Building Them Up While They Take You Down: Without Me

    “G-Eazy and I are taking some time apart.” This is what Ashley Frangipane, better known by her stage name, Halsey, posted on her Instagram story in July 2018 after she and her ex-boyfriend, rapper G-Eazy, split up. This breakup became the foundation of her 2018 song, Without Me. In this track, Halsey explores the emotional toll the relationship took on her and her feelings about how G-Eazy moved on so quickly. This song was written and released in October of 2018 after their very public relationship came to an official end, and it shows how G-Eazy was doing well again after the breakup (People Magazine). She wanted to both get her feelings out about her breakup as well as warn her fans about how love can quickly overtake self-preservation in a relationship. To convey this message, she uses metaphors along with rhetorical questions in her lyrics. She gets very vulnerable with her audience through the raw vocals and going into detail about the nature of the relationship, and uses this as another vehicle for her message. Ultimately, Without Me serves as a cautionary tale of how self-worth can be compromised in certain relationship dynamics, while also capturing the raw emotional aftermath of Halsey’s personal experience. 

    The song opens with the beginning of their tragic love story. She describes how G-Easy was fresh out of a breakup when they first started talking, then goes into a metaphor about how she acted in the beginnings of their relationship, trying to fix him. She sings, “I filled your cup until it overflowed/Took it so far to keep you close (keep you close)/I was afraid to leave you on your own.” This metaphor of filling his cup illustrates how much she did for him to help him heal and fix him and his broken heart. This metaphor is akin to the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today: A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids by Carol McCloud. This book uses buckets as a metaphor for happiness, and shows how others filling or taking from these buckets can affect the owner of the bucket’s overall mood or day. Halsey saying how she “filled his cup” uses this in a similar sense, and describes how she brought him up. Saying the cup “overflowed” shows how she went above and beyond, and how it may have been too much for the both of them, overwhelming and suffocating him while draining her. “Took it so far to keep you close” refers to the overflow of the cup in the previous line. She wanted to keep him with her, in her life, and she was scared to lose him, exemplified in the verse's last line. This verse shows the audience how more draining connections can be built, with one person’s entire mental stability relying on their partner. 

    The pre-chorus furthers Halsey’s narrative by introducing how he knowingly took advantage of her and got some of her pain from the relationship front and center. She builds up the agonizing melody throughout this part of the song to prepare the audience for the chorus. Halsey sings, “I said I'd catch you if you fall (fall)/And if they laugh, then fuck 'em all (all).” These two lines exhibit the promise she made to him and to herself, to save him from his broken heart. She acknowledges that others may hate on her for it, but she didn’t care at the time. All she cared about at the time was him and how he felt. In the last line of the pre-chorus, Halsey belts, “Just so you could take advantage of me.” This line lets out her feelings about the situation. The tone of her voice shows the hurt she felt by being taken advantage of by G-Eazy. She spends the entire first verse and first four lines of the pre-chorus showing the audience how much she did for him to take care of him and his feelings. This pre-chorus, repeated just twice throughout the song to the chorus’s three repetitions, serves as a cathartic release for Halsey, as she infuses her pain into this emotionally charged declaration. 

    The chorus illustrates Halsey’s confusion and hurt post-breakup. She didn’t understand how he could just leave her in the dust after everything she did for him. She sings, “You know I'm the one who put you up there/Name in the sky.” These third and fourth lines of the chorus express how Halsey knows she is the one who brought G-Eazy back from his heartbreak, and how the pair had a hit song, Him and I (2017), which solidified his place in the music industry at the time. Her saying she put his name in the sky claims she was the basis of his fame during their relationship and after they broke up. The next lines, “Does it ever get lonely?/Thinking you could live without me” express her disbelief that they didn’t work out and that he could leave so easily. She uses this rhetorical question as a way to convey this idea to the audience, which became less of a lyric in a song for fans and more of a cry for G-Eazy to take emotional responsibility for what he did to her. The last two lines of the chorus demonstrate how she questioned why she built him back up in the first place. She sings, “Baby, I'm the one who put you up there/I don't know why.” She restates what she said in the third line of the chorus, illustrating how she was the one to help him find himself again after how she found him: brokenhearted. The repetition highlights her grief while also emphasizing how low her self-worth was after the breakup, feeling used and taken advantage of. Her saying “I don’t know why” further exemplifies this feeling of low self-esteem and shows her reflection on the relationship. She didn’t know why she helped him, fixed him. The song is her searching for that answer while exploring her own feelings. While this chorus focuses on Halsey's processing rather than explicitly warning the audience, the vivid imagery of her pain is more than enough of an indirect deterrent to follow in her footsteps with this type of unhealthy relationship dynamic.

    The second verse focuses on the toll the relationship took on her. The verse illustrates how she tried to find love elsewhere, but continually returned to G-Eazy. She sings, “Gave love 'bout a hundred tries (hundred tries)/Just running from the demons in your mind.” By saying how she gave love a hundred tries, she is telling the audience how she was trying to escape the toxic dynamic she was in with G-Eazy, only to be pulled back into the pain and chaos surrounding him and their relationship. This is exemplified through singing how she was “running from the demons in his mind” which tells the audience of her break out of the cycle. She then goes on to illustrate how she took on all of his burdens and the pain she went through because of it. She sings, “Then I took yours and made 'em mine (made 'em mine)/I didn't notice 'cause my love was blind.” These two lines reveal how Halsey internalized G-Eazy’s various troubles as her own. She describes how her love was “blind,” which ties into the cautionary nature of the song: that unconditional attachment, like that of hers to G-Eazy, and emotional self-sacrifice can lead to the decay of one’s own well-being and sense of self.

    The bridge is a turning point in Halsey's perspective on the relationship. She starts to come to terms with the situation, changing from agony to acceptance as she sings, “You don't have to say (say)/Just what you did (you did)/I already know (I know)/I had to go and find out from them (oh, woah-oh).” Halsey says to G-Eazy that he doesn’t need to answer her questions, as posed in the chorus along with others, and that she already knows the answers. Although she is upset she had to hear from others, the tone suggests she no longer seeks, or requires, the closure of hearing it from him. The more detached nature of the bridge contradicts the intense emotional turmoil expressed in the other verses and chorus of the song, where she craves his validation and answers for why he left and how he could leave her. By letting go of her need for explanation, Halsey reclaimed some of the self-worth she lost in the duration of their relationship. It changed her from depending on his emotional stability for her own happiness to being independent and okay on her own, ultimately reinforcing the song’s warning about the dangers of losing oneself in unconditional emotional labor.

    In summary, Halsey’s 2018 breakup anthem, Without Me, expresses Halsey’s personal pain after her relationship with rapper G-Eazy. She delivers a deeply personal, and yet universally relatable, reflection on the love she and G-Eazy shared, vulnerability, and emotional imbalance. She tells the story of her relationship, starting with how she found G-Eazy, heartbroken from his last relationship, and going all the way to her acceptance of the situation. As Halsey reflects on her pain, she challenges both her ex and her audience to consider the cost of emotional sacrifice: Was it worth it to leave her after she built him back up? Could he really live without her? The vivid metaphors, like filling his cup or putting his name in the sky, and emotionally charged rhetorical questions used in the song, like asking if it was lonely without her, illustrate to the audience the turmoil the relationship stirred within her, both during and after. Halsey’s story of heartbreak cautions the audience about the toll losing oneself in the name of love can take. It serves as a heartbreaking reminder to the audience of how self-worth can deteriorate in toxic dynamics, and the importance of protecting it, no matter what.