There are few modern contexts in which you can still glimpse the pagan-era phenomenon of an uprising against a living god. I hope to witness the day when North Korea’s communist quasi-theocracy is consumed in righteous popular fury. Until then, I’ll have the spectacle of Billie Eilish’s Sept. 24 performance at New York’s Governors Ball music festival to sustain me. A few songs into the zoomer messiah’s Friday night headlining set, fans felt the waning of the initial adrenaline hit and subsequently began to notice how awful the whole thing sounded.
Eilish’s vocals were buried deep in a swampy mix and played at conspicuously low volume, certainly softer than Leon Bridges’s had been on the same stage four hours earlier. Midcrowd, it was impossible to distinguish between the backing tracks and the live vocals, and only an insider or a clairvoyant could know whether those tracks were played live from a sampler operated by Finneas O’Connell, Eilish’s multi-instrumentalist older brother and musical collaborator, or were instead being keyed in from offstage. The mix almost seemed calculated to make the live and preset elements blur into one another. It was probably the worst-sounding major show I’ve ever attended over my long and diverse career as a live music fan. Chants of “turn it up,” audible across the festival grounds at the Citi Field parking lots and unheeded by anyone with any power to do anything about it, constantly erupted from the throng.
I have a dark suspicion as to why one of the biggest gigs of Eilish’s career, a headlining set in a global media capital on the heels of a successful album release, sounded the way it did. In-studio, Eilish takes full advantage of her vocal shortcomings, whispering and moaning, toeing the boundaries between speech and melody to mesmerizing effect. But there are YouTube compilations of Eilish’s voice cracking, including during shows in front of large audiences. In almost every instance, she stops and smiles and generally seems flustered, possibly aware of how hard or even impossible it is for her to replicate the delicate, flickering quality of her studio vocals within the unforgiving crucible of live art. It’s weirdly difficult to pin down audience footage of her other recent festival performances, though from what little I could find, her recent headlining set at Delaware’s Firefly Music Festival had the same timid, overproduced, and underamplified quality as her show in New York.
By now, Eilish must expect everyone to be belting every lyric at any gig she plays, taking a bit of pressure off the artist herself. I doubt she thinks we’ve arrived in a truly soulless world where concert sound quality is only a codger’s concern, where audiences have been conditioned out of the expectation that live music will feature anything real or spontaneous, though maybe Eilish figures that gripes like mine matter less than the exhilaration that the vast majority of audience members feel at merely being in the presence of their hero. In that case, she’d be correct. Still, in a past age, an artist fobbing an intentionally inferior product off onto fans would have been considered cynical. But attitudes have changed, and there’s actually little in our culture that captures the turn toward aesthetically and spiritually deadening notions of self-care and the replacement of once-durable ideals of character and virtue with soft clinical jargon more compellingly than Eilish’s music does.
The empty Governors Ball spectacle of lasers and flashing lights is almost the opposite of the sensibility that shines through on her studio work. Her music is spare and often cerebral, and her lyrics are a tangle of hard-earned, contradictory feelings. She summons a world-weariness that lends credibility to her more adult themes, and only a boor would consider her substanceless. “My Future,” a standout track from Happier Than Ever, her chart-topping sophomore full-length album released this past summer, is a sultry piano ballad about rejecting sex in the name of self-discovery but held at a pace so wanderingly downtempo as to save it from being misread as a straightforward empowerment anthem. The next track, the infectious yet uneasy “Oxytocin,” swings to the opposite psychic pole. It’s an almost-satire of a club banger, with a repetitive, mechanical beat galloping over a description of a casual sexual encounter that’s as steamy as it is alienated. In album-closer “Male Fantasy,” she sings about the inner deadness of porn consumption over a rattling acoustic guitar.
Eilish, who sang at the Democratic National Convention and made the obligatory nods toward the climate emergency and Black Lives Matter during her Governors Ball set, isn’t really a subversive figure. Still, music as weird and complex as hers almost never gets as popular as hers has. Eilish’s runaway success is a rebuttal to the cultural declinists and catastrophists out there, a lot of whom aren’t predisposed to taking 19-year-old pop stars all that seriously to begin with. She is diffident and vulnerable, a self-aware super-woman, an ironist of palpable, even aching sincerity. She dresses like a goth but seems to know that isn’t really her. In 20 years, when Dua Lipa will be lucky to be soundtracking Bar Mitzvah parties, people not yet born will still be hearing Eilish as the voice of their subconscious speaking back to them.
But when that voice is actually singing to adoring present-day fans, singing in exchange for hundreds of dollars, and after hours spent standing in a stadium parking lot in the late summer heat, can’t it at least be a little louder, a little more willing to push itself?
The answer goes beyond just Eilish. Today, notions of self-improvement come through a therapeutic filter, as if there is nothing so noble as to feel well, or at least as well as the mysterious admixture of oppressive social convention and brain chemistry will allow. “I’m in love, but not with anybody else/Just wanna get to know myself,” Eilish croons on “My Future.” Does self-knowledge mean leaving the volume down in the name of inner equanimity or turning it up, leaping headlong into whatever comes next, straight into a creative frontier unknowable to you and to the tens of thousands of people in front of you? Eilish’s music lives within a space of not always being so sure. For the sake of the culture she now defines, I wish its creator were less sure, too.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
