“Lucky” by Halsey, Thursday, November 7, 2024
In July, Halsey released the first single from her fifth studio album, The Great Impersonator, “Lucky.” The album explores the two years after the singer’s fourth album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power after Halsey the birth of her son and her diagnosis of lupus and a T-Cell disorder. With the serious health problems facing Halsey, she wanted to record what could be her last album. That album’s concept deals with the disembodiment she felt after the diagnoses and treatments. Pulling from the musical landscapes of the 1970s to the early 2000s, Halsey becomes an “impersonator” of style on her latest album. The first single, an interpolation of Britney Spears’ 2000 single by the same name, parallels the well-documented struggles of Spears with Halsey’s experience.
EVERYBODY GET IN LINE TO MEET THE GIRL WHO FLEW TOO HIGH. Ashley Frangipane was born in 1994, making her six years old when Brintey Spears released her second album, Oops… I Did It Again. Spears’ career has been scrutinized and criticized, often unfairly. In many ways, the singer became a template of “how to be” or “how not to be” a pop star in the new millennium. In many ways, Spears held a mirror to pop culture. In her early career, she was both the muse of aspiring youth who wanted to be the star of the show and a sex kitten for men, many of whom wanted to exploit the singer. She was both the virginal role model with her Southern Baptist upbringing and the “Whore of Babylon” corrupting the abstinence-only sex-educated youth. In her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears writes of the pressure the public scrutiny gave her. She writes: “If you’re a girl, you have to play the game. What is that game? You’re allowed to be pretty, and cute, and sexy. But don’t act too smart. Don’t have an opinion.” Spears was talking about the downside of fame from her 2000 song “Lucky,” in which she tells the story of a girl, named Lucky, who seems to have a perfect life but feels empty when alone.
I SHAVED MY HEAD FOUR TIMES BECAUSE I WANTED TO. Halsey’s “Lucky” works chronologically, documenting her career struggles. She also sets up a parallel between herself and Britney Spears as many of the details could be about either pop star. Both singers struggled with negative discourse in the Internet age. Both struggled with mental and physical health in the public eye as well as body image. One of the stand-out lines in the song talks about Halsey shaving her head. The conversation about women’s hair length and color has been contentious. Recently, Garbage’s Instagram account posted a reprimand to a male fan, who stated that he “missed lead singer [Shirley Manson’s] red hair.” Manson was recovering from cancer treatment and her hair had begun to regrow naturally gray. Iconic female singers from Sinéad O’Connor to Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics have supported short haircuts, often making a statement with the style. In Halsey’s “Lucky,” Ashley Frangipane draws a parallel between the five times when she shaved her hair and the infamous incident when Britney Spears shaved her head in 2007. Spears’s shaved head drew conversation about the singer's mental health. In pop cultural retrospect, media voices haven’t aged well and Spears has shared more about the stress she was under--manipulated and controlled by her father, with a threat of her children being taken away. Online comments about Halsey’s weight and her hair as a potential mental breakdown or drug addiction the singer as she was dealing with a health scare. “Lucky” there’s really a song about the meta-narrative of pop music today. To me, it seems the pop music is more conceptual today than in the past. Pop music seems to be more of a conversation now than before songs are connected to events comments the overall story of who a pop star is. But while there is conversation around songs, it’s still important for us the commentators to be respectful we have to realize that the singers are not gods they are people and they have feelings. We think that because pop stars are lucky to have fame they are not hurt by the words that we would be hurt by. I’m writing to myself right now. I have written many negative posts in the three years that I have been blogging, and I would like to treat my subjects with more respect so if I hurt any artists, I apologize and I would like to be more mindful with my words as I grow as a writer.
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