Halsey is a tough girl with a rebellious mystique. A rare commodity in this world of plastic music, she is a pop star who writes all her own material. And though she sounds nothing like punk rock as her green hair would suggest, she emblazons its ideology.
At age 21, New Jersey’s electropop goddess struts her stuff on stage or in videos, with her signature aquamarine hair and multiple tattoos. Her lyrics are clever.
We are the new Americana,
High on legal marijuana,
Raised on Biggie and Nirvana,
We are the new Americana.
— “The New Americana”
Her debut album Badlands currently sits at number 16 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart. It peaked at number two. She’s accomplished all of this in the face of bipolar.
“The thing about having bipolar disorder, for me, is that I’m really empathetic,” she told Elle magazine, revealing her illness for the very first time on its pages. “I feel everything around me so much. I feel when I walk past a homeless person, and I feel when my friend breaks up with someone, or I feel when my mom and my dad get into a fight and my mom’s fuckin’ crying over dishes in the sink.”
I’ve always said that people with bipolar have a greater capacity for empathy. Even Kurt Cobain’s suicide note ends “Peace, love, empathy, Kurt Cobain.” We empathize with those who struggle because we’ve struggled ourselves.
Halsey has been playing guitar since age 14, switching over from the violin, the cello and the viola.
She is biracial — her mother is Italian-American, and her father is black. She’s also bisexual. Halsey was diagnosed as bipolar when she was 16.
A Web 2.0 success story, Halsey first posted the song “Ghost” on SoundCloud and it was discovered by someone at Astralwerks records. She signed with the historically electronic label and her label-mates now include many EDM acts like Deadmau5, The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and Hot Chip, as well as rockers like Iggy Pop, The B-52s, Phoenix, and The Kooks. In other words, Astralwerks is a cool label.
With a bipolar mom, Halsey’s upbringing must’ve been a bit easier had she not had someone in the family with bipolar. “I used to say to [my mom] all the time, like, ‘I hate this. I want to be naïve. I want to be worried about my prom dress,” Halsey told Elle. “I want to be worried about getting my math homework done. I want to be like everyone else my age,’ and she would say, ‘Would you rather be blissfully ignorant or would you rather be pained and aware?’ That was one of the things that’s kind of followed with me through my whole life. She’s encouraging of what I’m doing because she knows that even if sometimes I might be in pain, I’m aware.”
Wise words that could only come from a bipolar mom.
“If I had parents who were normal, and crazy things started happening to me, weird little signs started popping up, I’d probably be like, ‘I’m a freak,’” she continued. “But since I watched my mom do it, it was just normal to me.”
Halsey is a songwriter at heart. She admits that is where her talent lies. She doesn’t believe she is actually a very good singer.
“I’m okay with admitting that because some of the best musicians in history weren’t great singers: Patti Smith, Bob Dylan,” she told Elle. “I loved a guy named Conor Oberst who’s in a band called Bright Eyes. He can’t sing. Love him. And it’s cool because it’s almost like the most liberating thing ever.”
Halsey’s got an interesting take on the fetishization of the mentally ill, a notion I haven’t heard before.
“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,” she says. “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.”
Maybe it’s because she has grown up as a Millennial, in a different cultural milieu, where mental illness isn’t such a big deal and everyone and their sister is being diagnosed with ADD. Halsey deserves credit even just for speaking up. She can be a role model for those of us with the disease — another success story like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Carrie Fisher or Linda Hamilton.
