Once she and Berliner had completed The Ghost Network, Molly stayed in Chicago to work with her General Council and write, produce, and record songs for Cause Apocalyptic. Although none of the songs on the album had been officially released before, at least three of the tracks that ultimately made it onto Cause Apocalyptic stemmed from previously leaked early Molly Metropolis demos. Those three tracks reworked for her new album include “Lost,” “Beneath the Pavement,” and “Bang Bang.”
In Chicago, Molly fell into a creative routine. She woke up midmorning and after a long workout with her personal trainer, she went to her studio space to meet with the members of the General Council. Everyone assembled around lunchtime. Sometimes Molly was social, eating, talking, and drinking wine with her friends and collaborators. Sometimes she shut herself up in one of her private recording rooms, blocked off the windows, and wrote her lyrics in isolation. She shared the themes she was developing, as well as some snippets of lyrics and melody, which the other members of the General Council used to begin designing stage sets and developing marketing strategies. Parker started choreographing the “Apocalypse Dance” music video before Molly had even finished the song. The choreography involved a lot of leaps and sudden drops to the floor.
In the early evenings, the General Council had “family dinner.” Molly required that every member of the G.C. attend at least two family dinners a week, and she preferred when everyone attended all of them. The dinners were catered; the food was paid for by SDFC. Most nights, all the Council members met around the large wooden dinner table. While they ate fish, salad, and quinoa (Molly had gained a few pounds and was on a strict diet and a directive from the label to slim), they discussed the aesthetic focus of the new album and the tour that would support it. Everyone was invited to offer suggestions, but Molly’s final word was law.
While Molly was developing Cause Apocalyptic, she also communicated extensively with noted fashion designer Johan Van Duncan and his assistant, Angela Sebastian-Hay to discuss costuming for her music videos and live shows. Van Duncan reportedly sent Molly early sketches of the sculpted platform stilettos and the “distressed” metallic-green-rhinestone and mirror-glass encrusted body suit she wore in the “Apocalypse Dance” video. Molly visited Van Duncan’s studio, tried on outfits, and often socialized with the designer. After returning from visits with Van Duncan — who committed suicide on February 10, 2010, just over a month after Molly disappeared — Molly reported to her dancers that Van Duncan’s mood was “stunningly creative, but equally stunningly dark.”
In September 2008, SDFC flew Molly and the whole General Council to Los Angeles to record the album under the watchful eye of her Executive Producer, Darren J. Horner. At six feet four inches and three hundred pounds, Horner was an intimidating presence with an unflinching work ethic. Crack his shell, though, and he has a big smile and easy laugh. He made his name nurturing Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera’s careers. Along the way, he developed a reputation for working well with difficult personalities. SDFC tapped him to produce Molly Metropolis’s second record because they thought he had the wherewithal to take her over-the-top aesthetic and highbrow aspirations and shape them into a consumable pop product, without betraying the essential “Molly-ness” her Pop Eaters knew and loved.
To prepare himself for Molly, Horner ingested a steady stream of ’80s synth-pop like Duran Duran and the Pet Shop Boys, as well as contemporary examples of synthwave or “Outrun Techno” like Twin Shadow’s album Confess. He also prepared himself for a battle. Horner had heard rumors that Molly Metropolis was headstrong and argumentative, so he expected to have to reel her in. Molly defied Horner’s expectations; she was a collaborative worker and as docile as a pussycat.
Impressed with Molly’s professionalism and satisfied by her obedience, Horner never guessed he was being played. Molly’s friends at SDFC had warned her that Horner was a “big personality” and Molly decided the best way to work with him was to make him think he was making every decision. She manipulated him subtly throughout the entire recording process, fighting quietly for her aesthetic voice to shine through the studio production. At the same time, Horner was an experienced and adept enough producer to understand when the studios had caught lightning in a bottle. He knew Molly’s success primarily had to do with her distinctive point of view. Of course, under the costumes and rhetoric, Molly wrote straightforward pop songs. In 2008, Molly was a hard sell because her songs were considered “dance,” not Top 40, and SDFC’s marketing team stumbled a bit while pushing a non-white artist, who wasn’t already a star, outside of the “urban” demographic. But by the time she and Horner were recording her second album, she’d remade the Top 40 in her image.g
After slowly cobbling together her first album with SDFC producers and ex-boyfriend Davin Karl, with whom she had a terrible, prolonged breakup, Molly wanted the production process for Cause Apocalyptic to go smoothly. It did, but the post-production process didn’t follow suit.
Laurence Rappaport, the president of A&R at SDFC and Molly’s personal handler within the company, wanted to release the eight songs as a second disc of bonus tracks, tacked onto a re-release of Cause Célèbrety, scheduled to drop on November 18. Molly thought the price of a two-disc set would be too expensive for some of her fans; she also insisted that the new tracks were a thematic and emotional step forward for her. Putting them under the name Cause Célèbrety wouldn’t make sense, artistically, because the music wasn’t about “Celebrity” anymore, it was about dancing ’til the end of the world. Rappaport thought the album would sell better with the name Cause Célèbrety. He cared about her “artistic vision,” but he cared more about engineering a hit record. He thought the music business, and his own career, couldn’t afford splashy failures. He thought Molly was still too new, and the album-buying public wasn’t ready for a second album and a second set of singles. Radio DJs were still playing “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” on Saturday nights like it was a newly released track.
Rappaport had other problems with Molly. He didn’t like the way she conducted herself in interviews. He thought she talked too much about racism and not enough about her hair. He wanted her to pose for more “candid” photos; he wanted her to ditch the wig and weaves and let her hair “be natural.” Molly told him in an e-mail that she wanted to “perform her own hair.” He asked her not to refer to herself as a feminist, and instead espouse feminist viewpoints without ever using the word; whenever Molly said “feminist,” she passive-aggressively apologized to Rappaport for “letting her brain show.” Molly thought she was smarter than Rappaport, and that angered him most of all.
Rappaport and Molly fought dramatically. They kept it out of texts and mostly out of e-mails, out of anything that could be hacked and leaked, but their phone conversations were loud and aggressive. Nix had never seen Molly truly angry with someone before Rappaport. For Molly, her fight over the release of Cause Apocalyptic was the fight of her life; they weren’t arguing about what to do with the eight tracks, they were fighting about Molly’s whole career. “It’s the only real war I’ve ever fought in my life,” she told Nix. “This is for me and about me. I feel like I’m being born, fighting my way out of the womb, and Laurence, he’s not even a person, he’s just the narrow canal I’m fighting my way out of. The baby always makes it out. Or else it dies.”