Billie Eilish Signals the Dominance of Gen Z in (Anti-)Pop Music, Or: Fiona Apple Redux

Ah, gone are the days of such straightforward simplicity as being called a “Pop Princess.” Even Ariana Grande isn’t quite the same animal as a Britney Spears or fellow teen TV star-turned-pop star Hilary Duff. For now, one’s “personal lyrics” are far too important to the “business” of artistry. And, what’s more, taking a page from the Lana Del Rey blueprint of internet fame, Billie Eilish’s level of well-knownness (more precisely notoriety to those “old fart millennials” she doesn’t resonate with) already has more hype around it than it took for an 00s pop star to get after releasing a debut. But in the present, all that fanfare must come before. And that it did with Eilish’s first single, “Ocean Eyes,” published on YouTube almost exactly three years ago (March 24, 2016) to the day of WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?’s release (March 29, 2019). Written by her brother and sole collaborator/producer Finneas O’Connell, the surreal yet simple video brought a face to the then thirteen-year-old ingenue. Yes, thirteen. It all smacks eerily of Vox Lux. From there, it was a proverbial runaway train, with singles “Bellyache,” “Watch,” “Copycat” and “Idontwannabeyouanymore” all going platinum and eventually appearing on the EP Don’t Smile At Me.

To further embody the accelerated pace of pop stardom in the twenty-first century, Eilish soon after embarked on the Where’s My Mind Tour (not a nod to The Pixies but lyrics from “Bellyache”) from February to April of 2018, commencing in London and ending in Salt Lake City. Though Del Rey might be a cited influence (immortalized in a photo of Eilish being cradled by her Mother Superior after the 2018 ASCAP Awards), Eilish isn’t one for the baroque glam aesthetic that made Del Rey illustrious before she herself seemed to take a page from Eilish’s no makeup look and shapeless fashions. However, Eilish certainly takes the “I wish I was dead already” mantra of Del Rey’s early career to new heights. Dead-eyed and immune to the twentieth century belief that anything matters, Eilish has stated of her legions of emulating nihilist fans, “I love meeting these kids, they just don’t give a fuck. And they say they don’t give a fuck because of me, which is a feeling I can’t even describe. But it’s not like they don’t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It’s that you don’t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one’s going to remember you one day–it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn’t matter–but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won’t matter one day. So it’s like, why the fuck try to be something you’re not?” Sounds slightly like a defense that might soon be used by a suicide bomber. Or a deadbeat millennial dad.

The sheltered background of Eilish’s homeschooled life (in your face, Regina George) seemed only to augment her ability to empathize with standard human emotions of pain and love while not actually experiencing them. The eeriness of this notion has less to do with being imaginative and creative and more to do with the sequestered nature of being part of Generation Z. So locked in and yet attuned to everything that is happening all the time, Z is a contradiction in modern existence. And in so many ways, there are things that Generation Z will never understand, ergo, perhaps creating “philosophical” queries of faux profundity like Eilish’s album title itself: WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? On this note, the question of what it was like to work in the dinosauric model of an office as opposed to a co-working space barely paid for by a startup is surely a query to be on the Gen Z mind, and has likely fueled Eilish’s own well-documented obsession with The Office. To pay her respects to what millennials had to endure in terms of such an analog work setting with nary a beer tap in sight to make a hardly adequate for living in any major city salary, Eilish incorporates various pieces of dialogue from the episode “Threat Level Midnight” on “my strange addiction”–that’s another thing, Generation Z doesn’t bother with grammar in writing their titles.

To that end, the Newspeak vibes of communication are elucidated in the opening interlude, of sorts, “!!!!!!!”. For sometimes the visual manifestation of being exclamatory with excitement is the only way to express it. In Eilish’s case, such a quick ascent still amazes even her blasé aesthetic. Yet she seems to know that with her fame comes the often unwanted responsibility of “representing a generation” (as Lena Dunham claimed to do in the guise of Hannah Horvath). It’s a weight that killed Kurt Cobain, and not one that just anybody can shoulder. Luckily then, Eilish was born in L.A., the hotbed of nihilism immortalized by Bret Easton Ellis that makes one only too unmarred by the paralyzing burden of vacuous existence. The influence of her birthplace is apparent on “I’ve seen too much for my age” songs like “xanny” (“I can’t afford to love someone/Who isn’t dying by mistake in Silver Lake”) and “bury a friend” (“Keep you in the dark, what had you expected?/Me to make you my art and make you a star/And get you connected?”).

Bifurcating into two songs, sonically speaking, “bad guy” is the perfect track to commence a record that firmly establishes her as the Gen Z spokesperson. Even if lyrics like, “I’m that bad type/Make your mama sad type/Make your girlfriend mad type/Might seduce your dad type I’m the bad guy,” echo Del Rey’s “Sad Girl” and Grande’s “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”

As for fostering the already perhaps too loved idea of getting a return on the investment of having a child via making them famous, Eilish and her brother owe a debt to, of all people, the Hanson brothers. For it was the year that their hit, “MMMBop” came out that Patrick O’Connell, their father, realized the potential goldmine of allowing kids to pursue what they wanted to artistically, commenting, “I was completely swept away by these kids. They were religious Oklahoma home-schooled, but nonetheless. Clearly what had happened was they’d been allowed to pursue the things that they were interested in.” So yes, just as we have to thank Gloria Estefan for Ariana Grande so, too, do we have Hanson to thank for Billie Eilish. Eilish, however, would like to remind everyone that it’s hip hop that every musician owes a debt to, constantly praising the likes of Tyler, the Creator and Childish Gambino as contributors to her style. And it’s the type of style that Lorde already showcased six years ago, interpolating hip hop beats with baroque pop vocals (often combining into the zenith of her covering Kanye West during live performances). So no, there’s not “technically” anything vastly different about Eilish in terms of what’s been done before and in the very recent past. But maybe what makes her so captivating is the amalgam of internet-culled information she represents. A blender spewing out everything (literally in the “when the party’s over” video) she’s been exposed to–which could likely be far more than the average considering the extended free time that homeschooling allows. And her phobia of sleeping as a result of having so many problems doing so successfully.

Eilish’s lifelong battle with sleep issues, come to think of it, might very well have stemmed from having to share a “family bed” with her parents and brother. Goddamn right you’d start developing night terrors from that. With regard to the tormented sleeper, Eilish’s neo-Fiona Apple sound and look draw their greatest parallels in Apple’s “Sleep to Dream.” It also bears noting that Apple, too, was seventeen upon the release of her landmark debut, Tidal. And yeah, she already said everything Billie is repurposing long ago, namely: “See Maya Angelou said that we, we as human beings, at our best can only create opportunities, and I’m going to use this opportunity the way I want to use it. So what I want to say is everybody out there that’s watching, everybody that’s watching this world. This world is bullshit! And you shouldn’t model your life–wait a second–you shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool, and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.” And yeah, like Apple, Eilish is also a vegan. Again, amalgam is the word (even of someone more “obscure” like Dounia).

To add to the hyper-modern prototype Eilish serves as, college was never a goal her parents had in mind for her. The trajectory was always a track leading toward the byproduct of fame that comes with pursuing music (Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman probably ought to have caught onto this sooner). Her in tuneness with the youth culture that makes the viral-dependent music world go round is evoked in what will soon be dated lingo in the vein of “You make me wanna throw my pager out the window/Tell MCI to cut the phone calls.” This much is evident in the unrequited love lyrics of “wish you were gay” (which of course homos were offended by), on which she laments, “Our conversation’s all in blue/Eleven ‘heys’ (hey, hey, hey, hey),” speaking to the iPhone visuals of being ignored. And though a beacon of “the future,” Eilish’s analog theme of unrequited love appears throughout her debut, particularly on “8” (yes, track number eight) as she bemoans, “‘Cause who am I to be in love/When your love never is for me?”

Newspeak tendencies also flourish on “ilomilo,” inspired by a puzzle game that can either leave Ilo and Milo united or apart. Speaking to Eilish’s fears of losing people, she remarked of the song’s background, “The whole idea is the game, it’s just like, losing the person you love and then finding them again.” Hopefully. Unless they overdose on opioids in typical Gen Z fashion. The ultra Lordeness in its melancholy “listen before i go” again shows Del Rey up on being suicidal as Eilish rues, “Sorry can’t save me now” as she stands on a rooftop contemplating jumping. Has any of this actually happened to Eilish? It doesn’t matter. Feelings can be simulated now even if we’ve never experienced them. Hence the mournful and earnest delivery of the lines, “I can’t escape the way I love you/I don’t want to/But I love you” on “i love you.” And as Eilish says “goodbye” on the last track of the same name, she again one-ups millennials–this time in terms of narcissism–by turning the song into a sort of found poem, extrapolating lyrics and titles from the previous thirteen tracks. Self-referencing this early on being the ultimate sign that your only god is yourself. For even Madonna waited until ten years into her career to start doing that shit.

Calling the album her child that we get to hold while it throws up on us, maybe the one thing we can be hopeful about regarding Gen Z and all the damage they’ve inherited is that they’ll fucking know better than to have actual spawn. They’ve certainly seen enough evidence to prove that to never have been born is the greatest boon.

What’s more, the prophecy-like title of “you should see me in a crown” foretells Eilish’s further ascent to the ranks of “Pop Princesses” past. Au moment, this signifies “Anti-Pop,” which Avril Lavigne embodied in her time while also being blatantly pop. Any who, you literally have to be fourteen to be viable in the music industry nowadays. Unless you’re a man. Specifically James Murphy. Yay for proving that we’re still a world of Humbert Humberts.