I was wrong about Halsey.
The Friday Frank on Saturday
The Friday post is a day late: Thursday night was a big Halloween party, and I was hungover most of the day.
This led to me spending the day with Halsey’s latest album, The Great Impersonator, spurred by the puzzling social media rollout they've had, where Halsey impersonated a bunch of music icons like Dolly Parton, Aaliyah, and Bruce Springsteen. I decided to investigate if this was Halloween-related or actually integral to the album. And as it turns out… the album is now one of my faves of the year?
More on that shortly!
If you have the Substack app, we now have weekly chats on Survivor, House of Villains, and The Real Housewives of O.C.
The trailer for season 14 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills dropped this week. The premiere is November 19, and I will be recapping the season! The first week’s recap will be available for all subscribers; subsequent weeks will be for paid subscribers.
Stevie Nicks sat down with Rolling Stone. The interview sprawls Nicks’s entire career and has hilarious soundbites on Katy Perry (“Katy, I don’t have rivals. I have friends. All the other women singers that I know are friends. Nobody’s competing. Get off the internet and you won’t have rivals either.”), Stereophonic the play based on Fleetwood Mac (“How in the world have I gotten this far without knowing about this?”), on being seen as a witch (“I got freaked out at one point. People were writing about me being a witch, and I stopped wearing black and I made the girls stop wearing black, too. Margi made us all-new pale-pastel outfits; it was the Eighties. And then we all looked at each other one day and said, Why are we wearing these Easter egg dresses? This is not us.”), her friendship with Taylor Swift, and why it’s good Chappell Roan cancels shows (“Me and a friend of mine went and looked at her schedule, and it was outrageous. What she’s already done and then what she’s going into. It’s as bad as any schedule we ever did, and she’s new, and she’s young. I said, They’ll burn her out if that’s what they want to do, because there’s always somebody to replace you.).
Speaking of Chappell Roan, she found a photographer who was rude to her at a Grammys party and confronted them at Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts film premiere. The fact that she recognized him and said BET? I have to stan.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Denzel Washington is our greatest living actor. I’ve already mentioned how much I loved Gladiator 2, but you should know that Washington is the best part of the film. Nobody is having more fun in that movie than him. As Macrinus, an arms dealer who uses gladiators for sport, he’s giving Nichelle Nichols in Truck Turner. And if you’ve never seen Truck Turner, you’re missing out a Blaxploitation classic. It’s definitely a film in the Frank Canon.
In this Graham Norton episode, Paul Mescal, Eddie Redmayne, and Saoirse Ronan are in awe over Washington’s ability to recite lines from doing Othello from over 22 years ago. Washington will be playing the titular role again this spring on Broadway, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal.
I have a brief aside about Washington being our world’s greatest actor in my book (which you can pre-order now!), but I think a longer piece on his filmography is something I’ll tackle in the future.
Megan thee Stallion released MEGAN: ACT II.
I was worried about Megan releasing another album so soon after Megan, which I found to be just fine. There are maybe a handful of songs on it I still listen to. Thankfully, this mixtape or deluxe album or whatever you call it, is really fucking good. Megan is rapping, which is what I prefer her doing, instead of trying to make radio hits. It’s her best since Something for the Hotties!
I was wrong about Halsey.
If you only have a casual awareness of Halsey (she/they), you’re probably aware of the rollout of their latest album, The Great Impersonator. In the lead-up to the album’s release on Friday, Halsey released impersonations of some of her music idols and snippets of the songs on her album that they inspired. Maybe it was the timing with Halloween — there’s always a general irritation that comes with celebrities getting attention for using stylists to “transform” into other celebrities, which of course they can do, because they’re not doing their own make-up before rushing out to a party in Brooklyn, know what I mean?
Also, if your only interaction with the rollout was via reposts by outlets like Pop Crave or something, then you didn’t hear the snippets attached with the photos as posted on Halsey’s Instagram. So it just appeared as if they were randomly posting photos of celebrities like Dolly Parton, David Bowie, Linda Ronstadt, and Aaliyah. The general response to the uninitiated was kinda “What the hell is going on?” But you know what? It worked. I was definitely going to listen to The Great Impersonator.
As it turns out, it’s pretty fantastic. And one of the best records released this year.