How Halsey Became the Voice of Her Generation

The 21-year-old singer/songwriter/social media sensation has an out-of-nowhere hit album and a surprising sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, but that hasn’t kept her from (over)sharing every detail of her life with her hyper passionate followers, from her history of mental illness to her love of boy bands and Bernie Sanders: “I talk to them like real f—ing human beings”

- Jonathan Ringen

Halsey has her face buried in her iPhone, staring at it so intently that the outside world might as well not exist. she’s in the back seat of a black suV slowly threading its way through Manhattan traffic. Just 15 minutes earlier, the 21-year-old singer — her real name is Ashley Frangipane — abruptly decided she had had enough of Kanye West’s Madison square Garden fashion show-slash-listening party, where the Mc debuted The Life of Pablo. Wearing blingy sunglasses, a torso- baring bandeau and baggy yeezy-designed pants, her cropped hair pasted against her scalp in cool little swirls, Halsey emerged from the arena’s backstage entrance with her small entourage and headed for the car. she seemed simultaneously relieved and disappointed to discover that no photographers were waiting for her.

Now, in the SUV, Halsey is furiously multitasking -- fact-checking the lyrics she had just heard (“Did he say, ‘Every bad bitch in the Equinox, I want to know if you’re a freak or not?’ ”) and dipping into the roiling online conversation her fans maintain about her at all hours. She tweets the Kanye lyric to her 1.2 million Twitter -followers and points to her phone, where countless direct messages have accrued. Unlike most stars, she consistently and directly engages with fans -- the majority of the 3,000 people she follows on Twitter love her music, although they sometimes drive her crazy. “I talk to them like real f---ing human beings, because they are,” she says. “But then there’s also a sense of entitlement, where they feel like they have the right to chastise me like they would a friend. And sometimes you want to be like, ‘Who the f--- are you to say that?’ ”