By now, a certain breakout pop artist has probably caught your ear (or your eye, with her nearly ubiquitous turquoise hair) on Spotify, Tumblr, or your best friend’s record player. When she dropped onto my radar at the tail end of this past summer, I found myself wondering…just who is this girl, “Halsey”?
Now, I don’t mean “who is she” in a birth certificate, statistical kind of way. Those facts are easily accessible: Ashley Frangipane was born in New Jersey in 1994 to young parents who moved around a lot. Her music alludes to her nomadic, wild child adolescence, which culminated in her discovery and signing with Astralwerks record label in 2014. Her stage name is an anagram of her birth name and the name of a street she lived near as a teenager.
The more interesting and elusive question is: Who is Halsey, the artist? The most concrete way to explain her might be that she excels in her ability to defy explanation. She relishes in the ability to be an artistic oxymoron. The same young girl who gained her initial YouTube fame by writing silly songs about One Direction now sings authoritatively and unapologetically about sex, drugs, and mental illness. Her sound is at once ethereal and dreamy, gritty and angry. Her narrative and her persona are carefully crafted, but never, ever artificial. She manages to be pop, hip-hop, and rocker all in the same breath.
Are you starting to see what makes her music’s most fascinating newcomer?
She knows how to tell a great story…in a really smart way.
Halsey’s music is fascinating because she deals in concepts. While all her songs are undoubtedly an outpouring of personal emotion, her ability to link them together in a cerebral and self-aware way is what brands her as a true artist.
Halsey’s first EP, Room 93, grew out of a time in her life when she was living in and out of hotel rooms. She contrasts the feeling of isolation with the weird voyeurism of having so many people surrounding you in their own tiny spaces. She also talks candidly about the way her surroundings affected her romantic relationships. “When you’re trying to form a relationship with someone in a closed environment like a hotel room, the only thing that’s really affecting the relationship is the person right in front of you. It kind of strips it down to this bare, vulnerable intimacy…” she told Noisey.com.
Her first full-length album, Badlands, dropped just a couple months ago, and it represents an expansion of Room 93’s themes…as well as a more detailed exploration of the landscape of Halsey’s mind. The “Badlands” is a fictional, dystopian world of Halsey’s own making, but it’s also symbolic. As she explained in an interview with Rolling Stone, “I was treating the Badlands as a metaphorical state. This booming metropolis, so that’s my brain, surrounded by a wasteland, so nobody can get in and can’t leave, either, keeping people out. And there are toxic elements, but also being kind of proud to be from there.”
The music video for ‘New Americana’ features Halsey as a fierce, leather-clad rebel leader.
She’s a 90’s kid.
She cites the great female singer-songwriters of the 90’s (think Alanis Morissette and Jewel) as some of her biggest influences, and also grew up listening to 90’s grunge rock and old-school rap. Her wardrobe is “very 90’s”, and she often references classic 90’s teen cinema in her videos.
She’s got cool friends.
Halsey kicks it with 5 Seconds of Summer, dates Norwegian rappers, and frequently invites Josh Dun of Twenty One Pilots onstage to drum during her sets. Oh, and she’s got a collaboration with none other than Justin Bieber slated for release soon.
She identifies herself as “tri-bi.”
Halsey, who has an Italian mother and an African-American father, has always found herself in the complicated position of being a biracial, yet white-passing, woman. She tweets about issues like white privilege and reminds people not to erase her culture because of her complexion. She also identifies as bisexual, and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Both of these themes come up in her music: ‘New Americana’ celebrates the tolerance her generation has towards diverse identities, and she gives us a glimpse into her mental condition with songs like ‘Control’.
Undoubtedly, these factors contribute to her resistance to categorization, but they also remind her listeners that not fitting into clear boxes or binaries doesn’t make you unapproachable or unrelatable. She’s a self-proclaimed “inconvenient woman,” and a “brutally honest” one. In my opinion, that’s the quality that makes her fascinating and subversive…but also the quality that makes her seem like she could be your best friend too.
Keep inconveniencing us, Halsey. We’ve been loving every second of it so far.
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