IN DEFENSE OF HALSEY'S ALBUM, "THE GREAT IMPERSONATOR"

sorry to this guy who works at pitchfork i'm sure we'd have fun at the club or something

Hilma af Klint, “Series Dove XIV”, 1915

I’ve loved Halsey’s work since they were performing songs from their first EP, Room 93. I have this vivid memory of being in high school and following a lesbian’s mostly-Steven-Universe-fanblog where she would reblog these videos of Halsey in these tiny venues, long blue hair whipping as they wailed out the lyrics to “Hold Me Down”. My memory is worse than ever in specific ways these days, but I clearly remember them posting shit like i’m going to buy a halsey ticket idgaf anymore and i’m so horny for halsey i can’t breathe. Does this mean I’m biased towards Halsey? I mean, yeah, probably in ways I can’t even perceive, despite my best efforts to be objective here, but I also have been along for the Halsey ride for around ten years of my life, and they’ve made plenty of work that I’ve felt lukewarm about, or had to warm up to in general. The Great Impersonator is one of those pieces: I didn’t love the initial singles and was deeply missing the grandeur and the rage of their previous album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, which I think is one of the albums of the decade, if we want to make sweeping statements. This is, apparently, going to be an essay full of SWEEPING STATEMENTS! This is definitely an essay about EARNESTNESS! Why are we so afraid of earnestness? Of being embarrassed? Of saying that an album is cool to us, when it’s by a young millennial “popstar” who once wrote the song “New Americana”? This is not an in-depth taking-apart of music reviews (or even Pitchfork) as a whole, but it is about this Pitchfork review for The Great Impersonator that just came out. I’ve been side-eyeing Pitchfork for a while, specifically when it comes to their reviews of “uncool” popstars who are trying interesting things. A lot has changed these past few years in terms of pop music criticism, but don’t think I don’t remember how they reviewed Charli XCX back in 2017! They gave the Vroom Vroom EP 4.5/10. Remember that? I’m like, THE VROOM VROOM EP? A monumental moment in pop music because of its unique production by SOPHIE? We wouldn’t have brat without Vroom Vroom, self-admitted by Charli herself. And, god, I know what I sound like, okay. Forgive me for the stan lingo, for the shocked frustration when it’s just pop music, or whatever. Or- well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. Again, I’m diving into earnestness. I actually really don’t mind it. Maybe you do. Maybe that’s your problem. I’m not here to convince anyone to like Halsey, and I’m not sure who this essay is even for, really. But maybe that’s something.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about how Halsey is more deeply entrenched in what it means to be a late 90s/early 2000s baby than most big popstars of the moment. They created their career not just on the Internet, but on Tumblr, specifically, and these days when they interact with stans, I feel this energy emanating from them that they still find it strange to be where they are. Not that they aren’t confident, or that I sense weakness or something; perhaps it’s that many of their songs still are about grappling with the fact that they once wanted fame as a way to escape and then got it, somehow. They don’t seem to believe (within their lyrics, at least) that they have any sort of special talent, and instead believe all at once that they’re just lucky but not lucky, that they’ve worked hard but not really, that it’s all going to end but that it’s all going to last forever, that they’re hot shit but never going to be as cool as the people who have it come naturally to them. These oxymoronic tendencies in the face of art and fame are what make Halsey’s work so compelling, in my opinion. They are at the crux of what they write about. I, to tell you the truth, find this incredibly relatable.

I tend to like things about fame and others’ perception of you, so perhaps it’s just my taste, but I think it’s great. I also think that The Great Impersonator takes this all a step further and directly deconstructs what people want from them as an artist while showcasing their skills. See, the thing I hate about the Pitchfork review for the album is that the writer is very convinced that Halsey is a bad songwriter, even though they begrudgingly say that she has her good moments. When discussing the aforementioned oxymorons of Halsey’s work, they write, “This kind of skewed self-perception is interesting, but Halsey is not necessarily deft enough in singer-songwriter mode to pull off a nuanced exploration of it.” I disagree! I feel that this stuff is very nuanced, actually! I think that to write about these complex feelings that happen all at once is a pretty hard thing to handle. I could argue that Halsey just makes their craft and self-analysis seem effortless in ways people don’t notice, and so occasionally the struggles that bubble to the surface can sometimes come off as untrue, because she’s created this expectation. Does that make sense? Halsey’s not really allowed to make bad songs, not by herself or her brand or by pop culture at large; I can’t point out any song of hers that is truly bad, in my opinion, though I’m sure the Pitchfork reviewer has many on hand. I also think she’s just genuinely really fucking good. I think that we take that sort of pop music writing for granted: these natural, flowing song structures and production styles that she slips into so easily. In the song “Only Living Girl in LA,” Halsey sings:

My special talent isn't writing, it's not singing

It's feeling everything that everyone alive feels every day

I think about these lines a lot. I’m not just being nice when I say that Halsey is very good at writing and singing. I don’t care if you’ve seen the video of her singing in the mall or whatever. Listen to her catalog and get back to me. Her vocal skills are great on this recent album. And I don’t think any other artist could create The Great Impersonator, or any of her previous albums, for that matter. I admit to valuing unique voice over other skills in art, but I always think about Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross saying that when Halsey sent over the demos for If Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, they "learned [that they] were very well-constructed songs, and incredibly well-written lyrics and melody...” I found this one where they say, at around 2:30, that “the one thing they didn’t change was lyrics or melody” when they were producing the album. So there’s that. Not that I feel that these two men should be the ones who say whether Halsey is skilled or not, but more on that later. I agree with the Pitchfork review saying Halsey’s “a great curator”, but they immediately (kind of condescendingly!) add that they’re also an “excellent singles artist”, which I feel like is true but is not the truest. I don’t feel that Halsey’s singles are their strongest work at all, and though they have obvious talent for writing quote unquote radio hits, I feel that when I tell friends to listen to Halsey, they frustratingly bring up those songs as the examples as to why they can’t. I personally am over the idea that hit songs can’t be, like, artistically good, but it’s a sentiment that’s there for a lot of people, especially when a lot of radio hits are admittedly vague and “safe”.

I’ve also been thinking about that last line (“It’s feeling everything that everyone alive feels every day”) very often in particular, because, like a lot of this album, it’s both self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating. Which the Pitchfork writer hates, I guess, but I feel is something you can’t fabricate and that, again, is deeply relatable. Halsey truly is an empathetic person who digs deep into the topics of her work, sometimes so much so that the earnestness turns people off. I think most people dislike when popstars try to make big political statements about the state of the world (I’m thinking of Marina’s album Love + Fear, which does lack true understanding and specificity), but Halsey usually manages to make it about herself, so this lens often works, at least for me. It’s cocky to write songs like “Darwinism” or to cover Britney Spears’ “Lucky” and change lyrics to be about yourself, I suppose, but it’s this nearly nervous self-awareness that makes Halsey compelling. I feel it’s also in tune with and honest about the era that we live in, where you have to ironic to be cool, but you also have to be “vulnerable” in order to make anything worthwhile to people. You have to laugh at yourself or else they’re going to get there before you. A lot of popstars grapple with this, I think. It’s like Taylor Swift’s constant war of being vulnerable and diaristic in a way people like, but not too diaristic because it’s unsavory. People didn’t love when Billie Eilish’s second album was mostly about fame, for example, but I think she’s allowed to write about the biggest changes in her life (though whether or not that’s done well is a different matter! I kind of like that album). I think popstars can often take these ideas of being perceived and amplify it by a hundred, for better or for worse, and that excites me. Halsey has gone through and is going through many things that would be challenging (understatement) for any person, including her chronic illnesses, the raising of her child as a single parent, and general misogyny, trauma, biphobia, and so on, but within the experience of extreme fame, these things become harder, and, unfortunately, more theatrical. I don’t agree with the idea that popstars “sign up” for the bad parts of being famous, though I do think some of those things are inevitable and just have to be dealt with, as there is unfortunately a cost for an artist with a large amount of reach. I think that when Chappell Roan gets mad about paparazzi or weird fans, it’s completely valid and I hate it for her, but I’m not sure what the path looks like to healing the entire world of idolatry. Perhaps just saying something public about it is enough to change a few things, though, and I should lean into optimism. I think the Pitchfork reviewer writing that “perhaps Halsey feels like they’re a dumping ground for the emotions of their millions of fans, a site of projection for the wounded and the lonely—but as a pop star, that’s the first bullet point in the job description” makes for kind of a stupid take, candidly. I’m not sure taking issue with the idea of them writing about fame in the first place means anything as opposed to taking issue with the execution of that writing, but okay! Many popstars write about fame. Literally all the big ones constantly write about fame, and there is something to be analyzed there, yes, and this topic is not always well done, but there’s this thing with Halsey specifically in this review, where it’s like, I don’t get why she’s whining about all these things! which really sours this review’s credibility as something unbiased. We get it! You don’t like Halsey! You think she writes shallow stuff! You think Badlands was annoying! I don’t think any of The Great Impersonator is like, I hate being famous, I have too much money, etc, but I guess you could perceive it that way, if you were expecting to.

Back to the lyrics: in the Pitchfork review, there’s this implication that Halsey happens upon poetic lyrics only every so often, and the writer seems to have this idea that she lands upon greatness by accident, or that even when it’s good, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The writer brings up “Lonely is the Muse” as a standout for the album, which I think is right, but they write a whole paragraph about how they don’t see a point to it and don’t understand her experience, which I found odd:

The muse’s role in art, historically, has been one of diminishment and objectification, but you’d be hard-pressed to suggest Halsey is some kind of Dora Maar—Halsey is one of the most successful artists of their generation, and many of their biggest hits, like the absolutely brutal Hot 100 No. 1 “Without Me,” carry out character assassinations of former romantic partners with the precision of an MI6 agent. There is absolutely no convincing argument to be made that G-Eazy’s songs about Halsey are taken more seriously than Halsey’s about G-Eazy, so you have to wonder about the purpose and value of this song; is it to conjure a sense of victimhood? To make some listeners feel bad for not exalting her genius? There’s no accounting for how someone feels, obviously, but as a listener, it’s jarring to hear a passage like this, whose indulgently sad veneer hides a convenient rejection of its author’s own agency and talent. Does Halsey see absolutely no irony in claiming she bears the weight of millions of fans’ expectations before, 40-odd minutes later, reducing her own output to “a couple diamonds”?

Like, yeah, girl power, Halsey’s not just a muse, I totally believe you, random Pitchfork writer, but never listening to that song did I think we were supposed to worship Halsey’s skill within her popstar persona because of her supposed victimhood- I thought that it was just her feelings on a very small, personal level, dealing with misogyny, as the rest of us do. Just because this idea of her being a muse doesn’t translate to streaming numbers versus G-Eazy doesn’t mean that this song doesn’t come from a genuine place. I think it was more about being the girlfriend in artist/music spaces, which I think is a very real and common feeling. Also, hey, writer, you literally just wrote a whole review about how much you dislike the album and how you think that Halsey doesn’t have the skills to make an album like this, so it doesn’t come off like you’re hyping her up and instead comes off as like, You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re lying. This review has its own dichotomies: it paints Halsey as this giant, singles-heavy popstar that everyone knows and of course admires, but, oh no, Pitchfork’s got to do the real work of bringing her down a bit, because of course everyone loves her, but she’s not that good, really. In reality, Halsey is not someone I find many people stanning. In fact, people on Twitter are having a field day talking about her “low” album sales with this release, and this album has many lyrics in the vein of how she “doesn’t know if I could sell out my own funeral”, a common theme in a work about wondering what will happen after death for an artist like her. Regardless of her own perception of herself, where is this Halsey that’s a household name? They’ve constantly dealt with the fleeting fame of singles like “Closer”, and many people I know perceive them as a Bebe Rexha sort of artist (sorry Bebe Rexha I love that horrible “Blue” remix so much) even though they’re one of the most interesting “popstars” of our time. I put the word in quotes because there’s all this talk of Halsey being a popstar, and yet you guys don’t even treat them like one. They defy this label and it makes you all uncomfortable, I think, but then you still insist on throwing it around whenever they’re there. I watch all these interviews where it’s like, “Halsey! A popstar!” and it’s kind of impressive, how unique their career has been, and how people can’t wrap their heads around it.

Also, well, I feel that this review is strangely mean and condescending in tone relative to other reviews I’ve read of other artists in the same space. The review for Dua Lipa’s recent album Radical Optimism, a work I feel is much weaker in every sense, has none of this meanness, hilariously. They gave her a 6.6! And, listen, I don’t need criticism or reviews to be nice, and I’m not, like, that invested in Pitchfork numbers, despite my constant yapping, all right. I just feel that this Halsey review is bothered, for some reason. Is it because Halsey aims big, and with such large concepts, they have to have large, complex reviews in the face of their work? One could argue that this means that Halsey’s work is more nuanced than something they’ll write a mid, unenthusiastic review for, but whatever. I do think that there’s so much to say with Halsey proves something, at least, though it seems like she’s cursed with unlikeability from many. This is one of my final points: people don’t think Halsey is cool.

I think she is; this will not change your mind. What is cool, then, in this era of distancing ourselves from others? What do you want from an artist like Halsey? I have watched, in real time, the societal flip into suddenly acknowledging that Charli XCX is cool, because of her last album, brat. (And I’m watching, in real time, the flip happen again). This is at the forefront of the Pitchfork review for brat, actually! I think Halsey made something with the shock value of brat - incomparable projects, but stay with me - with If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, and it didn’t get the acknowledgement it deserved. Halsey’s out here making work about queerness, and gender, and ableism, and ambition, and motherhood, and this sort of sentence has always been made fun of, in the face of Halsey, it’s always been mocked as this attempt at wokeness, at forced diversity, people pointing with a grin and saying, But is the music good? Is the art good? and, well, guess what, it is. That’s the thing about Halsey: they make weird stuff, they make stuff about universal human struggles, and it’s good, and it’s also incredibly earnest, and sometimes she writes lyrics like the one in “Dog Years” like, Well, they say all dogs go to Heaven / Well, what about a bitch? and it’s GOOD, dude, because it makes me feel something. Sometimes words can be said exactly as they arrive in our mouths. Sometimes words are enough the moment they are birthed. This is not a lack of intellect, of skill. Have we forgotten the power of pop music? That directness, that honesty, that simplicity that masks complexity, that earnest attempt at communicating so clearly that people think you’re untalented? Many popstars are incredibly smart, and decide to use “simple language”, and it’s because it’s clear and it makes everyone feel. Maybe you don’t feel anything from listening to Halsey’s album, or from those lyrics; that’s not the point. I don’t mean that everyone should love this album, or love her work. I think it’s about forgetting the perceptions of your taste by others, and about opening your mind in the face of whatever you think is cringe. Maybe you’d have more fun or cry to the song using a spider metaphor that genuinely rips me apart. “Watery meditations on fame and torturous extended metaphors.” Pshaw. I think maybe you guys should come over here with me and forget about cringe and, like, have a good, emotional time. Sometimes things that are popular are good, actually. Sometimes things that seem stupid to you or embarrassing are good, actually. Sometimes things that seem shallow in the wake of your experience with art are not truly shallow, in the end. Must all music sound like what unbalanced history told you was artistically interesting? There’s this weird, foggy misogyny within the condescension that pervades this review as well, like when they say that the album is “a great idea for a series of Instagram posts”, and then say, “As the concept for a pop album, it’s fairly boilerplate—without being so explicit, this is essentially what Taylor Swift did on Lover or Chappell Roan on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”, both albums I do not feel like execute this same concept at all, honestly! A reach! I think The Great Impersonator is so different from these albums that it’s not very worthwhile to compare them, but if you asked me today, I’d say that Halsey’s album is better. Listen, I know you hate me for it. I don’t think The Great Impersonator is the best album of all time. It lacks the singularity of If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, for example. But I definitely don’t think it’s a goddamn 4.8. Bro, seriously. Radical Optimism?

This review is like, “Its most damning quality might be that, at the bottom of it all, it’s still hard to focus your eyes on who Halsey is: They’re not great at channeling artists from eras gone by, nor are they a particularly sharp assessor of modern celebrity. So what then? Is it enough, as The Great Impersonator so clearly wants us to believe it is, to say you’ve suffered for your art, and your fans, and call it a day?” Hm. The review as a whole is saying, yes, that Halsey is just not capable of writing about their own suffering in a way that can entertain. Meta, I guess. Slash joke. But, listen, I’m not sure I follow. If it’s a taste issue, sure, I get that this album doesn’t hit you. But maybe you just don’t get it? Maybe it’s just not for you, random Pitchfork writer? Because I was ready for some critique on production or length or something more concrete, but instead I’m reading this guy get mad about how Halsey can’t seem to funnel their experiences into something he likes to listen to, which I think is interesting. There’s this constant critique I see of this album where people are like This song doesn’t even sound like the artist she said it would!!! which I think is pretty boring critique. Dude, I don’t think anyone wants a 1-to-1 inspired album like that, and Halsey never said the influences were to be taken that seriously, as far as I know, and even if they did, I’m not sure that this angle means anything? If Halsey wants to make that one song sound like a Bruce Springsteen concert, is she not allowed to? Can we not experience it both as its own individual piece and as a derivative work? The songs sound very specifically Halsey, with sprinklings of others from a while ago, which, yeah, is the concept of the album. I’m not sure what a better-executed version of this would even sound or look like, truly. Is it such a sell-out move, to recreate pictures of celebrities she’s inspired by? Are we that mad at her? Or do we just recoil at the idea of an uncool woman? Are we just so scared of being seen as cringe by association? Who gets to decide what’s interesting, what’s hot? The members of Nine Inch Nails? People on Twitter? Our parents? Our peers? Our rivals? History? Time? Death? Maybe you’re just a guy on Pitchfork and I’m just some fan who doesn’t understand anything, either. Maybe you should come over here with me. We can listen to “New Americana”, a song written over a decade ago by a teenager with genuinely good intentions and a desire to voice her experiences. Or maybe we can listen to “Closer”. Yeah. They’re both good songs, if you let yourself have a little fun. We can, like, watch the basement that they run Pitchfork out of just collapse already.

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