The 2020s File Feature
Be Kind
Be Kind: Marshmello and Halsey's Electronic Pop Collaboration and Its 15 Weeks on the Hot 100 "Be Kind" by Marshmello and Halsey was released on May 1, 2020,…
01 The Story
Be Kind: Marshmello and Halsey's Electronic Pop Collaboration and Its 15 Weeks on the Hot 100
"Be Kind" by Marshmello and Halsey was released on May 1, 2020, and became one of the most commercially successful electronic pop collaborations of the year. The track debuted at number 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the chart week of May 16, 2020, representing its peak position, and spent fifteen weeks on the chart, demonstrating the kind of sustained audience engagement that distinguishes hits from novelties. It arrived during a period of significant cultural anxiety associated with the early months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and its thematic content, a gentle meditation on the importance of compassion and understanding in relationships, resonated with listeners navigating an unprecedented moment of collective disruption.
Marshmello, born Christopher Comstock on May 19, 1992, had by 2020 established himself as one of the most commercially successful electronic dance music producers and performers in the world. Known for his faceless performance identity, in which he appears publicly wearing a custom white helmet with a marshmallow-inspired design, he had built a massive fanbase through a combination of streaming-friendly melodic production, extensive social media engagement, and a persistent touring schedule. His previous major collaborations had included chart-topping records with Bastille, Kane Brown, and Khalid, establishing a pattern of pairing his electronic production sensibility with vocalists from across genre categories.
Halsey, born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane on September 29, 1994, in Edison, New Jersey, had built one of the most distinctive and commercially potent careers in contemporary pop music since her debut in 2015. Her album Manic, released in January 2020, had confirmed her status as a major pop force capable of generating significant commercial results across multiple formats. She had previously collaborated with The Chainsmokers on "Closer" (2016), which became one of the most commercially successful singles of the decade, and "Be Kind" represented another foray into electronic pop territory where her vocal style proved particularly effective.
The song was written by Marshmello, Halsey, and producer OAK, and the production reflects the melodic house and future bass aesthetics that Marshmello had developed over the preceding several years. The track features a relatively simple chord progression underpinning Halsey's distinctive breathy vocal delivery, with a build-and-drop structure that is characteristic of radio-friendly electronic dance music while being considerably more restrained in its sonic maximalism than pure EDM productions targeting festival audiences. This restraint made the track accessible across multiple radio formats, contributing to the breadth of its chart penetration.
The music video, directed in coordination with the release, featured imagery that emphasized connection and vulnerability, themes that aligned directly with the song's lyrical content. Released during a period when the pandemic had disrupted physical human connection on a global scale, the video's visual language of reaching toward one another and choosing compassion resonated with audiences in ways that could not have been fully anticipated during the song's production phase, but which proved fortuitously timely.
"Be Kind" was certified platinum by the RIAA, reflecting cumulative streaming and download activity that confirmed its commercial success beyond the initial chart run. Its YouTube video accumulated over 136 million views, making it one of the most-watched videos of the collaboration. The song performed well on multiple chart categories beyond the Hot 100, including the Hot Dance and Electronic Songs chart, where it reached the top five, and the Mainstream Top 40 chart, confirming its crossover appeal across format boundaries.
The commercial and creative partnership between Marshmello and Halsey reflected broader trends in 2020 popular music, where the boundaries between electronic dance music, pop, and alternative pop had become increasingly porous. The streaming era's dissolution of format silos had made it easier for artists with established followings in one genre category to find audiences in adjacent categories, and "Be Kind" exemplified this dynamic: Marshmello brought his electronic fanbase and Halsey brought her alternative pop audience, and the combined result was a mainstream crossover hit that neither artist would have been as likely to achieve independently.
Pandemic Context and Cultural Resonance
The particular cultural timing of "Be Kind" deserves emphasis as a factor in its commercial success. Songs with explicitly positive and compassionate themes often perform well during periods of collective stress, as listeners seek affirmation and emotional sustenance through music. The pandemic spring of 2020 was an extraordinary period of collective need in this regard, and "Be Kind" offered a simple but genuinely felt message that proved widely resonant. The song's commercial trajectory across its fifteen weeks on the Hot 100 charts the arc of a cultural moment: its debut strength reflected immediate appetite for its message, and its sustained presence reflected the continuation of the conditions that made that message feel urgent.
02 Song Meaning
Compassion, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Emotional Presence in "Be Kind"
"Be Kind" addresses a tension that sits at the center of many intimate relationships: the gap between what a person is going through internally and what they are able to communicate to the people who care about them. Halsey's vocal performance delivers the song's perspective as someone who is struggling and who needs a particular quality of emotional response from their partner, specifically the quality of kindness that requires no explanation or justification, the kind that is given because it is needed rather than because it has been earned. This is a nuanced emotional position, and the song articulates it with clarity and without self-pity.
The central ethical argument of "Be Kind" is that kindness in intimate relationships is not merely a pleasant quality but a form of moral responsibility. The song's narrator is not asking for extraordinary generosity; the request is for the basic compassion that ought to characterize close human relationships, particularly during moments of personal difficulty. The implication that this baseline of compassion is somehow in question, that it needs to be explicitly requested, gives the song its emotional tension and its relevance to the experiences of listeners who have been in relationships where emotional support was conditional or inconsistent.
Halsey's vocal delivery is the primary vehicle for the song's emotional meaning. Her breathy, slightly fragile tone on "Be Kind" is well-matched to the lyrical content, suggesting vulnerability without descending into helplessness. She delivers the request for kindness with a dignity that refuses to beg; the tone is direct and clear even when the emotional content is tender. This balance between vulnerability and dignity is difficult to achieve in vocal performance, and Halsey's success at achieving it here is one of the reasons the song connected as broadly as it did with listeners across demographic categories.
The pandemic context in which "Be Kind" found its largest audience expanded its thematic range beyond the specifically romantic. In the spring and summer of 2020, the request to be kind carried societal as well as interpersonal dimensions. The pandemic had created conditions of collective stress in which the quality of how people treated one another, in physical spaces, online, and in their intimate relationships, was under unusual pressure. The song's simple ethical instruction resonated as a response to this broader social condition as well as to its more immediate interpersonal concerns.
Marshmello's production choices serve the song's thematic content by creating a sonic environment that is simultaneously warm and slightly melancholic. The melodic figures that run through the arrangement have a gentle persistence that mirrors the song's central emotional posture: not demanding, but present and sustained. The build-and-release structure characteristic of electronic dance music production is employed here in a muted form, suggesting the possibility of relief without aggressively pursuing it. The overall sonic effect is of a track that holds space for difficult feelings rather than resolving them prematurely.
The song participates in a tradition of pop music that has consistently used the romantic relationship as a lens through which to examine broader questions about how people treat each other. The request to be kind is simultaneously intimate and universal, and the best pop songs that employ this move manage to honor both dimensions without sacrificing either. "Be Kind" largely succeeds at this balance, which explains why it resonated with listeners across a range of relational contexts and emotional situations far broader than the specific romantic scenario its production narrative might imply.
The cultural conversation about mental health and emotional support that had been gaining momentum through the late 2010s provided an additional framework through which many listeners understood the song. The explicit request for emotional attunement from an intimate partner aligns with the vocabulary of mental health discourse that had become increasingly mainstream in popular culture, and "Be Kind" can be heard as a contribution to this broader cultural conversation about the emotional labor of relationships and the importance of naming what one needs from the people closest to them.
The collaborative dynamic between Marshmello and Halsey reflects something meaningful about the song's thematic concerns as well. The collaborative process itself requires a degree of emotional attunement between artists, a mutual willingness to be present to the other's vision while also contributing one's own. The fact that this collaboration produced a song about the importance of kindness and mutual vulnerability is, at minimum, a felicitous alignment between the process of the song's creation and its content.
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