Manic, Nate

(Here's a long preamble that isn't about Manic at all. I trust Joe will put it in italics, so you can skip right to the review if you'd rather not read another edition of Nate's Feelings.)

There is neither honor nor pride to be taken in sticking one's head in the sand, so when I say that I have successfully avoided Halsey until now, I understand how that comes off. My point is not to say that I was, until now, "above" or "better" than Halsey and her art. I was just so tired.

The way it has always worked in successful pop music—successful in the financial sense, not the creative sense—is that the music is, at best, a partner to the pageantry and presentation, if not the second- or third-most important thing. "Teenage Dream" is an incredible song, but it certainly helped Katy Perry's heyday that her feuds with other women and relationship foibles were front-and-center in the conversation, that her music was a soundtrack to drama and tabloids. This kind of thing, the keeping up with the high and low drama of the semi or would-be famous, is what ultimately turns people from Whos to Thems. A great song will take you to the front page of a gossip magazine, but then the real show takes off. It has always worked this way, but it feels much worse now. Band of Horses really had it right fifteen years ago.

And so it went with Halsey, and her consideration of sex work, and her defense of Miley Cyrus, and her relationships with MGK and G-Eazy, and this tweet, and feuding with Iggy Azalea (!!), and and and. All of this without hearing a song. This kind of headline generation is exhausting, both because I am too old for it and because it is a broken-mirror reflection of the news internet at its worst; a machine that takes in would-be celebrities for celebrity's sake and grinds their bones and blood into a slurry that comes out the other end as "content." And what is most upsetting to me, personally, is that I am so addicted to this garbage water that I consume it mindlessly, so much so that I knew who Halsey was before I really even knew who Halsey was. It isn't Halsey's fault, I was broken before she got here.

And so, now, Halsey.

Manic sounds like a teenager's breakup diary set to a high school production of Spring Awakening. Put it another way: It sounds more like Panic at the Disco! than you may be prepared for. There's catharsis to be found in that. It wants to be taken seriously, so much so that it rounds the corner into parody.