“Monster” by Gabbie Hanna

It’s funny how there was a controversy, as expounded on later in the article, between the music video to this song and that of Bebe Rexha’s “Sabotage” (2021). For now that we are actually analyzing “Monster”, it seems the similarities between the two tracks are not only relegated to the associated visuals. That is to say that lyrically they are based on similar themes also. And that is the vocalist’s perceived tendency to destroy the interpersonal relationships in her life.

But Gabbie Hanna is less direct in coming to this conclusion than Bebe Rexha. For the former, it is more like she is postulating. She has come to realize that “one after another” the people that she tends to get close to, including the addressee, are “dropping like flies” out of her life. 

The Monster

Also, unlike “Sabotage”, she is not clearly able to perceive why such is transpiring. In other words, she doesn’t recognize driving people away as being one of her flaws per se. Instead it’s more like since such keeps happening, she is starting to take a deep look in the mirror. And that is to say that she is exercising the idea that maybe she is responsible. Maybe she is the one, “the monster” as it is termed within this narrative, who is causing these relationships to come apart.

But at the same time, it should also be noted that there is a strong sense of victimization in the lyrics. Or put differently, the fact that friends may disassociate themselves from the singer while not revealing any reason why they are doing so is contributing to the overall confusion, i.e. the narrator questioning her own humanity. 

Yet despite being the recipient of such abuse in the form of unfair treatment, she still desires to make things right with the addressee.

So have you ever been in one of those situations where perhaps a friend stops talking to you, yet you don’t know why? And then after a certain amount of time, even though you can’t recall doing anything to offend them, you start to feel like you did? That appears to be what the narrator of this song is going through. 

She feels she has turned off so many people without even trying – most pointedly the addressee, who reads like an associate she values – that maybe there is something intrinsically wrong with her. 

So the whole ordeal comes off as sort of a self-esteem issue, because at the same time, in the back of her mind, the vocalist knows that given the circumstances she’s actually the one that’s being mistreated.

Gabbie Hanna

Gabbie Hanna is an entertainer who has made a name for herself not so much as a musician but more so as an internet personality. What that means for her personally is that she blew up on the now-defunct Vine before subsequently taking her act, known as The Gabbie Show, to YouTube. 

In fact in 2018 she won a couple of Streamy Awards for her efforts, one individually for Storyteller. The other award was as part of the Ensemble Cast of a series known as David’s Vlog. And as of the writing of this post in May of 2021, her own The Gabbie Show YouTube channel boasts of nearly 6,000,000 subscribers. Furthermore Hanna also enjoys nearly 3,000,000 followers on her Instagram account.

Gabbie also takes her music seriously, having dropped over 10 singles between 2017 and 2020, as well as one EP, 2WayMirror, in 2019 and another, Bad Karma, the following year. And she’s had a couple of notable hits to date, those being 2017’s Out Loud (which was her debut single) and 2018’s Honestly.

Meanwhile “Monster” also managed to chart. It peaked at number 19 on Billboard’s Pop Digital Songs list. And to note, this is a track which Gabbie independently released herself.

More about “Monster”

There is also an encore to this song known as Monster (Reborn) which Gabbie Hanna usually performs side-by-side. In fact the music video to this track, which Ryan Parma directed, serves as a double for both tunes.

“Monster” was produced by Some Randoms, a pair of music producers. And they also co-wrote the track alongside Gabbie.

This song’s release date was on 26 October 2018. Later the same year, Gabbie promoted the single via a “Verified” interview with the music website Genius. And the audio/video associated with her performing “Monster” in that venue became a popular internet meme, dubbed “what if I’m the monster”, where fans more or less made fun of said performance. But Gabbie took it all in good spirits. She even went about selling merch associated with the meme.

“Monster” and Bebe Rexha

And “Monster” made headlines again in 2021. This time around it was for yet another incident that was not directly related to the song per se. Instead another, more-popular singer named Bebe Rexha dropped a single in April of that year entitled “Sabotage”, complete with its own music video. 

And viewers recognized, shall we say strong similarities between that clip and the music video for “Monster”. Bebe’s response, once these plagiarism-laced accusations became public, was interesting. According to her, she “never heard of” Gabbie Hanna “but now”, since “great minds think alike”, “will listen to her music”. 

Meanwhile Gabbie herself more or less blamed the situation on the director of the “Sabotage” clip, that being Christian Breslauer. 

Gabbie also went on to explain that at first she was going to “stay silent and shut up”. But then, perceiving this as yet another case of a smaller artist being taken advantage of by a more-prominent one she decided to speak out. She however, stopped short of putting the blame on Rexha.