Billie Eilish Is Gen Z's Most Knowable Superstar
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The first time I saw Billie Eilish, it was at the Governor’s Ball Festival in New York City in June 2018. She was sixteen years old. She played in the middle of the afternoon at one of the side stages. Her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? wouldn’t be out for another nine months, but it was very clear what was happening.
The tent was packed, overflowing, but you could still see girls sprinting to push their way inside. They knew every word to the singles Eilish had released on SoundCloud and on her EP Don’t Smile at Me. R&B singer Khalid, himself still a teenager, joined her to perform their duet “Lovely,” which had just come out on the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack, and the crowd exploded. The world didn’t know about Billie Eilish yet, but these girls sure did.
The next time I saw Billie Eilish was almost exactly a year later. She was seventeen years old. She was headlining Radio City Music Hall in June 2019; it sold out immediately and scalpers were charging a fortune. They were getting it, too, because now When We All Fall Asleep was the biggest album in the country, on its way to triple-platinum status, and her following had both expanded and intensified.
The Radio City audience—90 percent teenage girls, with scattered adult chaperones—was as fanatical as any I can remember seeing; screaming every word, openly weeping, identifying so deeply with the young woman onstage that they would follow her into battle. Eilish had established herself at the almost impossible nexus of being both accessible and larger than life, their friend who just happened to be a superstar, or maybe the other way around.
I’m still mad that I didn’t get to see the next Billie Eilish show I was planning on attending. She was scheduled to headline Madison Square Garden in March 2020, just a few weeks after her historic night at the Grammys, when she was the youngest artist to sweep the “big four” awards—Album, Song, and Record the Year, and Best New Artist. She opened her arena tour in Miami on March 9, got through three dates, and then the world shut down. That MSG show was the first thing on my calendar that was cancelled due to COVID.
The time frame sketched out by those three dates more or less aligns with the period covered in the new documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, which premieres Feb. 26 on Apple+. Director R.J. Cutler (The September Issue, The War Room) kept cameras on the singer, at home and on tour, from the making of When We All Fall Asleep up through the triumphant Grammy evening. At two hours and twenty minutes, the film unfolds at a leisurely pace, with a lot of time devoted to the actual music; more than twenty songs are included, some of them full performances.
Cutler has said that his models for the project were cinema verite music documentaries like Don’t Look Back and Gimme Shelter. Like those classics, Blurry is purely observational—no narration or talking heads, no analysis or context, very few shots that even acknowledge the presence of a camera. There are no huge surprises or shocking revelations; the news hook seems to be the inclusion of Eilish’s relationship with a boyfriend named Q, with all the challenges of touring and travel added to the usual teenage drama (spoiler alert: It ends with some of the most familiar dating words of them all—“I can’t fix him, I’ve tried.”)
The real question facing this film was whether there’s anything left to say about a nineteen-year-old who has already been the subject of so much coverage, so many profiles, in the couple of years since she conquered the world. Even the most casual fan knows the outline of the story—she was home-schooled by creative parents; committed to music after an injury ended her dreams of a dance career; struggled with emotional issues and self-cutting; records her electro-emo-dance-dream pop music in her brother’s bedroom; created a signature baggy, oversize fashion style that shuts down the haters and body shamers.
All of this is captured in Blurry, which opens with footage of a thirteen-year-old Billie, in blonde braids, recording her breakthrough single “Ocean Eyes.” We see her studying for her driving test, and then her parents freaking out the first time she drives off by herself without the Find My Friends app activated. We look at pages of her journal that address suicidal thoughts and self-harm. The pre-teen Eilish’s obsession with Justin Bieber is something of a recurring theme; her parents considered sending her to therapy for her fixation, and when she meets the Biebs at Coachella, she stares at him wordlessly for a painfully awkward thirty seconds before hurling herself into a lengthy hug.
The strength of the film is that its approach allows time for these moments to really breathe and sink in. A more conventional documentary would mark the meeting with Bieber, let her gush about it for a minute, and move on. Instead, the shots linger, then we hear their phone call that followed, then later return to what he meant to her in her (younger) youth. It’s bold to dedicate this kind of time to potentially peripheral, backstory paths, but the reward is a deeper sense of this singular star.
What it comes down to is the really important thing about Billie Eilish, which is what she means to her fans. Those girls I saw in her audiences believe so deeply in her, at a time when it’s so hard to believe in anything. Most coverage of Eilish focuses on her darkness, the anxiety and tension in her lyrics, the flippant bravado of “Bad Guy”—and at one point in Blurry, she responds to people who ask why she can’t make “happy music” by saying “I feel the dark things very strongly.” But she’s also capable of writing the vulnerable, complex emotions of “I Love You,” which could be a modern standard.
Eilish’s adolescent fans respond to the sense she conveys of truth at all costs, of speaking for them in all their messy contradictions. “The least I can do is make art because I have the same problems,” she says, adding “they’re not my fans, they’re part of me.” Watching her whining about her insecurities (“I can’t sound good ‘cause I’m not good!”) or rolling her eyes at her parents or pausing a meeting during a “tic attack” from her Tourette’s Syndrome or living in constant fear of social media reaction to her every move only heightens her greatest strength—articulating and embodying real life for a young woman coming of age, navigating independence and love and feeling too much and knowing too little.
“Voice of a generation” is a preposterous burden to throw on any artist, but it does represent something beyond simple stardom. There were more popular acts than Bob Dylan in the ‘60s or Nirvana in the ‘90s, but there was something about the particular honesty and expression they had that captured those moments—the ascendant power and conscience of the counterculture, the inchoate slacker frustration of Gen X—that became definitive. Billie Eilish is that kind of a figure, offering an indefinable, fearless truth that those growing up in the shadow of #MeToo, climate change denial, QAnon, and internet supremacy were seeking, whether they knew it or not.
The first half of The World’s a Little Blurry, with Eilish developing her songs at home, is insightful in a way that the second half (and there is an actual intermission indicated) can’t be, as it inevitably turns into more of a standard tour documentary, scrambling to keep up with the dizzying whirlwind of the Billie Eilish Phenomenon. But at moments, she gets as close as possible to explaining the power of her music.
“To have a song that is describing exactly how you feel is just the best feeling in the world,” she says. “It makes you feel like you’re not alone.”
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