How does an 18-year-old with green hair sweep the awards on music’s biggest night?
Last Sunday night, breakout pop star Billie Eilish took home four Grammy Awards: song of the year, record of the year, album of the year, and best new artist.
She’s the youngest artist to receive the award for album of the year (with Fearless, Taylor Swift was 20). And she’s the second person ever to sweep all big four categories. The last time was Christopher Cross in 1981, with the song Sailing off his self-titled album.
Less celebrated were fellow breakout artists Lizzo, who earned eight nominations but only three wins, and 20-year-old rapper Lil Nas X, who tied with Eilish for second-most nominations, but scored only two wins.
Ariana Grande fans were devastated that she didn’t win any of the five categories she was nominated in, but her loss makes sense. While the 26-year-old Grande sings a materialistic message that embodies the sort of easy glamour in so much pop music (“You like my hair? Gee, thanks, just bought it”), Eilish speaks a language much closer to the ground: “My soul? So cynical.”
Eilish, like so many in her generation, seems missionless. She sings with the voice of a generation that has grown up inundated with news about school shootings and climate change on the one hand and vapid viral trends and Instagram-fueled beauty standards in another.
With the patch of lime green atop her black hair and her baggy clothes, Eilish may look odd, but there’s a reason she dresses the way she does. Last year, she explained, “I never want the world to know everything about me. I mean, that’s why I wear big, baggy clothes. Nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath, you know?”
This is a coping mechanism for fame, yes, but it’s a coping mechanism that strikes a nerve for Generation Z. Like a teenager curled in the corner on her phone, Eilish sings in lovely: “Isn’t it lovely, all alone?”
When Eilish won album of the year for When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, she appeared on stage with her brother and producer, 22-year-old Finneas O’Connell.
“We didn’t write a speech for this because we didn’t make this album to win a Grammy,” O’Connell said when it was time for his half of the acceptance speech. “We didn’t think it would win anything, ever. We wrote an album about depression and suicidal thoughts and climate change and being the bad guy — whatever that means. And we stand up here, confused and grateful.”
Eilish became so popular in part because she sings, frankly, about the mental health problems that plague her generation without pretending to have all the answers. She’s just as “confused” as the rest of them.
