This is Billie Eilish's World, and we are all living in it: How the young singer-songwriter is re-defining pop

Nine months before a girl becomes the youngest solo performer to ever win ‘Album of the Year’ at the Grammies, she drops a video from her album When we fall asleep, where do we go? A yellow wall fills the screen. Suddenly, a rend appears in it, revealing it to be paper, and the girl tumbles into the room. Just like that, Billie Eilish bursts into the frame, and our consciousness. What will she do next? How will she establish herself as a ‘teen sensation’, as a ‘diva’? How will she set herself apart from and above her adoring masses, how will she inspire worship? Britney Spears donned red spandex and romanced an astronaut on Mars. Miley Cyrus woke up from sleep with perfect hair and make-up . Taylor Swift, who set the previous record by winning Album of the Year at age 20, chose to lie on the banks of a river in a white dress.

Eilish gathers herself after bursting through the wall, reaches into her mouth, pulls our her braces, and hands them to a man waiting to take them. And in the next shot, she stands with her electric blue hair in a white shirt as a nosebleed creeps towards her lips. Just like that, Billie Eilish lands a bomb on the tinsel-and-glam landscape, announcing that pop, as you knew it, is defunct. That none of that will feel as real now that Billie’s brand of real is here. Nirvana reincarnated Long years ago, a similar bomb had dropped on a landscape swept by the spectacles of Michael Jackson. The day I first heard Billie Eilish, late in the game, I immediately said: this is to teenagers today what grunge was to teenagers in the 90s. Sure enough, I was vindicated by no less a figure than Dave Grohl himself: he said Billie reminded him of Nirvana. [caption id=“attachment_7972241” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Billie Eilish in a still from ‘When The Party’s Over.’[/caption] Like Nirvana shattered the over-produced, over-polished soundscapes of the time with cheap guitars and distortion; just as they gave the big f*ck you to established codes of superstardom, instead treating it as the privation it actually is; just as Kurt Cobain told kids everywhere that no, things are not alright, and it’s okay to feel rage and hurt and inadequacy, so too today Billie Eilish is offering to teenagers a catharsis that, for all its zany creativity, feels more true than any of the dancing divas of the past. But here the comparison ends, for of course we are talking about originals here. And Eilish is a star of our times, and is a young woman. Where Cobain fought glamor with its antithesis, rot and dysfunction, Eilish is able to play at a more sophisticated level, to be extraordinarily cool in a way that exposes the old cool as desperate showboating. Open-hearted in her interviews It is hard to describe the effect Eilish has on me, and which I can only imagine is an approximation of the effect she has on her fans. I can be a sober fan of music, plumbing depths in lyrics and instrumentation. But Eilish, while being musically extremely interesting and fresh, does not appeal to the mind. I can be a connoisseur of Kenny Burrell or Ali Farka Touré or Sigur Rós, but with Eilish, like Nirvana before her, I can only be a fan. If I knew how this distinction worked, I’d tell you. As a result, when I heard Eilish, I instantly needed to hear everything she’d ever written. And, instantly, I had to see what she was like in interviews. Two interviews stand out. In one, Eilish is asked the same questions over three years, at ages 16, 17 and 18. [caption id=“attachment_7972231” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] This is Billie Eilish’s world, and we’re all living in it. (Youtube Image)[/caption] At 16, Eilish is the wide-eyed newcomer, disbelieving of her fame. At 17, one can see that she is vulnerable, that fame hasn’t done all that for her, that there is a sadness in her that won’t leave her; that interview is the clearest indictment of the industry I’ve seen in a while. It is also the year where this stunning debut album comes from. At 18, she has confidence, poise, and is almost contemptuous of some aspects of her older self. But through all this, Billie is absolutely Billie. She gives no quarter to the process of the interview. One can see, because this cannot be faked, that she is true to herself. A different sexuality Female pop stars are often forced into faux-sexual awakenings. Britney Spears used ‘Oops I did it again’ to throw away her Disney persona. Cyrus straddled a wrecking ball when it was her turn. ‘Bad guy’ is itself overtly sexual, but has an impish, playful, rebellious quality that challenges the man and refuses to concede an inch of independence. It’s the transgressive, ‘might seduce your dad type’ of sexuality that can terrorize the male gaze. It is the sexuality that reduces sex to the red bruises on the knees. It is the sexuality that celebrates dad bods sucking their stomachs in as a dance move. The second interview I like is the one discussing her fashion. In an interview for Calvin Klein, known for featuring skinny bodies in underwear but forced to reckon with Eilish’s baggy clothes, she says, ‘That’s why I wear baggy clothes. Nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath. Nobody can be like, “she’s slim-thick,” “she’s not slim-thick,” “she’s got a flat a**,” “she’s got a fat a**.” No one can say any of that because they don’t know.’ [caption id=“attachment_7972251” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Tinsel-and-glam is dead. Billie Eilish is here. (Youtube Image)[/caption] It is through this interview that Eilish establishes herself as a symbol. Teenagers today, especially in the US, are living a schizophrenic reality. While their media streams are full of ‘instagrammable’ scenes, body shaming and insecurities are at a fever pitch due to the very same media environment. Eilish has not responded to this by sculpting her body to suit the image. Instead, she has clocked a snook at the whole game, while bringing to the fore the horror and squalor that sits behind the quest for a one-note and frankly boring idea of ‘beauty’ propagated by magazines and on social media. The kids are not alright Along the same vein, the bubbly positivity of pop sits in stark contrast with what kids in the US are faced with regularly today: the specter of climate disaster and frighteningly regular school shootings. This is why Eilish is so important, because she will sing ‘Bury a friend’. Because she will stand before a mirror, and say, ‘I don’t wanna be you anymore’. It is why her videos draw so richly and creatively on horror tropes, including the backward walk famous in The Exorcist. It’s why ‘Bury a friend’ starts with a pitch-black-cornea’ed Billie hiding under a man’s bed, asking ‘When we all fall asleep, where do we go?’ It’s why the rest of the video shows hands breaking Billie’s neck, or sticking her back full of syringes, a back she then goes on to convulse. It’s why she keeps repeating, ‘I wanna, I wanna, I wanna end me’. Eilish could have been dismissed as the emo misfit. She could have been reduced to a depressing naysayer. But her wild popularity, which the Grammy has only really rubber-stamped with its four top awards, shows that while we millennials may be deluded, the next generation is alive to the harms being visited upon them, that they are not okay, and that they’re not going to fake it, not for us or anybody else. What we do with this information is up to us. Meanwhile, expect more lyrics that jolt you awake. Expect visuals that defy their own inimitable logics. Expect a powerhouse who has just won four Grammies to casually suggest a ‘rival’ deserves it more. Expect this young woman to show the world how to be vulnerable and honest, playful and rebellious, affecting and zany, all at once.