Billie Eilish and the Changing Face of Pop - The New Yorker
By Doreen St. Félix
Excerpt:
While performing at Coachella, earlier this month, the singer-songwriter Billie Eilish forgot the words to her song “All Good Girls Go to Hell.” Eilish, who is only seventeen, didn’t seem especially bothered by the lapse. She exuded a cool girl’s sprezzatura, style as nonchalance. Mumbling a little, Eilish wheeled around the stage, like a spinning top about to give out, and then hiked up her shorts, which, baggy and long, were messing with her torque. “Fuck,” she said, turning her back and her mood-ring-gray hair to the audience, “What the fuck are the words, though?” The mistake was so charming that it did not seem like a mistake at all. The audience yelped and the Internet squealed. “I love this,” one YouTube commenter said, below a clip of the performance. “She made it sound like it should have been a part of the song.”
Such reactions are the product of more than your average fan worship. I watch the clip of Eilish and feel a strange reassurance. If the teen idols of the nineties or two-thousands had cursed during a performance, they would have been excommunicated by the pop powers that be. Pop stardom, at the turn of the millennium, was an aggressively packaged and censorious business, necessarily hostile to the unplanned and instinctive, to the performance of anything like whim. The teens we revered moved in militaristic phalanxes, and, though they were forced to dress and live as virginal sex kittens, they seemed like robots programmed to never act out.
By Doreen St. Félix
Excerpt:
While performing at Coachella, earlier this month, the singer-songwriter Billie Eilish forgot the words to her song “All Good Girls Go to Hell.” Eilish, who is only seventeen, didn’t seem especially bothered by the lapse. She exuded a cool girl’s sprezzatura, style as nonchalance. Mumbling a little, Eilish wheeled around the stage, like a spinning top about to give out, and then hiked up her shorts, which, baggy and long, were messing with her torque. “Fuck,” she said, turning her back and her mood-ring-gray hair to the audience, “What the fuck are the words, though?” The mistake was so charming that it did not seem like a mistake at all. The audience yelped and the Internet squealed. “I love this,” one YouTube commenter said, below a clip of the performance. “She made it sound like it should have been a part of the song.”
Such reactions are the product of more than your average fan worship. I watch the clip of Eilish and feel a strange reassurance. If the teen idols of the nineties or two-thousands had cursed during a performance, they would have been excommunicated by the pop powers that be. Pop stardom, at the turn of the millennium, was an aggressively packaged and censorious business, necessarily hostile to the unplanned and instinctive, to the performance of anything like whim. The teens we revered moved in militaristic phalanxes, and, though they were forced to dress and live as virginal sex kittens, they seemed like robots programmed to never act out.
