Halsey Maniacally Redefines Herself

 

Halsey’s third studio album, Manic, shows the artist cutting herself open and examining every part of her inner self. She is so emotionally open and defies every label that has ever been put on her. Halsey, or rather Ashley Frangipane, completely redefines herself.  She goes back to her indie roots, reconciles with her mistakes, and makes an effort to gain understanding about herself.

Halsey breaks through the cage that the music industry has put her in as they label her a mega pop star. She allows listeners to gain an understanding of who she is outside of her stage name in the self-titled song, Ashley. You can hear the turbulence she feels through the sounds of the music in the track. By putting this one as the first track on her album, Halsey establishes that this album is going to be about herself and only herself. The ending track, 929, does the same as Halsey lays out her biggest struggles in her life and is seen dealing with her inner struggles yet again. It is obvious that she is not making an album about other people or for other people. She’s dedicating her time, focus and energy to the person who really matters the most, herself.

Within some of the tracks, Halsey’s frustrations with life, other people, and the industry are tangible to the listener. She goes back and forth between not needing anyone but also saying she “just need[s] everyone and then some” in the track Clementine. The confusion heard in the lyrics of this song along with those in ‘I HATE EVERYBODY’ allow the listener to feel the frustration that Halsey feels as she doesn’t want to need anyone but herself in her life, but then realizes that she does rely on people when she is struggling. She seems to be trying to convince herself that she really does hate everybody and that she only needs herself.

While many of the tracks are very catchy, and seem upbeat, they have very somber undertones as she deals with her emotions. In 3 AM, Halsey conjures an image of herself after a night out, losing all of her credit cards and drunkenly feeling all of her emotions at a heightened level. She is aware of all of her insecurities and acknowledges her self-destructive characteristics.

She dedicates the track More to a sensitive topic in her life, one where she has struggled with fertility, and desperately wants to be able to have a baby. The hopelessness she feels with this struggle, do not take away from her desire of wanting her own child. She’s frustrated with her own body and why it is defying her dreams. She mentions in an interview with Zane Low that the end of the song was made to sound like a sonogram, which is really touching and shows the rawness of the song itself.

Halsey still continues to question why she still feels the need to be loved and accepted by others and still struggles with her mental state, but she understands that she is still growing as a human in the track Still Learning, which seems to summarize the idea of the album in a nutshell.  She knows that she has a lot of working on herself to do, and that she is still learning to love herself for who she is. It seems that Manic has helped Ashley Frangipane work through the inner turmoil she feels and brought her to accept herself for who she is.

 

Ashlyn Cole