Halsey covers the March issue of Glamour Magazine. I don’t remember her getting too many major fashion-mag covers in the past, but then again, I’m not paying super-close attention to Halsey’s comings and goings. If I’m right and this is one of the rare moments when she’s gotten a somewhat major cover, I have to admit that I laughed a little bit at how seriously she takes herself. She’s 24 and she’s a perpetual motion machine of melodrama. Halsey was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was 17, and I know her disorder affects how she sees the world, how she sees herself and how she gives interviews. Fair enough. She talks about her breakdown at 17 and a lot more. I’m still convinced that half of her backstory is an epic piece of fiction, but as long as she keeps repeating it endlessly, I guess people will believe her. You can read Halsey’s Glamour cover story here. Some highlights:
On death: “So there’s a Native American proverb, and it’s like you have two deaths in your life, right? The first is when your physical body obviously decays, and you are buried, and you are dead. And the second is the last time somebody ever says your name.”
She remembers every single fan: “Watching my dad be like that affected me as an artist tremendously. I have met tens of thousands of fans; I don’t forget any of them. Ever.”
On her privilege: “I have obviously been given this massive privilege and responsibility to effect change. At the end of the day, no matter how meaningless one person might consider my art, it could have meant the world to somebody else.”
On her messy breakup with G-Eazy: “The biggest lesson I learned was to make art, not headlines. Because it can become quite easy, in the social media generation, to go from being a musician to becoming a personality.”
Her breakdown at 17: “Given what I’ve been experiencing the past couple of years, if I hadn’t already had my meltdown, who knows when it would have happened?”
Competition between pop starlets: “We are just not f–king having it…We’re so supportive,” she says of her relationship with musical peers, Ariana Grande and Lorde. She points out that men are seldom accused of hating each other, even if they have similar appeal. “There are so many male artists who are regurgitations of each other: they all f–king dress the same, they all have the same stylist, they all wear the same f–king clothes, they write with the same writers. We live in a world where women are required to be so f–king original, it’s crazy.”
On how people don’t believe her stories of her hardscrabble teen years: “I was literally living on the Lower East Side in a f–king heroin den, like with all of these artists. It was 2014, the last year that New York was kind of bohemian.”
Granted, I’m much older than Halsey (or older than she claims to be), but I am still laughing at 2014 being some generational-shift year, after which New York was no longer boho. 2014!!!!! LMAO. As for how the pop starlets all support one another… I think that’s sort of true. Especially after the terrorist attack at Ariana Grande’s concert in the UK, that was a moment where there was so much solidarity among the women of pop music especially. That being said, I imagine one or two of those pop stars talk sh-t about Halsey when she’s not around.
Photos courtesy of Eric Ray Davidson for Glamour, sent from promotional Glamour email.
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