According to NME, Halsey has retaliated online against music critic Anthony Fantano, who rated her recent album The Great Impersonator a “decent one” out of 10 and criticized it on social media. Fantano is a YouTuber and Twitch streamer with his own website, all under the handle The Needle Drop. The reviewer said Halsey’s album included “the worst case of main character syndrome I’ve heard on any pop album in 2024.”
In 2022, the singer was diagnosed with lupus and a rare T-Cell lymphoproliferative disorder, and has been undergoing chemotherapy since. She has also suffered numerous health scares following her diagnosis, including a severe seizure that led to her hospitalization in 2024. She recently referred to her new album as “an experimental concept album about how I almost fucking died.”
Halsey replied to an X (formerly Twitter) post of Fantano’s in which he had replied to a recent X post, critiquing his own review, by joking that people cared more about his review than the album itself. In her reply, the singer defended her vulnerable work on the album.
“I’m certain my least memorable song will be remembered more fondly and for more time than anything you ever do with your life will be,” she wrote. “Everything you say is more “whiny” and “edgy” than I was at any point on that album. But at least I had the excuse of going through chemo.”
“Who cares he gave a bad review? I care that a pay for clicks reaction YouTuber can facade as a pro critic and say it’s “main character syndrome” for an artist to lament her medical suffering on an album (surprise!) about her own life. He’s a raised-by-4chan edgelord bully. Yuck.”
The artist went on to call out the misogynistic nature of Fantano’s review and the broader mistreatment of women in the music industry.
“Being a woman dealing with serious health issues often means being afraid of telling the truth about the pain you’re in because you’re afraid of not being believed or seeming attention seeking. He validated that fear to thousands of women.”
In response to Halsey’s first post, replying to him directly, Fantano simply said he was “flattered to be on your radar, queen.”
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