via houstonpress.com
New Jersey singer Halsey, AKA Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, has risen to the height of fame on the internet and, in turn, in the music industry, over the past year or so. After releasing her EP ‘Room 93’ in 2014 and her 2015 record ‘Badlands’, she has become the fascination of the media and young people worldwide… but is her media attention always a positive thing?
Halsey has a mother who is a Caucasian Italian-American, and a father who is African-American. However, she is ‘white passing’ – meaning she is pale-skinned, so many people assume that she is not mixed race, but white. This often causes her to be the subject of criticism on Twitter and other social media sites – Twitter users frequently claim that Halsey ‘fakes being biracial’. In fact, she has posted several photos of her mother and father online, and has even hugged them and talked to them both onstage at a festival. She has posted photos of her natural hair and explained on Tumblr, “I have hair that is an inbetween texture from my father and my mother and often leaves hairdressers with their hands in the air like ‘sorry I can’t help you’.” Still, she makes it clear that she’s proud to be mixed-race.
What’s more, the singer is bisexual and has made this explicitly clear ever since she became known as ‘Halsey’, yet she also faces erasure for this. A Tumblr post from a few months ago claims that people have been attempting to invalidate her sexuality by making comments such as “when was the last time she dated a woman” and “she never uses she/her pronouns in songs”. Last time I checked, when male celebrities such as Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie say they have an interest in the same gender, no one questions them, even if there are no specific mentions of male love interests in their songs…
Finally, Halsey has been labelled, because of these two things and her bipolar disorder, ‘tri-bi’, a misquote she has repeatedly tried to expel from people’s minds as it is not anything like what she’s ever labelled herself as. Some think she is claiming to be all these things to be ‘trendy’, ‘edgy’ or ‘cool’ to gain popularity online.
When asked about the disorder she had told an ELLE interviewer she has, she stated:
“This plight, like you said, of being the “inconvenient woman,” just comes from people expecting me to… I’m not always going to be agreeable, you know? I’m not always going to be calm. I’m entitled to my emotions and, unfortunately, because of the circumstance that I deal with, it’s a little more than other people. But then there’s people who seek it out as a fetish almost. They fetishize girls with mental illness. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I want a crazy girl.'”
After the ELLE interviewer agreed with her view, she went on to say:
“They’re like, ‘I want to be with someone who is like crazy.’ Well, guess what? It’s not all painting at four o’clock in the morning and road trips and fucking great things. Sometimes it’s throwing things and, like, getting hurt and having to pick someone up from the police station at two o’clock in the morning. My biggest fear has always been being that woman.”
It seems, Halsey wasn’t holding the attitude that being truthful about her mental health would gain her fans or interest; to the naked eye, it would plainly seem like she wanted to be honest and get her view across to those who didn’t quite see what she did.
Halsey also suffers further criticism for the way she responds to aggression/inappropriate behaviour from fans themselves – when she was in London having a series of interviews with the BBC, fans waiting outside the building for her accused her of “swerving her fans” and being “fake”. After seeing these comments, she came outside and promised them she was trying her hardest and that this couldn’t be avoided; she seemed very upset, but still met every fan there after her interviews.
Upon discovering all this, it appears that Ashley Frangipane is just trying her best – and getting targeted for it is not helping the situation at all.
Is it because she is a woman in a world where a man would generally be favoured or whose flaws would be brushed over more due to the patriarchal society we live in? Is it the fact that, much similar to the likes of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus etc. years ago and still today, she’s very young to be famous and is therefore seen as more vulnerable? Is it because, unlike many celebrities who try their best to keep up perfect appearances and infallible images, she allows her cracks to show? Is it because she lets the world know she’s ‘only human’?
“We need a feminism that is not negligent of women of color, trans women, queer women. We need a feminism that protects ALL women. Globally”, @halsey states on Twitter in August, 2015. Whatever the reason for the ‘haters’ ‘hating’ is, it is clear to see that Halsey isn’t out to look ‘cool’ for herself; she’s out for everyone…
Maybe people just aren’t looking hard enough.
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