“I want my head frozen. Samantha, will you tell the financial advisor to set aside a quarter million?” blackbear directs this request into the gaggle of friends and employees, both full-time and hired-for-the-day, gathered around his pool table, where a tattoo artist is setting up a traveling station. It’s a rare day off in Los Angeles, and his three-story house is abuzz: there’s a gangly photographer documenting Bear’s life, a couple artists he’s developing, friends zoning out to a Kardashian marathon, a publicist in chaperone mode, a vet who’s popped in to tend to Pocky, his Shinbu Inu puppy, a few people no one I ask really knows. Den mother slash day-to-day manager Samantha seems to have a lot on her hands.

“Groupies don’t want my babies. They want my blood,” he says, moving onto his balcony to indulge his pack-a-day cigarette habit. He has a way of locking eyes with you, ducking his head and granting you this little closed-mouth smile that is boyish and endearing, and I understand why one of his former girlfriends is having, according to him, a hard time letting go.

blackbear is so famous that he has to move because both TMZ and teen girls found out that he lives in this unassuming neighborhood. Now, they’re parked across the street taking photos of him and pitching stuff across his gate, respectively. Both, he says, are “borderline stalking” him.

These are the conversations you have when you are famous, and blackbear is very famous. The 26-year-old singer, songwriter and producer is so famous that when you google “blackbear,” he—not the actual animal—is the first result. He’s so famous that hiring a private chef to whip up “grownup kid food” like the buffet of tater tots, grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and “dirt” pie with gummy “worms” warming on the kitchen island is nowhere close to the most famous-person thing he does all day.

Neon pink cargo shorts and a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “Ketamine” swim on his slight frame. The sun glints off his rose-glitter Gucci Ace sneakers, which match his pink Gucci cap. Lots of tattoos, some self-inked, snake across his body, but only one is currently visible, a Cubism-inspired face with the caption, “sry i suck.” He’s gazing across the street with a faraway look in his eye, scanning the horizon for a TMZ van and wondering if photos of him and me will surface on the blog tomorrow. Okay, I’m the one doing that.

It is. One of the weirdest things about fame in 2017 is the sheer amount of people who are simultaneously famous and yet completely unknown (just browse Instagram’s “Public Figures” category). In this distinctly American era of being famous for nothing—as long as you’re ultimately making money for a large corporation, long live the entrepreneur!—there have never been so many famed, unrecognizable faces.

Which is why blackbear’s fame is impressive. When girls were fainting over Elvis, it was due in large part to his bump-n-grind hips, blue-black waves and sultry baritone. But the supply couldn’t keep up with their squealing demand. Now, an artist like blackbear has a huge array of competition—like Justin Bieber, for whom he co-wrote “Boyfriend,” the 2012 song that secured his retirement when he was just 21 years old. Having grown up an artist, however, blackbear wasn’t content to stay in songwriting rooms, and the same year, he released his debut EP Foreplay and mixtape Sex, a pair of earnest, overprocessed, pop-tinged projects. There was magic in his first full-length, Deadroses. Released on Valentine’s Day 2015, it spawned two blockbuster singles, the sparse, twinkling “idfc,” which has racked up almost 30 million plays on Soundcloud, and the rock-lite, G-Eazy-featuring “90210,” which has nearly 15 million plays.

Calling him prolific is an understatement. In the two years since Deadroses, he’s formed the alt-R&B duo Mansionz with frequent collaborator Mike Posner and a production collective called Bear Trap Records, dropped a handful of projects, and received spins on Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat. This summer, he signed a ten million dollar distribution deal with Interscope Records and announced both an opening slot on Fall Out Boy’s autumn tour and his fourth full-length album as blackbear, Cybersex, which arrives on his birthday, November 27. “do re mi,” a clever, icy breakup single from his last studio album, this spring’s Digital Druglord, reached number 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is in radio rotation, finally giving him mainstream exposure. But he’s not too concerned with that sort of thing: The earworm has more than 113 million streams on Spotify, while its video with Gucci Mane has over 35 million views (go ahead, try shaking “Do, re, mi, fa, so fuckin’ done with you” out of your head). Speaking of numbers, good luck finding a song on his Soundcloud with less than a million plays.

It’s surprising, then, that he says music is not his primary means of making money. “Music’s a hobby to me. I have stocks and bitcoins, I consult for things and whatever, I dress girls for Coachella. I only wanna put out a couple more albums,” he says. “My goal is to make the world feel something, whether it’s happy or sad or anything, it’s all really the emotions of the world, and I feel like a true troll. My goal in life is to be the ultimate troll.”