[ad_1]
Nineteen-year-old Billie Eilish, who won the record of the year at the Grammys on Sunday for the second year in a row, grew up in a modest two-bedroom house in Los Angeles but really grew up on the internet. His debut single, Ocean eyes, the threat of a dreamy whisper of a song (a lover’s eyes are compared to “napalm skies”) became a SoundCloud viral hit before being commercially relaunched, eventually racking up more than 200 million plays on Spotify. . In 2015, when the song exploded online almost overnight, it spawned an entire ecosystem of remixes, today considered a marker not only of achievement but also of influence. This led to 13-year-old Eilish landing a massive deal with Interscope Records, the label run by Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and Lady Gaga.
His songs have amassed 15 billion combined streams worldwide according to Spotify, his YouTube channel has over 39 million subscribers and the music video for Bad boy it has over a billion views alone. Simply put, over the past five years, Eilish has cemented her vitality as an apocalyptic teen pop sensation and transmuted that prestige to become the defining artist of the streaming age.
Maybe that’s why RJ Cutler’s Apple TV + documentary watcher, Billie Eilish: the world a bit fuzzy, insists on examining the hyperconsciousness that surrounds female stardom that is a by-product of the Internet. Filmed over two years, it chronicles the creation of Eilish’s multi-platinum, award-winning debut album. When we fall asleep, where do we go? and the reverberations of its rarefied level of success (it won 11 Grammys, including album of the year). Drawn from hours of home movies and concert recordings, The world is a little blurry is an absorbing portrait of how the landscape of pop stardom has altered since Britney Spears and Taylor Swift used to run its course.
In that sense, Billie Eilish: the world a bit fuzzy he’s just as interested in answering whether the most successful female pop stars are ever in control of their own narratives as documentaries American lady (2020), aired on Netflix, which focused on Taylor Swift regaining her narrative after a tense period in her career, and Framing Britney Spears (2021), which analyzes the rise and fall of the singer two decades ago. Unlike Spears and Swift, who endured the brutal aftermath of not subscribing to the ideal image of a complacent pop star, Eilish’s inimitable quality of fame hinges on her steadfast dedication to defying that.
Eilish eschewed the routine sexualization of her body to fuel her pop mythmaking early on, a stark contrast to Swift and Spears, who used their sexuality to define their pop star identity. On stage, she is more androgynous than feminine; Eilish is famous for her aversion to skimpy clothing and dresses exclusively in baggy T-shirts and shorts.
His lyrical themes also deviate from the conventional. The conflict in their songs does not come from the anguish or casual indifference of men, central themes of Swift and Spears, but focuses on the sadness of life: climate change (All good girls go to hell), night terrors (Bury a friend), serial killers (Bellyache) or an indefinable feeling of isolation from the world (When the party is over).
The film is concerned with underscoring Eilish’s concept of artistic authenticity, which, as Cutler suggests, allows her to exercise more agency over her own career than the world would have allowed her otherwise. The singer has never entered a recording studio, she continues to make music in the old bedroom of her brother Finneas O’Connell, next to him. She is also in charge of her own music videos, conceptualizing and directing them, effectively the creative director of her narrative. The fact that Eilish went on a sold-out tour even before having a debut album to her name is a testament to her ability to relate to a younger generation disillusioned by the sanitized language of pop.
So while Eilish’s body dominates more headlines than her music, she’s not a pawn: As a pop star whose playing field is the internet, the vicious nature of media scrutiny is inherently ill-equipped to alter perception. public against him. That’s a stark contrast to Swift and Spears, whose trajectories were stopped by an ecosystem of voyeuristic media. Swift, 19, was bullied into hiding for a full year after her much-publicized feud with Kanye West, which in turn affected the reception of her album. Spears’ career-threatening public meltdown, on the other hand, was a direct result of unrealistic expectations piling up on female pop stars, with cameras recording every move that went against it. The autonomy Eilish has come to enjoy as a pop star feels both an anomaly and a reckoning, a counterattack to the forces that interfered with Swift and Spears’ careers (Swift has been forced to return to record his entire catalog in order to regain creative and financial ownership of his own work).
The downside to this precise nature of Eilish’s fame is that it is intertwined with an acute and constant paranoia about how quickly social media can turn against her; these moments paralyze her especially when she is charting undeniable career highs. Take, for example, the fact that Eilish insists on being authentic to herself. Sometimes that’s an abbreviation for her overwhelming fears that she doesn’t like them. Early in the process of creating Eilish’s debut album, Finneas, who seems to visibly give in under relentless pressure from Interscope Records to deliver a hit song, lashes out at his sister’s resistance to being more accessible. “His equation is that the more popular something is, the more hate it becomes.”
Another sequence towards the end of the documentary captures Eilish worrying about how unfavorably people online might perceive her portrayal of No time to die, the theme song he was enlisted to create for the latest installment in the James Bond franchise. In her signature DIY bedroom music approach, Eilish records the track on a parked tour bus under the supervision of her older brother and multi-script producer. The brother duo made time for the track in the middle of a sold-out tour in Houston, Texas, as if it were a last-minute college assignment and not a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration with an Oscar-winning songwriter. Eilish looks visibly exhausted as she begins to sing the song, having put on a demanding show. But she continues, stopping only when it seems that her attempt at singing, a singing technique that produces a high-intensity vocal sound, could be straining her voice. “The internet will make fun of me when I do it,” Eilish complains, finally breaking down under the pressure. “The Internet is going to be bad if I do it.”
The internet wasn’t cruel when it did. No time to die racked up 90,000 graphics sales, including 10.6 billion streams. It went straight to No.1 on the Official Singles Chart in the UK the week of its release, marking the biggest opening week in Bond franchise history. The haunting ballad, a visible departure from Eilish’s trademark sinister sonic concerns, is powerful while silent, its rage simmering in the shadows instead of exploding in your face. By all accounts, Eilish, who became the youngest artist to record a James Bond track, had managed to reinvent his purpose for a new generation.
In hindsight, it might seem ridiculous that Eilish ever felt concerned about possible media scrutiny despite her talent and fame. But as the movie suggests, these are calculations that you have to make as someone whose attractiveness depends on the relationship and on reducing the distance between her and her fandom. Cutler contextualizes the influence social media comments have on the Eilish process as an ongoing crackdown rather than presenting it as a one-time overreaction. In fact, she is always one step away from an Instagram condemnation or Twitter cancellation, a thought Eilish expresses in an outburst later in the film when she is attacked on social media for being rude to her fans during a meet and greet. forced and improvised. session. “I don’t want anyone who knows who I am, and is a fan or knows a fan, to see me in an awkward situation,” he says. “It’s embarrassing and I have to keep smiling. And if I don’t, they hate me and think I’m horrible. “
But the truth is, she still has more control of her destiny than Swift and Spears ever had at her age. After all, how can the media cycle curse a pop star for not fitting the mold of a nice female artist when it is impossible to influence her next move? That is the power that Billie Eilish has on the Internet.
