Billie Eilish and the Changing Face of Pop
NEW YORKER
In January, Billie Eilish’s music reached a billion streams on Spotify.
While performing at Coachella, earlier this month, the singer-songwriter Billie Eilish forgot the words to her song “All Good Girls Go to Hell.” Eilish, who is only seventeen, didn’t seem especially bothered by the lapse. She exuded a cool girl’s sprezzatura, style as nonchalance. Mumbling a little, Eilish wheeled around the stage, like a spinning top about to give out, and then hiked up her shorts, which, baggy and long, were messing with her torque. “Fuck,” she said, turning her back and her mood-ring-gray hair to the audience, “What the fuck are the words, though?” The mistake was so charming that it did not seem like a mistake at all. The audience yelped and the Internet squealed. “I love this,” one YouTube commenter said, below a clip of the performance. “She made it sound like it should have been a part of the song.”
Such reactions are the product of more than your average fan worship. I watch the clip of Eilish and feel a strange reassurance. If the teen idols of the nineties or two-thousands had cursed during a performance, they would have been excommunicated by the pop powers that be. Pop stardom, at the turn of the millennium, was an aggressively packaged and censorious business, necessarily hostile to the unplanned and instinctive, to the performance of anything like whimsy. The teens we revered moved in militaristic phalanxes, and, though they were forced to dress and live as virginal sex kittens, they seemed like robots programmed never to act out.
With her album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” which came out in March, Eilish became the first artist born in the two-thousands to rank No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. As its ruminative title suggests, the record is about teen angst, leavened by Eilish’s humor and by her fluency in ironic Internet shorthands. The album opens with “!!!!!!!,” a fourteen-second clip of Eilish giggling with her producing partner and elder brother, Finneas, as they make an announcement: “I have taken out my Invisalign, and this is the album.” Later, on “Bury a Friend,” Eilish samples the rough music of a dental drill used during her actual orthodontist appointment; Eilish has described the song as being written from the perspective of a monster hiding underneath the bed. In the music video, the whites of Eilish’s eyes are blacked out. In a sequence in a rubber room, her back is stabbed with syringes. Often, the darkness feels like satire: the song “My Strange Addiction” (“My doctors can’t explain / My symptoms or my pain”) takes its title from a TLC reality show and samples a scene from “The Office.”
Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell was born in Highland Park, Los Angeles, “three months after 9/11,” according to a profile of the singer in The Fader. She and Finneas, who is four years her senior, were homeschooled by their parents, who are both working actors. Eilish started writing music when she was eleven. Her freakish precocity recalls that of Taylor Swift, who was a strong enough songwriter to sign a record deal at fourteen. But Eilish has a husky, slurring voice that she can thin out to reedy. In subject and in tone she’s more like Regina Spektor or the godmother of West Coast weariness, Lana Del Rey (with whom she has in common a dalliance with hip-hop). Growing up, Eilish watched the film “Spice World” obsessively, not realizing that the girl group in the movie was real. She struggled with feelings of social inadequacy. “My 11-year-old brain was so sad and I didn’t know how to deal with it,” she told Billboard. She has a cinematic, out-of-body approach to songwriting; Eilish imagines herself as a sneaky jinn or a bored wallflower and then writes what she sees.
Finneas and Eilish have developed an anti-Svengali relationship; the two collaborate on a single, shared persona. In 2015, when she was thirteen, Eilish posted her breakout song, “Ocean Eyes,” to Soundcloud. The song had been written by her brother for his band, but Eilish convincingly translated the maudlin dreaminess of lyrics like “Burning cities and napalm skies / fifteen flares inside those ocean eyes.” The track blew up. Today, she has an enormous following among smart and jaded teen-age girls; in January, her music reached a billion streams on Spotify. Her skittish shuffle-step and spooky melodies are now getting radio play, too, but she remains an Internet phenomenon.
Eilish’s expression droops, and her eyes tilt upward like those of a possessed doll. Her quasi-goth style and horrorcore videos have prompted some critics to warn parents to “beware the pop princesses romanticizing death.” I’d argue that Eilish’s creepy confrontations of loss, fear, uncertainty, and death are just what younger listeners need. A generation that was born into a war and is accustomed to having videos of massacres autoplay on their devices should have limited patience for prefab bubblegum pop.
Eilish provides a covertly girlish perspective on the current male-dominated wave of moody, and pessimistic, “sad pop” music. But she has resisted gendered marketing of her music, and her songs mock teen-girl affectations even as some of them are about pining after a boy. She starts off the track “You Should See Me in a Crown” using a sexy baby voice, which dissolves into a sound that is pleasingly sinister. Like Lorde, the young gadfly she most resembles, Eilish has a severity to her. She sings to those of her generation who have grown exhausted by pill-popping numbness—on the song “Xanny,” she observes, “They just keep doing nothing / Too intoxicated to be scared”—and posits that what is actually seditious is to feel.
Eilish aspires to be “genreless,” a byword among young musicians who think that boundaries are passe. “I don’t want to be in the pop world,” she told the Times reporter Joe Coscarelli, over Facetime, in the “Diary of a Song” video series. Too late. The throne for a Gen Z pop royal is open and available. But if Eilish is the future of pop, as some have predicted, it is because pop is a changed sector, one that is ready to abandon materialist concerns and attend to existential ones.
Billie Eilish Redefines Teen-Pop Stardom on a Haunted, Heartfelt Debut Album
JON PARELES, NY TIMES
- When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
- NYT Critic's Pick
“I’m the bad guy,” Billie Eilish declares in “Bad Guy,” the first song on her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”; then the music pauses to splice in one spoken, very teenage syllable: “Duh!” You can hear the eyeroll.
Eilish, 17, has spent the last few years establishing herself as the negation of what a female teen-pop star used to be. She doesn’t play innocent, or ingratiating, or flirtatious, or perky, or cute. Instead, she’s sullen, depressive, death-haunted, sly, analytical and confrontational, all without raising her voice.
On singles and EPs, like her 2017 EP “Don’t Smile at Me,” Eilish’s songs have treated love as a power struggle, an absurd game, and a destructive obsession, racking up more than a billion streams from listeners who apparently share her sentiments. On her Instagram page, which has more than 15 million followers, she is brusquely anti-fashion, swaddling herself in shapeless, oversized, boldly colored clothes and making silly or ghoulish faces. “I do what I want when I’m wanting to/My soul so cynical,” she notes in “Bad Guy.” But that’s just her starting point. While Eilish’s previous releases have featured her flinty, defensive side, her debut album also admits to sorrows and vulnerabilities.
In some ways the album arrives as a continuation, not an introduction. Like her previous releases, it’s the work of a very small, decidedly innovative family team. Eilish writes and records her songs with her older brother, Finneas O’Connell, working largely at home. The sound they have built for her is sparse with instrumentation and large with implication. A typical track uses just a handful of parts, nearly all of them electronic: a bass line, a beat, only enough keyboard notes to sketch a harmony. Eilish sings barely above a whisper, a signal of intimacy.
But at any moment, the tracks are likely to flaunt their artificiality: adding samples or sound effects, distorting her voice, suddenly deploying a big bass drop. “Wish You Were Gay” — a guy is ignoring her, and she wishes he was indifferent to her gender rather than her in particular — starts with just acoustic-guitar chords and her voice, tokens of pop sincerity. But the mix also includes a tittering audience and applause at the end, insisting that the song is archly theatrical. In Eilish’s digital-native universe, it’s impossible to pretend that anything is unobserved or unmediated; everything is self-conscious.
While albums in the streaming era aren’t always made to be heard as a whole, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” traces a clear arc: from bravado to melancholy. Early in the album are songs like “You Should See Me in a Crown” — an ominously assured, sustained and then slamming claim to power — and the mocking, music-hall flavored “All the Good Girls Go to Hell,” as well as “Xanny,” a ballad that disdains the trendy overuse of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. But with a stretch of songs near the end of the album, Eilish turns to thoughts of grief, suicide and loneliness.
“Bury a Friend,” with a pulsing, nervous undercurrent and sampled screams, veers between mourning, lashing out and self-destructive thoughts. “Ilomilo” has a briskly plinking, near-ska beat, but it worries over a suicidal friend: “I might break/If you’re gonna die not by mistake.” In “Listen Before I Go,” a glacial piano ballad with looming reverberations, the narrator herself is suicidal; “Sorry, can’t save me,” she warns, and sirens at the end suggest the worst. It’s followed by the whispery “I Love You,” a hovering, hesitant confession: “I don’t want to, but I love you.”