At age nineteen, nine months before she turned twenty in December of 2000, Christina Aguilera won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Usually a kiss of death (see: previous winners Sheena Easton, Cyndi Lauper, Milli Vanilli and Hootie and the Blowfish), Aguilera transcended any Best New Artist curse by going on to record a slew of successful albums in addition to becoming a sartorial legend and all-around Respectable Person in The Industry (even if a fellow Sag named Britney Spears wants to try to claim otherwise). Billie Eilish, who shares the same Sagittarian birthday with Xtina–December 18th–also won the Grammy for Best New Artist when she was nineteen. In the year that everyone will forever begrudge, 2020.
Both slated for “great things,” maybe the weight of that kind of pressure is what they had in mind when recording a second album. One that made each of them want to break away entirely from what had established them as “pop sensations.” If pop is what we want to call Eilish’s music. And, perhaps as a testament to how much of a difference two decades can make, Eilish did not build her career on what Aguilera would call “cookie cutter” ditties meant to appeal to the millennial “teen dream,” so much as dark, depressing numbers highlighting the youth of America’s waning mental health, as well as climate change anxiety. In effect, Gen Z porn. Ironically, an aspect of that “porn”–a.k.a. the things that “speak to them”–is a certain sexless nature, replete with oversized clothes and a lack of wanting to sexualize the body in any way, as women of Christina’s era were preconditioned to do.
On Eilish’s latest single, “Male Fantasy,” she, incidentally, gets the most candid she’s ever been about “sex,” or rather, watching it unfold in the form of internet pornography. Discussing how it’s fucked with her head (and created false expectations for everyone) in the lyrical content, she also went on to confirm the same in greater detail to Howard Stern, an appearance that vastly detracts from her credibility as some kind of feminist… being that Stern is huge d-bag who should have been cancelled somewhere around the time he made those heinous comments about Selena in the wake of her death. Or how about even in 2012, when he made his disgusting remarks about Aguilera being “plus-sized”? If that was the case in his mind, then surely he must have been thinking the same about Eilish when she went on the show to discuss, among other things, being exposed to porn by age eleven. An admission that places a huge gap between what someone like Aguilera’s teenage years were like versus what Eilish’s were like (from the sound of it, it basically seems like she was in quarantine before the rest of us). Which is why it’s no coincidence that the jadedness of teen “pop” stars today is so much more pronounced. The rage in their voices (hear: Olivia Rodrigo’s “brutal”) is the sound of years of bitter resentment that have built up since the time when millennials were teens and things were still theoretically “good”–despite, oh, 9/11, George W. Bush, a sham of a war and the 2008 financial crisis.
And let us not forget the trauma of witnessing millennial talisman Britney Spears’ “breakdown”–first the head-shaving, then having to watch her be strapped to a gurney and taken to a psych ward against her will. In short, the death of the illusion Spears had formerly been so capable of selling as the “teen dream.” Maybe that’s why Xtina was fortunate to have the dimmer light between the two pop stars (as evidenced by her kiss with Madonna being totally glossed over). There was less expectation placed upon her to meet a certain standard. Because if Britney Spears had appeared in assless chaps or naked on the cover of Rolling Stone with nothing more than a guitar to cover her, she would have risked a greater chance of being publicly flogged. The same went for Billie Eilish in terms of appearing on the cover of British Vogue with a then newly debuted “pinup look.”
As for Aguilera, she, too, went on the “retro journey” that Eilish seemed to be on for the first part of her promotional blitzkrieg for Happier Than Ever when she released 2006’s Back to Basics. Twenty-five when it came out, it reveals, once again, the accelerated “maturity” of someone in Eilish’s generation gravitating toward this style of music sooner. Thanks, obviously, to the omnipresence of the internet making every single person and musician an “expert” in whatever genre they want to be. Although Back to Basics was billed as her “fifth” album, we can strip away Mi Reflejo and My Kind of Christmas in this instance to call it her third album of original material. By that logic, Eilish is already accelerating the path of the ex-teen pop icon by reverting to the “throwback genre” sooner. Something Amy Winehouse also did with her own sophomore album, Back to Black. Granted, Winehouse was an obvious “retro queen” from the get-go with Frank.
Whatever Eilish ends up doing with her own third album, it will mark the first time she’s put something out as an “adult” a.k.a. non-teen. And one wonders if she’ll bother taking the approach that Aguilera did when she released Stripped at the age of twenty-one, a couple months shy of twenty-two. Considering Eilish has engaged in almost every “shocking” moment in the book already (complete with her racist faux pas and her “unveiling of the body”), it leaves an audience to wonder if, yes, there is such a thing as burning too brightly too soon. In the instance of that other teen dream, Britney, she had about a solid five years of “pure success” before the media started to tear her apart post-Justin Timberlake breakup in 2002. But again, that was a different, even more misogynistic epoch, and Eilish will never get torn down in quite the same way due to a magical little thing called social media that helps a singer control the narrative. As a result, she never needed to have her “Stripped moment,” where “all of the sudden,” the veneer comes off and her fans were able to see the “real” her. They’ve been seeing her in absolutely every iteration from the outset. And maybe that’s what makes it both easier and harder to be a “pop” star today. Though Britney and Christina both will likely balk at any girl who claims it’s challenging now. Bish, try doing it when you actually had to incorporate elevated choreo (that is to say, not “TikTok choreo”), in addition to putting up with tabloid lies bought and sold about your personal life without being able to respond to them immediately.
While Spears was, in the collective mind’s eye, forever cemented in her “teen dream” era, Aguilera again won the race as the pop icon tortoise by being able to set herself apart sonically with experimental albums that weren’t more recycling of the same thing she’d already done before. Whereas Britney had a greater need to rely on the “same ol’ dance bop style” to keep her chart-relevant (likely because of Jamie Spears wanting to milk that cash cow). It seems more likely that Eilish will take an Aguilera path in this musical sense…while also getting the benefit of being seen as the “darling” of music in the same way Britney was before K-Fed. So yes, let’s just hope she doesn’t meet any trashy boys from Fresno (then again, that seems more like Lana Del Rey’s flavor).
