Billie Eilish, the 17-year-old pop star whose album just topped the Billboard Hot 200, is on a roll.
“When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” may be her first LP, but it’s already breaking records. Thanks to new hits such as “Bad Guy” and “Xanny,” Eilish had 14 songs on the Hot 100, a record for the most simultaneous hits among women.
Eilish is beckoning in a new era of teen pop. Yet she dresses for the grunge era that ended before she was born. It’s appropriate Foo Fighters frontman and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl compared Eilish’s connection with her audience to that of his former iconic band the year “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out: “My daughters are obsessed with Billie Eilish. And what I’m seeing happening with my daughters is the same revolution that happened to me at their age. My daughters are listening to Billie Eilish and they’re becoming themselves through her music. She totally connects to them. So we went to go see her play at the Wiltern, and the connection that she has with her audience is the same thing that was happening with Nirvana in 1991.”
If “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a cacophony of rebellion and inscrutability, Eilish’s “Bad Guy” is a contradictory feminist anthem for the 21st century.
“My soul? So cynical,” she sings in the No. 7 hit. “Bad Guy” is about a “tough guy” who likes “it really rough,” but who doesn’t realize he’s not actually in charge. “I’m the bad guy,” Eilish reveals. “I like it when you take control/ Even if you know that you don’t.” The music video takes Eilish’s power trip up a notch, with the singer pouring milk into a passed-out man’s mouth and sitting on another’s back while he does pushups.
Eilish’s other music videos and lyrics also dwell in the macabre and rebellious. She sings of suicide (“I wanna end me”), despair (“My Lucifer is lonely/ There’s nothing left to save now”), and feminism (“I’m not your baby/ If you think I’m pretty”). In press photos, Eilish keeps her lips pursed and her eyes droopy. No, she won’t give you a smile, unless she’s giving an interview.
Speaking on “The Ellen Show” this month, Eilish joked about Grohl being so old that her parents used to listen to him, and then she opened up about her diagnosis with Tourette’s syndrome.
“It’s not anything different, you know? I never said anything because I didn’t want that to define who I was,” she said. “I think I’ve also learned that a lot of my fans have it, which made me feel kind of more at home with saying it. And also I felt like there was a connection there.”
In this way, Eilish has drawn support from her fans. But in another sense, her fame has overwhelmed her. “It’s hard to make friends when you can’t go out to lunch” without getting mobbed, she told the Los Angeles Times. “I can invite someone over, but that’s giving them my address. They’ll see my car with my license plate. They could take a picture of me in my room while I’m changing and blackmail me.”
Eilish’s disaffected, “my soul so cynical” image may grow with her fame, but it also may reflect her own generation. A majority of American teens are worried about the mental health of their peers, with anxiety and depression becoming less stigmatized and more of an avenue for bonding. When Eilish sings, “Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now,” many of her fans feel heard, too.
Eilish stands apart from other young artists such as Khalid, the 21-year-old singer she joined for the song “Lovely.” Khalid sings about youth with all the earnestness of a classic high school movie. In “Saturday Nights,” he croons to a lover with a dysfunctional family, “And all the things that I know/ That your parents don’t/ They don’t care like I do.”
In “Lovely,” the young artists’ collaboration, they sing of a subject dark enough for Eilish and teen-movie enough for Khalid: isolation. The song appeared in “13 Reasons Why,” a TV show about a high school student who commits suicide. In it, they sing, “Need a place to hide, but I can’t find one near/ Wanna feel alive, outside I can fight my fear.” Then Eilish embraces the solitude, asking, “Isn’t it lovely, all alone?”
She’s a new type of teen, one that more aptly describes the generation born after 9/11.
She’s cynical, sad, but most of all self-aware. In “When the Party’s Over,” Eilish asks a question that could distinguish her runaway success from its unintended consequences. She could even pose it to some of her more vulnerable fans: “Don’t you know I’m no good for you?” Eilish embodies many of the pains of modern youth, so as she holds up a mirror to Generation Z, the reflection may not always be pretty.
Madeline Fry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
