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.
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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.
This was hardly my introduction to Halsey. The first song of theirs I remember listening to on repeat was “Strangers” of their second album, featuring Lauren Jauregui of Fifth Harmony.
The song, produced by my synth-pop king Greg Kurstin (from one of my favorite bands The Bird and the Bee) is a duet between two bisexual women. Hasley describes how important it was to get Jareugi on the track in a radio interview: “If I want this song to be believable, I'm not going to put a girl on the song to sing who's straight. So I reached out to Lauren and she came in and she cut the vocal and it sounds awesome. Our voices sound really cool together because we both have really raspy voices, mine's a little more delicate than hers. Hers is like really powerful and big and raspy, and mine is kind of like light and raspy.” The song is incredibly addictive, and while I didn’t latch onto all of Hopeless Fountain Kingdom as an album, “Strangers” ended up in the top 20 on my 2017 Spotify Wrapped.
I’m a Post Malone fan, so the next Halsey song that hooked me was “Die 4 Me” off his third album Hollywood’s Bleeding. The song, co-produced by Andrew Watt (who just produced the sick new industrial pop, electroclash Gaga song “Disease”), also features Future and it’s a kiss-off to exes who discounted the three of them before fame. This is the theme of most of Post Malone’s albums tbh, but coming from Halsey I appreciated the attitude and pettiness of her lyrics. And I love even more than she expanded her verse into a full song (though I do prefer the Post Malone version).
And her previous album, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, was produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch. I was never a Nine Inch Nails fan in high school, though I did listen to a few songs based on the fact that Cassie, the Black girl in the Animorphs books, listened to them. 1994’s Downward Spiral was my first listen, thanks to the single “Closer.” I became a real NIN fan once Reznor and Finch began producing banger film soundtracks like The Social Network, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and a slew of Luca Gadagnino films like Bones and All, Challengers, and Queer. Btw, we should have gotten a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sequel based on the soundtrack alone. Amy Pascal is so rude for ignoring Rooney Mara’s e-mails (god bless the 2014 Sony leak)!
I love Claire Foy, so I’m gonna keep my mouth shut on The Girl in the Spider's Web and the five dollars it made at the box office.
But back to Halsey.
The album features 18 tracks, each of them inspired by one of Halsey’s music idols. The idols and their correlating songs are:
Only Girl Living in LA (Marilyn Monroe)
Ego (Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries)
Dog Years (PJ Harvey)
Letter to God (1974) [Cher]
Panic Attack (Stevie Nicks)
The End (Joni Mitchell)
I Believe in Magic (Linda Ronstadt)
Letter to God (1983) [Bruce Springteen]
Hometown (Dolly Parton)
I Never Loved You (Kate Bush)
Darwinism (David Bowie)
Lonely is the Muse (Amy Lee of Evanescence)
Arsonist (Fiona Apple)
Life of the Spider (Draft) [Tori Amos]
Hurt Feelings (Halsey!!)
Lucky (Britney Spears)
Letter to God (1998) [Aaliyah]
The Great Impersonator (Björk)
The Great Impersonator wrestles with fame and Halsey’s authenticity as an artist, hence the impersonations, so it only makes sense that she’d include herself and draw inspiration from her debut album Badlands. The song, “Hurt Feelings,” isn’t one of my personal favorites, but it delves into fraught feelings about her dad and her upbringing. Hasley, who is biracial, has always identified as such even though she is white-passing. Unfortunately, the song is followed by “Lucky,” which samples Britney Spears’ “Lucky.” The subject matter is song but the song itself doesn’t really work. The original, a soaring Max Martin pop song, works because it’s not so melancholic. “She’s so lucky, she’s a star, but she cry, cry, cries, in her lonely heart” hits you because the song is so pretty, the visage of Britney Spears up to that point has been so pristine and manufactured, that it comes across as a peek behind the curtain at Spears’ real emotions. Halsey has never been one to shy away from discussing depression and the darker recesses of her mind in her music, so the use of “Lucky” feels on the nose and a bit lazy. (I am a fan of the interpolation of Monica’s “Angel of Mine” on the track, I wish it song had drawn inspiration from Monica and ‘90s R&B instead of the more obvious Spears song.)
Thankfully, those are the only two songs that don’t work for me on the album. By paying homage to classic rock and country legends, The Great Impersonator has an Americana feel similar to a project like Cowboy Carter. It’s hard to pin it down in one genre because it encompasses so many. It allows Halsey to deal with darker themes and use her raspy voice to great effect by evoking artists like Springsteen, Nicks, and Ronstadt. “Ego,” inspired by PJ Harvey, is one of the album’s highlights, as well as “Darwinism,” where she matches Bowie’s space melancholy vibe, and the final track (the Björk-esque “ah-AH!”s punctuating lines of the chorus are a fucking delight), which ends with the lyrics:
Does a story die with its narrator?
Ah-ah
Surely it's forgotten soon or later
Ah-ah
Hope they spell my name right in the paper
Ah-ah
In here lies the great impersonator
This year, Halsey shared news of their lupus diagnosis and rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. It’s why The Great Pretender often deals with concepts of death, depression, the fragility of the human body (in "Life of the Spider"), and immortality (the latter in the stellar “Lonely is the Muse”). Looking back at the comments thrown at Halsey for their "impersonations” as the album rollout began, it seems as if calling into question the derivativeness of impersonating other artists’ images and their sounds was entirely the point.
If you were to make your last piece of art today, what would it include? Would you honor the artists that inspired you to become one? And if you were able to do so and still sound like yourself in the end, still able to make something completely original, does that mean you are a real artist? One worthy of recognition? Halsey asks these questions in The Great Pretender. The answer is yes.