I was spent Friday afternoon following class at USM. The long week of trying to write marketing collateral, hitting an article deadline, a return to tutoring, and then, sitting through my nearly three-hour-long history class, pushed me past my energy tipping point.
Back home, waiting for Mary to arrive from work and thinking about what to make for dinner, I flicked on the television. Five minutes of politics was enough. For whatever reason, I changed the channel to a music station and on my screen was a young woman who could easily have been one of the students I’ve been spending time with tutoring and subbing. Except that she was in a “strange” video; blood was dripping from her nose and she appeared in outfits ranging from a white uniform, to yellow sweat suit, all the while commencing to sing about “bad guys and tough guys.” The video was jarring enough to keep me there, watching the song called, “Bad Guy.”
Saturday, sitting in the Lee’s Tire waiting room while getting my snow tires swapped-out for summer treads, I happened to be paging through the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times: Who was looking back at me from page 17? The face of Billie Eilish, the young woman from Friday’s video, which commences with Eilish saying, “I’ve taken out my Invisalgn.”
Apparently, I’ve been living under a rock because I knew nothing about the 17-year-old prodigy named Billie Eilish. According to the piece in the Times, before she’d even turned 17, Eilish had accomplished “nearly all of the modern prerequisites of pop stardom and then some. The writer than ticked off things like her homemade songs (written with her brother, Finneas) had been streamed “more than a billion times on digital platforms,” along with millions of Instagram followers (15 million, according to the article).
On Spotify, I’ve been listening to tracks from her new album (if that’s what you call this compilation of songs gathered together hastily to cash-in on her popularity), “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” Honestly, I didn’t mind the experience. I heard pop for sure, some elements of hip-hop were present, but I’m not an expert on teenage music of this sort.
Reading about her family, she sounds like a fairly normal kid—as normal as any 17-year-old can be with fame banging on her bedroom door and wanting to consume yet another pop music acolyte. [see Michael Jackson]
The writer, Joe Coscarelli, described Eilish’s vocals as “pure,” but that her lyrics were “angsty and bleak—serial killers, domination, monsters under the bed,” as her thematic set. I did note the “wobbly beats,” when I first saw her video, which initially captured me.
Of course, like with every new teen idol who comes along, some parents are freaking out about their children’s adulation bordering on obsession. Apparently, Eilish is “so controversial.” What’s new? Can anyone say, “Elvis,” or “Eminem?”