewer Eliza L. Pinkett her most revealing interview to that point. She told Pinkett stories from her childhood, teetering on the edge of talking about racism without fully committing to a serious dialogue: “Growing up, I was very theatrical and dramatic and strange, and I had this gigantic mane of wild, really thick hair. Most of my friends were white girls with thin hair, they didn’t know how to help me look good. It was the nineties so everyone was trying to have that really straight Jennifer [Aniston] look.” She also talked about the difficulties of dating as a superstar, “What I don’t understand are the guys who don’t want to be with a successful woman. It’s so sexist! It’s like, don’t they want to be with the best version of me? The one that sells hundreds of thousands of records and gets to spend every night with thousands of my Pop Eaters? If a guy can’t deal with that, then he’s the one that has a problem, not me.”

Molly couldn’t keep Debord out of the Elle interview, explaining fame to Pinkett in Debordian terms: “In the past, being a pop star meant specializing in the ‘seemingly lived,’ superficially representing one personality type or another. Like, one pop star is the pretty virginal one, and one is the wild child, and one is the unlucky-in-love one. But I’m not superficial, I’m not a type, I’m a woman! I don’t want my fans to get some simulation of life from watching me, I want them to listen to my music and feel that it describes, and improves, their own life. I want them to identify with me, but also know that I’m my own person.” a

By the time the Elle profile was published, on the eve of her disappearance, Molly Metropolis’s following had become increasingly passionate and fervent. The creativity and ferocity she devoted to what would’ve otherwise been standard pop songs caught the attention of “highbrow” critics and thinkers, as well as teenage pop devotees. She insisted on her and her fans’ non-conformity with society, even as she sold millions of records, as music critic Tesfaye Likke wrote in his controversial article “Eulogy for Molly Metropolis—2 Years Later”: “Molly made her ‘Pop Eaters’ out to be more punk than the mall-punks they grew up with, more rebellious than the pseudo — Che Guevara disciples they sat next to in Econ 101, and more revolutionary than all the kids living in filth at Occupy Wall Street. She created a scene where people could claim non-conformity by listening to music made by the most popular artist in the country. And she made that paradox feel logical. Her inexplicably powerful charisma trumped better judgment. That quality is rare in a musician, and hasn’t been seen since Kurt Cobain took his own life.” b

When Molly Metropolis vanished during her massive Apocalypse Ball tour, she left 152 dates unperformed, costing her record company upwards of twenty-five million dollars and disappointing thousands of fans who had given her their hearts, souls, and money. At the time of her disappearance, Molly Metropolis had more than forty million Twitter followers, and fan sites by the hundreds. The abrupt end of millions of parasocial relationships became the greatest and most frequently broadcast loss. “She was a part of my actual life!!!” a typical (though with a marginally greater grasp of grammar and spelling) YouTube commenter exclaimed. “I’m going to miss her because I really really felt like she was talking to me — she answered a question from my twitter in an interview once and it was so amazing.” cMolly often Tweeted her exact location, providing a link to a map with a drop-pin, making her physical person even more present in her fans’ realities than all other pop culture phenoms before her.

After Molly disappeared, a few kooks came out of the woodwork to offer elaborate explanations. A popular Illuminati conspiracy theory website called The Vigilant Citizen weighed in with their particular brand of insanity. On August 12, 2009, the website had published a long article called “Molly Metropolis: An Illuminati Puppet,” which claimed Molly was a mind-controlled puppet and that every time she posed for a picture with her hair over her eye (which, admittedly, happened a lot in her early press photos and the music videos for her Cause Célèbrety singles) she was making herself into the All-Seeing Eye. The Vigilant Citizen wrote: “Those who have passed Illuminati Symbolism 101 know that the All-Seeing Eye is probably its most recognizable symbol.”

According to The Vigilant Citizen, Molly Metropolis disappeared because her “Delta” or “killer” programming had been activated and she completed her “final Illuminati operation,” then vanished to hide the evidence of her actions. dWith the story, The Vigilant Citizen ran an early publicity photo with Molly dressed in a black T-shirt with a deep V-neck; she holds the back of her hand up to her left eye to reveal the tattoo of an eye inside a triangle that Molly has on her palm. Needless to say, the police never investigated “Delta programming/evil Illuminati mission” as a possible explanation for her disappearance.