This Halsey Debate is Really Annoying

The internet is going to say this is a Fantano glaze but I am genuinely an Internet casual (I just joined this subreddit for this post).

Look, I'll be upfront with you when I say that I completely disagree with the chorus of people that are angry with Fantano over his Halsey review.

Zooming out, I understand music reviews based on two presupposed values:

(1) Musicians & Music Critics ought to have a complicated relationship (neither completely cordial nor 100% antagonistic).

(2) the Musician & Music Critic relationship is a necessary part of a social ecosystem of art production/consumption.

Where I disagree is that any party within this ecosystem (be it Musicians, the lay Fans, or Critics) has to be "right." In other words, Halsey doesn't get to make art that is impervious to critique, even if the critique comes off as completely misunderstanding the central premise of the album.

Now, I get that people view the review as disrespectful which I think is valid to point out. Contextualizing Halsey's album within the framework of medical misogyny certainly allows you to make a strong claim for Fantano's lack of tact or care when talking about this album. However, we cannot assume that Fantano was also contextualizing the album in the same way.

In fact, one could very easily contextualize this album from a framework of how white women--vis-a-vis white feminist epistemologies--socially construct victimhood and sympathy for otherwise small hurdles they face (particularly ignorant of the massive amounts of struggles the rest of the world goes through/that they also perpetuate). That framework actually gives a lot of credence to Fantano's dismissive attitude of Halsey's album. But again, that is also an assumption that we cannot make when it comes to how Fantano understood this album.

I would actually push back against all this additional work (i.e., four different videos in the span of a week popped up on my algorithm talking about this) to character-assassinate Fantano as a misogynist. It actually cheapens true forms of misogyny because a music review cannot be a hill a whole subculture of people online die on for the passed 2ish years. Like, there has been a genocide amongst so many other countless human violations. We can move on.

TL;DR: I agree he was insensitive and should've done more to contextualize this thoughts. However, saying he's a misogynist is both inaccurate and self-defeating.