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January 17, 2020 - Capitol Records
From Persephone to Ophelia to Marilyn Monroe, we as a Western audience have been collectively obsessed with the tragedy of the fallen beauty queen for a long time. After two world wars, global societal upheavals, the realization of our negative influence on our planet, punk rock, and the inception of the internet and all its dangerous implications, our post-modern civilized development graduated from a preschool of worshipping the innocent damsel in distress to a kindergarten worshipping the damsel who walks into the distress knowing it’s the only way forward. Enter the famous modern female condition. Lana Del Rey has built a prolific career on it, being self-aware enough to tell her own story following in the footsteps of the doomed before her. Billie Eilish haunts that room too, with an extra helping of dark melodrama only a teenager can deliver. It even grows to abstract proportions in a public who can see Melania Trump as a reflection of its own trauma under the rise of a Trump presidency in the United States.
Pop-princess-of-the-fatalistic-youth Halsey’s new album Manic tells the tale as old as time, pandering to and capitalizing on this narrative of epic human tragedy, the appeal we Americans feel for a starlet who peels back some forbidden curtains to show us the truth we spend our lives being told to ignore for our own good—that she is just like we are. That she knows what pain feels like. That love hurts her too. Manic is the most honest I’ve heard Halsey be. She drove right past Britney Spears’s ‘Lucky’ and flipped it the bird. She out-sampled Bon Iver’s attempt at poetry in modern eclecticism with more specificity in her choice of sound bites for the collage. Manic is a triumphant moment in her career, with loose experimentation, biting lyrics, impeccable production, samples that demonstrate the power of effective choice when facing unfathomable amounts of consumable media, and a collection of songs that demonstrate the expanse of emotion in Halsey’s vocal range.
The level of thoughtfulness that went into this album honestly surprised me. It convinced me to pay attention to this famous person I had written off to the Top 40 radio graveyard when I was still commuting to work in a car for hours every day. She was something I left behind when I sold that car. She was manicured. Groomed for fame. Younger than me. Singing songs with all the most prominent and most watered-down mainstream producers. But Manic asked me to pay closer attention, and I did. Every element in every track serves the message Halsey is singing in a tightness that is hard to achieve when juggling influences from so many different genres. In fact, that tightness is hard to achieve as a songwriter, period. There are no distractions, even if what she asks us to hear is grating at times. Her lyrics are poetic but still digestible. The songs weave briefly in and out of mass-appeal, but I think this whole album is just a little too weird overall for heavy radio rotation—which I absolutely consider creative progress. Start to finish, it almost reads like a storybook, with a beginning, rising action, falling action and a resolution. An album approach that deviates from the calculated pop mainstream from the last twenty years.
The real tragedy is that despite all my admiration of Halsey’s exploration and creativity here, the whole experience of hearing her story really just leaves me asking—why be an artist? More specifically, why be a woman artist? Your audience consumes you outside of yourself. The more honest you get, the more they eat it up trying in vain to cure their existence with yours. A tale as old as time.
Self-awareness is a shield, a coping mechanism. If you put yourself into a box, then no one else has the power to put you in that particular box anymore. Today, being self-aware enough to employ irony is the trend du jour. The bunny costumes and stage makeup have been replaced by spectacles and reading Proust while eating pizza and playing video games. Women who understand conspiracy theories. At least the bunnies had the luxury of being specialized—they didn’t have to read Proust. They knew their purpose was to be captured. Today, we have to be sexy, fit, highly intelligent, deep, ok with smoking weed, good at computers, and ambitious at work but also able to manage a household. We have to glow without makeup on like angels of light parading as the edge of darkness, no longer of this Earth. Thinking we are free but trapped in a hunter’s net. If you ask me, we’re still products built to different specifications, aiming for a new definition of value.
What I want to know is, will the damsel ever not be in distress? Maybe someday Halsey’s music will no longer be relatable. For now, my empathy flows. ☔