With each new generation that “comes up,” there is the constant accusation from previous ones that there has never been a worse sect of people than the “youthquake” currently dominating. In Gen Z’s case, however, it might actually be true (until Alpha comes along to overtake them). Of course, defendants of the generation would argue that they can’t help what they are, being the first to have grown up entirely in the matrix. Never knowing a world in which the internet didn’t reign supreme. Those who came before them, the millennials, at least have some vague remembrance of a life before being totally “connected” (thereby being, ironically, totally disconnected). And yes, millennials were, once upon a time, the most hated. It was they who were dubbed the “snowflakes” first. But that term is quickly shifting to apply to Gen Z. Not just because of how easily offended they are or how incapable of processing opinions and ideas that don’t fit in with their own algorithm, but because, well, they’re just not equipped to deal with much of anything at all outside the matrix.
Nonetheless, for a generation as dependent on the internet as Z, they scarcely seem to understand how to use it to its utmost potential. Certainly not for research and fact-checking purposes, it would appear. This much was made starkly apparent by one of the few Gen Z spokespeople thus far, Billie Eilish. For, in an episode of her now-defunct “radio show” (a.k.a. Apple Music podcast), me & dad radio, Eilish unashamedly admits, “I used to love [“Picture to Burn”] when I was, like, four—no, probably older than that. Probably, like, six. It’s crazy. It’s very country. When I listen to it now, I’m like, ‘Wow, I totally didn’t realize how country this was.’ But I loved this song back then because I thought it was so badass. I thought it was so cool and mean. I just loved it.” And yet, she didn’t love it enough to 1) look into who actually sang it and 2) try to understand something as simple as what it means to burn a picture.
To be “fair,” Taylor Swift was an entirely different person in 2006, when her self-titled debut came out and she was Country Barbie. Eager to neither confirm nor deny the ever-burgeoning rumors that she was a savior to the Aryan race and a God-fearing Republican. So there little four- or six-year-old (she was seven, per the math of when the single was released that Eilish ostensibly can’t do) Billie was, probably right to file away this country singer as someone separate from the Swift we would all eventually come to know. A being so far-removed from her howdy, yee-haw days that it’s understandable someone might not associate her with that girl from “Picture to Burn.” If, that is, said person had no access to the internet and/or was totally detached from interacting with pop culture. Such a person, needless to say, is not Billie Eilish. But her ill-informed, la-di-da statements reveal much about the generation to which she subscribes. One that is so out of touch with anything tangible that she felt no embarrassment in also adding, “I didn’t understand at all what a ‘picture to burn’ meant. The only word ‘burn’ that I knew, that I thought that she meant, was, like, when you burn a CD.”
While one could say that associating “burning” with CDs is decidedly millennial, in this instance, not so. Eilish’s childhood spent in a world where the trappings of the internet (including downloading songs and, at that time, burning them onto CDs) were pervasive as opposed to peripheral is indicative of a generation that would scarcely grasp (or ever have to) anything related to the physical. That CD burning was, in fact, a “millennial thing” was far more telling of said generation’s lingering attachment to that which was concrete. But, as it turned out, the practice was just a launching point for eradicating all tangibility and turning everything digital with the advent of the first iPhone in 2007 that also combined the key elements of an iPod function for music-listening purposes. In other words, what Gen Z would come to view as more normal than anyone because they grew up with it as their norm. CDs (and records and tapes) be damned.
Swift, who released “Picture to Burn” in February of 2008 (two years after Taylor Swift came out) offered an accompanying video that Eilish could have easily watched at some point for a keen understanding of what it means to burn a picture. Complete with contextual cues at the beginning of the Trey Fanjoy-directed video that includes Swift holding up a picture of her and her ex and asking her friend, who’s with her in the front seat of her car, “Would you look at how happy we were back then? I can’t believe he turned out to be such a jerk” (by the end, that picture will be up in flames, further “spelling it out” for Eilish). It’s the sort of comment one could imagine hearing in a Britney Spears interlude from Oops!…I Did It Again. And, yes, at that time, Spears was still at the peak of her influential powers, so it’s entirely possible Swift could have been “infected” with a touch of Spears in this regard (even if “Picture to Burn” itself was ahead of Britney’s curve by employing the same style of pyrotechnics as her months before the “Circus” video came out that same year). Unlike Eilish, whose undercover love of Swift all this time never seemed to creep into her own musical style. No overbearing Telecaster guitar strings or vocal warblings about how, “As far as I’m concerned/You’re just another picture to burn.”
At the same time, some of Eilish’s “we are never ever getting back together” sentiments on Happier Than Ever might be traceable to this moment in her early sonic exposure. For just as Taylor rails against a no-good, low-life type with, “State the obvious, I didn’t get my perfect fantasy/I realize you love yourself more than you could ever love me,” so does Eilish on “Lost Cause” via such lyrics as, “I used to think you were shy/But maybe you just had nothing on your mind/Maybe you were thinkin’ ’bout yourself all the time/I used to wish you were mine/But that was way before I realized/Someone like you would always be so easy to find.”
However, by this estimation, everything of “value” Gen Z has to “give” (read: repurpose and pass off as their own) was ultimately gleaned from millennials through internet osmosis. A phenomenon that’s only worsened thanks to TikTok and the increasing lack of “crediting original sources.” Leading one to believe that civilization truly has reached a “wall” in terms of everything having been done before (something Barenaked Ladies confirmed in 1998). And rather than being, at the very least, done in a better or more thoughtful way in the present, it seems that the “reinvention” of the same thing only gets worse in its presentation over time. Making one simply want to burn it all to the ground. Surely Eilish must know what “burn” would entail in that sense.
