BILLIE’S WORLD
HOW BILLIE EILISH’S BRAND OF DREAMY, MACABRE ANTI-POP TURNED HER INTO A NEW KIND OF HIT MAKER
This is Billie Eilish’s world – we’re just living in it
TTHE COACHELLA MUSIC FESTIVAL , not necessarily known for its adorable moments, offered up the pop equivalent of two baby pandas playing when Billie Eilish met her idol, Justin Bieber, for the first time last year.
The meeting was of two pop prodigies, ages 18 and 26, at rather different points in their careers. The walls of Eilish’s childhood bedroom were once papered with images of Bieber, and when he enfolded her oversized denim bootleg
Louis Vuitton–logoed self in a long embrace, a chasm seemed to yawn underneath their adjacent but distinct generations. Eilish, whose album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 last year, isn’t the first young singer to make hit records out of dark sonic tableaux. But the totality of her effect on the pop landscape – from her whispered anti-anthems to her blob-like anti-fashion to the sense of it’s-really-me relatability she provides to her fans – has made her immediate predecessors seem almost passé.
‘This whole time I’ve been getting this one sentence,’ Eilish says, ‘like, I’m a rule-breaker. I’m flattered that people think that, but it’s like, what rule did I break? The rule about making classic pop music and dressing like a girly girl? I never said I’m not going to. I just didn’t do it.’
WHEN WE MEET FOR THE INTERVIEW, Eilish is at home in the house she grew up in and still shares with her parents in Los Angeles. This is where Eilish prefers to do her interviews, and she does much of her self-disclosure on a window bench in the kitchen, in earshot of her mother, Maggie.
Eilish, whose full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’connell (Billie after her maternal grandfather, William, who died a few months before she was born; Eilish, the name of an Irish conjoined twin whom her parents discovered in a documentary; Pirate, which her older brother, Finneas, began calling her before she was born; followed by her parents’ surnames), tugs at her white socks.
In January, she became the first woman in history to take home all four big prizes at the Grammys.
She came dressed for a rave while everyone else looked like they were at a school dance. She’s playful in person, but her art has thus far been unrelentingly dark. Her videos brim with the macabre: black tears sliding from her heavy-lidded eyes, tarantulas creeping out of her mouth, needles shot into her back, cigarettes being extinguished on her cheeks. But then Eilish’s generation was born to a surfeit of grim realities. Many of her peers not called to action have opted to hide out in their rooms, living virtually and numbing themselves with tranquillisers. Eilish speaks to them, too, in her giant I-won’t-grow-up pyjamas. She sees into their loneliness in “When the Party’s Over”; in songs like “Xanny,” she warns them about Xanax abuse.
For all the encroaching gloom, Eilish’s childhood was a loving place in which all manner of artistic expression was encouraged. Her brother, a songwriting prodigy, her best friend and constant collaborator, paved the way.
WHILE EILISH HAS been Open about her depression, she insists that her penchant for dark material preceded and has generally been independent of her mood.
For years she liked to say that “Fingers Crossed” – inspired by an episode of The Walking Dead – was the first song she ever wrote as part of a songwriting class. But recently she came across songs she wrote at 11, including one called “Why Not”. The lyrics of the song had a simple, morbid premise: if she killed herself, everything would be the same; the stars would still shine, the sun would still come out, the seasons would still change. So why not? Her friends loved it.
‘I’d never felt suicidal,’ she says.
‘But I liked the idea of writing about something I didn’t know about.’
Her songs are never strictly autobiographical. She and Finneas develop characters and write from their perspective: the monster under the bed in “Bury a Friend”; a girl who’s just killed her friends and is grappling with guilt in “Bellyache”. Eilish notes that artists she admires such as Lana Del Rey and Tyler, the Creator have created dark alter egos in their songwriting. ‘There’s a difference between lying in a song and writing a story, and there are lots of songs where people are just lying. There’s a lot of »
that in rap, from people I know.
‘It’s like, “I got my AK-47,” and I’m like, what? You don’t have a gun. “And all my bitches,” and I’m like, which bitches? That’s posturing, and that’s not what I’m doing.’
Although she insists that her songs don’t glorify death, fans who are suffering connect to them, which for a young artist can be a burden. ‘People tell me at meet and greets, “My daughter was hospitalised five times this year, and your daughter’s music has been the only thing keeping her going,”’ Maggie explains. ‘It’s very intense.’
Eilish connects her own depression to a concatenation of events in her early adolescence, but above all, her appearance.
‘I just hated my body. I’d have done anything to be in a different one,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to be a model, really bad, and I was chubby and short. I developed really early. So my body was going faster than my brain. It’s funny, because when you’re a little kid, you don’t think of your body at all. And all of a sudden, you look down and you’re, like, whoa. What can I do to make this go away?’ She engaged in some self-injurious behaviour that she doesn’t elaborate on. She thought of suicide. But by June last year, after some changes in her life that she prefers to keep private, the fog began to lift.
WITH An ARSENAL OF TOXIC COLOURS , chaotic prints, and bootleg European luxury-brand emblems (to which luxury brands have responded by sending her the genuine articles), Eilish seems always to be flouting the proprietary or predatory gaze. While we might politicise her look as post-#metoo dressing that has wrested skater style from the dominion of men and boys, Eilish makes clear that her look isn’t a protest against anyone. In an interview with Pharrell last year, she said, ‘The positive comments about how I dress have this slutshaming element. Like, “I’m so glad that you’re dressing like a boy, so other girls can dress like boys, so that they aren’t sluts.” That’s basically what it sounds like. And I can’t overstate how strongly
I don’t appreciate that.’
For all her no-fucks nonchalance, it’d be impossible to cast Eilish as a cool girl. Selfpossessed, transgressive without trying too hard, unimpressed by the traditional hallmarks of mass culture, she doesn’t appear to be making choices that serve to maintain an aura. She isn’t a rebel. Finneas explains that there was no need for such in the O’connell household.
‘I don’t know what a conventional childhood is.
‘I have friends who reacted to one, I guess, who’ve wanted to move out their whole lives,’ he explains. ‘But, truth be told, we’ve never had that feeling.’
Eilish and O’connell’s relatively simple musical formula – setting off her airy vocals against spare, spacey beats – suits their preference for writing, recording, and editing their music at home. ‘We’d go into the studio and work with someone, and it was fine, but nothing ever did what me and Finneas alone do. And I think it’s how we’ll keep doing it.’
While Eilish has broken away from pop’s recent sights and sounds, she’s also playing the game according to the rules of the streaming era. She’d already hit the one-billion-streams mark before her first album debuted, and the singles preceding it came out of good, old-fashioned artist development: they were coordinated by her team to hit multiple playlists at once, gathering a wider fan base.
Eilish isn’t embarrassed to admit that she yearned for pop stardom: there was her surprise Grammys sweep, Oscars performance and the theme song to the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die – and that’s just this year so far. As her fame grows, it gets easier to imagine herself as a casualty of the pop machine, or in any case to identify with those whom fame has disfigured. ‘As a fan growing up, you’re like, What the fuck is wrong with them?’ she recalls. ‘All the scandals. The Britney moment. But now I’m like, Oh, my God, of course they had to do that. In my dark places
I’ve worried that I was going to become the stereotype that everybody thinks every young artist becomes, because how can they not?’
The erosion of her privacy has become another burden. The previous weekend, she and her father took their dog for a walk. No one seemed to recognise her. But by morning, photos of them were all over the internet. ‘I dress fly all the time, so it’s not like they’re getting a picture of me looking crazy,’ she jokes. But for now, she has no intention of leaving her parents’ home. ‘I love my parents. My brother comes here all the time because he likes it here. He likes us, too. So there’s a good balance of...’
She pauses to consider her current circumstances, which aren’t so different from those of any teenager: craving independence but still in need of a parent’s watchful eye. ‘No, actually there isn’t a balance; forget it. I’m fine. Whatever. I have a car. A car is enough.’