No Tits for Target

Marveling at how many layers there are to being a pop star and how much you have to do to get any kind of message out these days

I swear I’m not trying to maximize my SEO or anything; I’ve just been really genuinely enjoying Halsey’s new album and all the overblown, ostentatious marketing about it.

When I saw the album cover on Apple Music — the singer posed as a queen on an elaborate throne of bent metal, wearing a crown, a relatively understated gown, and minimal make-up, with one breast exposed, looking to the side while holding a baby to face the viewer — I had the most geriatric response possible: “Well, good for her!”

But really, it’s such a good image and it says everything the album wants to say, perfectly and immediately: it’s about femininity, motherhood, and power. It fits in with the medieval aesthetic of the whole album and its associated IMAX movie, functioning perfectly as both marketing and as artist statement. It shouldn’t be controversial at all, and I was briefly happy to think that we’d all finally grown up enough to realize that it’s not controversial. That’s the end of that, and good for… oh no wait it can’t be that simple.

I was in Target yesterday, where there’s still a tiny section in which they try to sell music on physical media, and while I didn’t dare go into that section — it was full of darkness and mists, and the echoing cries of Ariana Grande — I did start wondering how the cover would be received when it was on display in the more prudish parts of the country. Won’t someone think of the children who have never been confronted with the sight of a woman’s breast?!

Sure enough, there’s a Target Exclusive Vinyl edition of the album, and its version of the cover is hilariously cautious, deftly pushing the baby up and over a skosh, so that its hand covers Halsey’s offending nipple.

I also found this article in Variety from July with a press statement (from Instagram, apparently) describing the cover as part of an attempt to get rid of the stigma around breastfeeding, and to dispel outdated notions of the Madonna/whore, in which a woman can be either motherly or sexual but not both. That’s giving wide exposure of a great message to a younger audience, and I’m all for it.

Except it’s undercut by the fact that the Variety article itself contains the censored version at the top and embeds the uncensored version via Instagram within the article. It’s a hypocritical double standard, just driving home that when marketing and artist statement are unable to peacefully co-exist, marketing is always going to win.

I’m still extremely thankful to that Variety article for exposing me to this fantastic video from Halsey’s team, unveiling the album artwork back in July at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s far too long at 13 minutes, most of which is dead time showing Halsey traipsing through the halls checking out depictions of the Madonna and other Renaissance Moms with an inscrutable expression somewhere between “I totally get it now” and “Holy hell I’ve got to pee again already it’s only been like five minutes being pregnant suuuuuuuhhhhhcccks.” They also look back to the camera occasionally, as if to say, “Do you get it yet?” Finally, they s l o w l y walk out to the lobby to reveal the main exhibit: a giant framed print of the cover, taller than they are. Halsey yanks off the covering and walks out of frame, as if to say, “Yeah, deal with it.”

I genuinely, unironically like the overblown audacity of the whole thing. And while I understand that it threatens to undermine Halsey’s own contributions to keep mentioning Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s work on this album, I don’t see it as a slight. It feels to me like a really successful collaboration. This video reminds me so much of the vibe of The Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails videos: simultaneously silly and cool. (“Mr. Reznor, please stop throwing your microphone away. We’ve talked about this. They’re expensive, and you need it to buy your house. These microphones are what make your house hot.”) I don’t like it because it’s silly — although my favorite part of the Met unveiling video by far is that they committed to the silent “Oh hello, I didn’t see you there,” opening, which is hilarious — it’s laughably absurd, and it’s thoughtful and earnest and well executed, at the same time, without collapsing into one or the other no matter how many times I observe it.

The idea behind the cover simply isn’t controversial; technically it may be more revealing but it’s still 10,000 times less sexualized than, say Halsey’s video for “You should be sad.” Which is itself a case of getting sillier and sillier as the video progresses, to the point where they’re sprawled out naked as Lady Godiva on a white horse. (And I’d bet you anything that the part that caused the most grief wasn’t all the mostly-nude people grinding on each other, but that they say “fucking” in a non-sexual context). After all, it’s not exactly news that record companies are eager to show super-sexualized images of young women to sell music, but will freak out if the young women try to take control over their own sexuality or to say anything with it.

But it’s not a particularly deep idea, either; certainly not something that requires 13 minutes of starting blankly at paintings to get across. It would be a little hypocritical to accuse anybody of making such a big deal out of an exposed breast, when the artist themselves is literally unveiling it in a museum.

It’s all part of this gigantic marketing blitz driven by people who have decided that Halsey is going to be a super-star no matter what, dammit. Just looking for articles for Halsey’s own take on the album, this weekend, I’ve learned more about them than I know about most musicians I actively follow. It feels invasive and, inescapably, less than genuine. I realize that that’s just how the business is now, where you have to have an entire alternate persona and multi-media marketing blitz just to make a dent in the public consciousness.

It’s also made it near impossible for commercial success to coexist with earnest sentiment. I’m not a fan of St Vincent’s current album Daddy’s Home, but I realized recently that it’s not just a case of disliking a bunch of songs while looking forward to the next album in a year or two. It feels like I’m rejecting this entire new persona she’s built for herself, pounding us over the head with 1970s imagery and merchandise that says “Daddy.” (And I confess I totally bought one of the Daddy shirts because I thought it’d be funny, and therefore I am part of the problem). It feels like it’s getting harder and harder to find out what’s real at the core of any of it, or whether it’s all just commerce.

Maybe sometime this century, the US will be able to get over its prudishness and misogyny, and stop sending out messages to women like “we’ll pay to see you naked, and you should be ashamed for it.” I’m just skeptical that the positive change is going to come embedded in a multi-million dollar marketing campaign.