“Happier than Ever”: Why Billie Eilish is a phenomenon – culture

Singer Billie Eilish is a contemporary phenomenon, and that’s when you want to stop reading again. Because you can’t actually hear it anymore.

Phenomenon, that’s what the daily culture observation called for some time everything that, with the best, bloodiest will, could not understand why it is so incredibly popular. The crazy frog from the ringtone company, cheap, half-wilted Italian starter buffets, Sebastian Fitzek audio books, of course Paris Hilton, who is, as it were, the holy Mother of God of the modern no-good shock culture – all typical phenomena. Popular phenomena that are exhausted in outward appearances and predecessors and thereby contribute little to the specific weight of art history. Which then again seemed so unsettling to the crowd of chroniclers that justification was necessary. A well-paved meta-level equipped with stirrups to be able to write feature articles like this one.

Billie Eilish, 19, from Los Angeles, singer, songwriter, video director, four-time Grammy winner and currently one of the world’s greatest, most successful pop stars, is a phenomenon. But, and there is an important difference: It is the example of a new, current phase in entertainment culture in which practically everyone has become a phenomenon. A present in which everyone who somehow stands in the pop public on a larger scale has their oversized, not constantly, but very regularly whispering 3D identities that produce notification pling tones. Especially those whose core audience is Generation Z, born in the new millennium, the true digital natives. Unfortunately, the punch line is unavoidable: those who, surprisingly, are not phenomenologically significant would be phenomenologically significant today.

Billie Eilish is also a social media influencer, hashtag, TikTok and Instagram star, brand ambassador, photo model, and all in all has to do a gigantic amount of non-music content production, which, in addition to pondering new lyrics, has to be managed first got to. Part of her figurative existence is now also being played out in the Twitter debates about her. In the end it was about questions like whether she might have multiplied a repressive image of women with a “Vogue” photo shoot in which she wore body-hugging fashion. And whether she has slimmed down inappropriately close to the queer community with a video that contains some lesbian-themed scenes. Because everyone knows that Billie Eilish is really not a bit lesbian.

The album’s opening song is a Denomination of Sorrows – Billie Eilish’s “My Way”

The whole preliminary skirmish is necessary because Billie Eilish’s album “Happier Than Ever”, the recently released new contribution to her musical core business, can never be properly assessed without this context. And because the artist herself refers to her multiple roles, of course, over and over again in the course of the 16 pieces.

“Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now”, sing-whispers or raun-sings in “Getting Older”, the first song. “Things I’m longing for, someday, I’ll be bored of.” What used to be fun has become a duty, and today’s longing will be yawning tomorrow. A supposedly banal realization of adolescence, but Billie Eilish turns it into a ballad of fate and life balance of comprehensive design, accompanied only by the sluggish, dark slow-motion tremolo of the synthesizer. You can read it as a private denomination of pain, with hints of abuse and stalking experiences. But at the same time as a higher-flying reflection on what happens when the youthful furor gives way to relaxed, informed serenity over the years.

You could also say that “Getting Older” is Billie Eilish’s “My Way” as things stand. Her precocious counterpart to the great, disarming life confession song, as Frank Sinatra first sang it at 53, which in the show business of the late 1960s was already well past the sell-by date. The thought feels absurd at first, but becomes more and more appealing the longer you listen to this new music: In view of the sheer intensity with which the teenager Eilish has been accompanied, illuminated and represented in all colors over the past four years, it works. ” Happier Than Ever “like a real old work. She might be the first person in pop history to do that at 19.

In “Halley’s Comet”, for example, she slips – accompanied by a small band that, as always, was created by her brother and producer Finneas O’Connell in her home hobby studio – in the amazingly well-fitting evening dress of the midnight-blue nightclub singer, who is affected by the pain of Love sings, but holds the poetic torch firmly and confidently in its own hand. The tellingly titled “Billie Bossa Nova” piece tells the story of a forbidden hotel room affair, which sounds like an adult problem, here too the singer breathes and swings with the staying power of a diva. The title song, an ode to the betrayed, but under the circumstances all the more subjectively stronger woman, which begins as a kind of Marilyn Monroe film song, then leads to a crashing finale in which you can literally hear yourself the audience in evening attire on the box balconies to applause.

Here and there there are clear echoes of the haunted and nightmare worlds, the battered metal bucket beats, gasping rhythms and background noises massed in line, for which Billie Eilish’s first album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” Loved so much in 2019, richly awarded and awarded 53 hard-to-imagine platinum records for sales and converted streaming numbers. Overall, however, the audience above the 30 “Happier Than Ever” should rate it as an extremely positive signal.

The fact that parents also believe they understand Eilish is an indication of the class of their songs

Because even when Eilish reached the older cohorts a good two years ago with the videos “Bury A Friend” and “Bad Guy”, the jubilation there was enormous. In contrast to, for example, the rather erratic K-Pop or German Hip-Hop with its constantly changing secret symbols, Billie Eilish was a phenomenal personality that Generation X also believed they understood immediately, at least in basic terms. The Gothic macabre, the latent ego despair and the industrial aesthetics of the sounds and harmonies, all broadcast on frequencies very similar to those of the underground heroes of the 1990s, whose Weltschmerz was fueled by mangas, punk, horror films and existentialist poetry.

Countless mothers and fathers proudly posted on social media how they could finally listen to music with the children again, for the first time since “Bibi and Tina” and “Fireman Sam”. The fact that such a crossover effect was possible without too gross misinterpretation can be seen calmly as an indication of the class and sustainability of Eilish’s songs. The new album, which can be used as utility music even more cheaply than the last, even in the stressful headache of everyday life, could now ensure even more consensus among older fans. The writer Nick Hornby once criticized the British group Radiohead for more or less jokingly that their more experimental new records could no longer be expected of stressed, working people in the evening. He would certainly not say that about “Happier Than Ever”.

To put it the other way round: Could Billie Eilish lose some of her young listeners with this rather muted, fire-warm, less cool album? That is possible, but it would be a gross misunderstanding. What sets the artist Billie Eilish apart from other songwriters of her generation is the incredible visionary power that can be felt in her music. Her ability, on the one hand, to speak from the experience of the Generation Z girl, combative, with original lyrical language. But to keep an aesthetic view that extends far beyond the generation horizon.

On “Happier Than Ever” she builds a cathedral out of her own “teenage fear”. A young woman with a very old soul. There is still a lot to be expected from her.