Horror, motherhood and digital defiance in Halsey's 'If I can't have love I want power'
Nicolette Petra reviews.
Halsey is renowned for their lyrical genius and music video worldbuilding, but it is their fourth album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power (iichliwp) that has cemented them as a master of genre blending and cinematic music experience.
At the close of July this year, Halsey posted an image of a horror-genre-reminiscent promotional poster for her upcoming album with the tagline promising, “A disruptive album and film experience from the mind of Halsey.” And disruptive they were.
The album and film of the same name centre on “the lifelong social labyrinth of sexuality and birth” - a concept most artists and producers would shy away from, if not flee in terror. For Halsey, however, this is a chance to powerfully, poignantly, and successfully shine a spotlight on paradoxical ideas - sexuality and sexualisation, childbirth and miscarriage, life and death - in a way that pervades the audience’s senses. There is no looking away, no chance you will not hear everything from her angry shout on rock ballad Easier than Lying to the smallest, most haunting echo on Whisper.
While Halsey collaborated on the album with Oscar-winning duo, Nine Inch Nails, and Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham who plays the acoustic guitar in lullaby-like track, Darling, there are no features on iichliwp. This was intentional. Halsey has openly spoken about her endometriosis, pregnancy, past miscarriages (one of which happened immediately before a concert), the way she has been owned - bodily and sexually - by the entertainment industry, and the toll this has taken on her mental health. iichliwp brings the focus back to Halsey’s experiences - to Halsey’s story which she began writing while trying for a baby and continued writing throughout her pregnancy with first child, Ender Ridley, born in July. The story is her’s alone to tell, and yet speaks to layered and universal truths.
To explore such heavy truths and untouched themes that may be difficult for audiences to swallow - or even fully comprehend - Halsey uses familiar biblical, mythical, and feudal allusions, a constant throughout their discography which draws a thread from earlier works, like Young God and Castle, to current tracks like Lilith and I am not a woman, I’m a god. The album’s second track, Bells of Santa Fe, sees Halsey address Jesus directly - “I could keep your bed warm, otherwise I’m useless” - thus, subverting antiquated religious concepts of gender and purity in a metaphor that dances tantalisingly close to blasphemy.
Yet, the disruptiveness and grandiose imagery do not stop with the lyrics, nor the music. Halsey went one step further, releasing an hour-long limited-viewing IMAX-exclusive film to accompany their album. The jumpcut-filled trailer alone is just as disruptive, disturbing, and horrifying as the album. In one shot, Halsey, who plays protagonist, Queen Lila, is taken hold of by a set of blackened hands; in another, a man stands over her as she lays splayed on a bed; in another, she runs through a forest bleeding through her nightgown.
Using a transfixing film as a marketing tool for an album is just one way modern artists are navigating the new almost-solely-digital post-pandemic age. Billie Eilish’s recent album release, Happier Than Ever, was promoted through three different ‘modes’ on Spotify - Billie Mode (the tracks in chronological order), Lyric Mode (Billie’s insights on each track), and Fan Mode (an enhanced version). Promotions of Lorde’s Solar Power saw Instagram advertisements informing audiences about how to listen to the album, including a day at the beach and a long drive home. Whilst the pandemic has restricted ‘real-life’ experiences, the music industry has turned towards digitally produced and online immersions with artists embracing the ‘visual’ component of ‘audiovisual’ to connect with their audiences beyond the traditional, oversaturated music video market.
Unfortunately, though, even the visual has its limits. Sydney’s lockdown meant attending a screening was impossible, which makes one wonder whether an online streaming of the film would have been more accessible. Moreover, the album’s cover depicts Halsey on a throne, holding a child, one breast exposed. It’s an image that invokes the Virgin Mary and renaissance paintings like The Birth of Venus. The dual purpose of the cover was to firstly, illustrate that the ‘dichotomy of Madonna and Whore’ can coexist peacefully within an individual, and secondly, to ‘[eradicate] the social stigma around bodies & breastfeeding.’ However, the original cover is often censored on news sites and Instagram to avoid the ‘nipple algorithm’. This censoring and removal of the cover ironically reinforces the very commodification and sexualisation of women and breasts that Halsey seeks to subvert.
Even with these visual limitations, the images Halsey evokes in her music in addition to those she uses in promotional posters, trailers, and her film work because they remove the glossy veneer of motherhood and childbirth to reveal the deeper and oft unacknowledged struggles, horrors, pain, and complexities beneath in an unbridled fury. Consequently, iichliwp earns itself a strange but rightful place on the horror genre shelf, specifically the claustrophobic and unsettling kind, sandwiched between Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. As with these films, Halsey’s listeners and viewers must lean into their discomfort, if not merely sit with it. There is no escape.
Halsey’s iichliwp is the latest in a trend of cinematic and immersive musical experiences and an exceptional one at that. Whilst digital spaces may attempt to buck the artist’s subversive defiance, Halsey’s latest record shows that they have reached an innate level of peace within and acceptance of themself, therefore making the ultimate statement that neither they nor the album are waiting to be legitimised.