POPPYCOCK (2017)
POPPYCOCK
Poppycock is the first-ever music project from Pop Hitchcock, originally released on SoundCloud in 2017 when he was just 16–17 years old. A 22-track collection of joke rap, relentless wordplay, and youthful absurdity, the album marked the beginning of what would eventually become the Pop Hitchcock creative catalog.
The project features appearances from many of Pop’s friends from Neosho High School, most notably on “Porpoise Posse,” a chaotic collaborative track that brought together a collection of the people surrounding him at the time. Though deliberately unserious—and occasionally extremely inappropriate—the album was driven by an early obsession with lyricism, internal rhymes, punchlines, and boom-bap production.
The process itself was completely DIY. Pop Hitchcock wrote all of the songs first, then went searching for beats to match what he had written before recording the material on a homemade setup at AC Marion’s house, where the tracks were also mixed. There was no established studio, professional infrastructure, or polished release strategy—just a teenager writing constantly and figuring out how to turn those ideas into music.
Despite its rough beginnings, Poppycock quickly found an audience. After being uploaded to SoundCloud in 2017, the album accumulated more than 65,000 streams and became reasonably well known throughout the surrounding area. What started as a collection of jokes and experiments among high school friends unexpectedly became the first major step in Pop Hitchcock’s creative career.
The album is undeniably a product of its age. Its humor is immature, its subject matter can be inappropriate, and much of its identity comes from the reckless creativity of being 16 years old with a microphone and nothing to lose. But beneath the jokes was an artist beginning to discover the importance of writing, rhythm, rhyme, collaboration, and creating a world of his own.
Poppycock wasn’t supposed to be the beginning of anything.
It just happened to be where everything began.