Her own special way

ballad Ocean Eyes on the music-streaming platform in 2016.

She signed to Interscope Records that same year and has built fervent Instagram and Snapchat followings since. At a recent music business conference, former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl compared Eilish’s connection with her youthful audience to ‘‘what was happening with Nirvana in 1991’’.

‘‘My daughters are obsessed with Billie Eilish,’’ he said. ‘‘And what I’m seeing happening with my daughters is the same revolution that happened to me at their age. When I look at someone like Billie Eilish, I’m like, rock and roll is not even close to being dead.’’

In addition to Lana Del Rey and Amy Winehouse, Eilish has cited rappers Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt as inspirations because, as she told Elle magazine at 15, ‘‘a lot of the stuff that real rappers say is kind of ahead of what other people are saying’’.

In her work and interviews, Eilish addresses heavier topics, such as the toll fame can take on mental health, including on a video Vanity Fair published late last year of two juxtaposed Eilish interviews – one from October 2017, the other from October 2018.

‘‘I’m kind of jealous of Billie a year ago,’’ she said in 2018, more morose than before. ‘‘I’m really not about to pity myself for people recognising who I am, because I’m really grateful for it. But, I don’t know, I would like to go to, I don’t know, anywhere and not be always recognised.’’

With such a successful Billboard debut, Eilish has infiltrated the mainstream – she even appeared on Ellen Degeneres’ talk show, when they discussed her high-profile fans (Grohl, Thom Yorke, Julia Roberts) and her recent candidness about having Tourette syndrome.

Close scrutiny accompanies this level of fame, and Eilish has had a taste of online backlash. In Wish You Were Gay, which was first released as a single, she sings about wishing she had been rejected by a boy for a different reason: ‘‘To give your lack of interest an explanation/ Don’t say that I’m not your type/ Just say I’m not your preferred sexual orientation.’’

Some listeners accused Eilish of ‘‘gaybaiting’’ with the song’s title, and she responded by saying that the lyrics were ‘‘so not supposed to be an insult’’ and that they had been ‘‘a little bit misinterpreted’’.

Eilish has also had some flak for performing a tribute song to her friend Xxxtentacion, a rapper who was awaiting trial on domestic violence charges when he was killed last summer. ‘‘I want to be able to mourn, I don’t want to be shamed for it,’’ Eilish told The Times of the song. ‘‘I don’t think I deserve getting hate for loving someone that passed.’’

But Eilish’s success hasn’t faltered, as Billboard reports that her first release, the 2017 EP Don’t Smile at Me, has spent 67 weeks on the chart and peaked at No 14 in January. When We All Fall Asleep scored the second-largest sales week for any album released this year and, with 194 million ondemand streams in its debut week, set the record for the third-largest streaming week ever for a female artist. – Washington Post

Eilish will perform one sold out gig at Auckland’s Spark Arena on Wednesday, April 24.

Sixty years after The Twilight Zone was first broadcast, its influence on popular culture reaches far beyond the Fifth Dimension.

Just imagine a parallel universe where the spooky anthology series and its creator Rod Serling never existed. There would be no Star Trek ,no Twin Peaks ,no Black Mirror, no twist endings, no breaking of the fourth wall, and no-one whistling the ‘‘do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do’’ theme tune whenever something strange happens.

Originally broadcast from 1959 to 1964, The Twilight Zone told one-off tales of mystery, monsters and men from space, usually with a rug-pull twist – ‘‘They were dead all along! It was all a dream! The humans are the real monsters’’.

Serling himself played its suitwearing, chain-smoking host, who wandered into the stories to introduce the week’s mystery and warn viewers they were about to enter The Twilight

Zone.

Now it is set to return for 10 new episodes on TVNZ Ondemand from Monday, with Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele stepping into Serling’s role as ‘‘The Narrator’’, producer and co-writer.

What gave the original show its power was its sharp-minded political allegory and social conscience, tapping into the anxieties of the day through probing moral quandaries. Is it the anxieties of our own politically and socially turbulent era that make 2019 the right time to re-enter The Twilight Zone?

‘‘I think that you could do The Twilight Zone in any era,’’ says Glen Morgan, a writer and executive producer on the series. ‘‘You always think, ‘This era is really crazy’, but things are always crazy.’’

The team of producers, which includes Morgan, Peele, Blackkklansman producer Win Rosenfeld and Carol Serling, the wife of Rod, who died in 1975 at the age of 50, have vowed to create stories for the 21st century using Serling’s tools – ‘‘mischief, allegory, paranoia’’. They are also bringing back the original series’ iconic, unnerving theme tune.

The rebooted series promises to delve into such modern-day issues as celebrity, technology, race and terrorism. Guest names on board for individual episodes include Big Little Lies actor Adam Scott, Seth Rogen, Chris O’dowd and Jacob Tremblay, the child star of Room.

But Jordan Peele remains the face of the show. He is horror’s man of the moment, the director of 2017’s Oscar-winning Get Out, the well-reviewed Us, in cinemas

now, and a remake of

Candyman, due to be released next year. Morgan believes Peele will finally get it right.

‘‘Jordan has a vast knowledge of the genre,’’ he says. ‘‘His films are showing how to incorporate a social message into horror, the way Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist did. That’s why he’s the guy to do it.’’

Serling himself confessed that he was ‘‘traumatised’’ into writing by his experiences in World War II. He had been a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division and fought in the bloody Battle of Leyte. He returned to the US in 1946, but he was left with physical and mental scars.

Serling became a scriptwriter, firstly for radio and then TV. But he became frustrated with executives who meddled with his stories, terrified that his morally progressive scripts would upset conservative viewers and advertisers. The Twilight Zone concept allowed Serling to slip in his social and political commentaries via the Fifth Dimension.

‘‘His quote was, ‘It’s the writer’s job to menace the public’s conscience’,’’ says his daughter Anne, 63. ‘‘He was passionate about what was happening in the world – prejudice, mob mentality. Through The Twilight Zone, he was able to tell these stories, with the messages going under the radar.

‘‘These issues that he talked about way back when are still sadly relevant today. He would be deeply, deeply saddened by what’s happening [in America] now – and then he would be apoplectic.’’

After The Twilight Zone was cancelled in 1964, Serling went on to host and write for the notentirely-dissimilar horror anthology Night Gallery. He died 10 years later after a series of heart attacks.

‘‘I don’t know that he was aware of the impact he had,’’ says Anne. ‘‘He would be stunned and humbled that people are still talking about his work.’’

The Twilight Zone screens on TVNZ Ondemand from Monday.