Totally getting into Billie the kid!

Says much that the one thing my 12-year-old niece and I have in common is pop-star Eilish!

Music is like friends. We progressively discover less and less of permanent/new ones, with age. And that’s really our bad. For, no matter how old you are — it’s still the youngest you’ll ever be, and the oldest you’ve ever been.

Still, unsure about you, every time I socialise, we start with all kinds of music; hence everyone remains relatively uninvolved. As the boozy evening progresses, like an elaborate but easy maze, we inevitably end up with the same tracks, that permanently define the average age in the room! 

Presuming, because music is memories, first. With time, I suspect, those force-resistant reminiscences take over every porous space in our head to instantly allow for newer sounds to seep in.  

If you’re past 30, tell me the last time you organically discovered a brand-new, unknown international artiste/track, and immediately made it your life’s mini-mission to evangelise? I’m not including Bollywood and other desi stuff. Every latest bit of it blasts through our eardrums, no matter where you go. Earworms don’t count. 

For me, all the way since Ed Sheeran’s A-Team (which is a 2011 track), it’d have to be only around early 2019, perhaps on Instagram (which has great sound quality, if you’ve noticed) — with Billie Eilish. And her debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go’s title track ‘Bury a friend’. ‘Bad guy’, I guess, was her other breakout number.

No, seriously, frickin’ eh, what is this voice/production? How do you not go deeper into the rabbit-hole of this sweetly raspy repertoire? Only later I learnt, that’s what my li’l niece, about three decades younger, religiously listens to. 

And that’s because we rarely discuss fresh music, with the super-young — heaping on them our own personal, taste-signalling nostalgia instead. Which, by definition, is an exaggeration. 

The reason the ’70s, for instance, were so cool in the ’90s (likewise ’90s in the naughties), is because we were only listening to the ‘best of the decade’, that survived years/generations — not every crap recorded every other week. This is why the anointed ‘golden age’ always precedes us — whether in music, architecture, painting, name it.

Maybe some of Fiona Apple, 43, comes vaguely close — what is it about Eilish that so powerfully/viscerally/naturally draws you into her distinctively emotional, electronic, experimental pop? Quite simply, it’s just something adult I hadn’t heard for long, and it maturely fits. Over-intellectualising music is like ironing jeans.

The lyrics, if you’re into it at all, are full of alluring melancholy, even when the production is phenomenally peppy. For what is teenage, without its angst? The best of soulful music, I reckon, also last longer — like comedies, with movies! 

Eilish is 20. She starts out at 13, in the heartwarming, incredibly insider-account of her career, that’s her life, thus far — RJ Cutler’s Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, that dropped on Apple TV recently. The film pretty much wraps with her first time at the Grammys (2019), where she picks up all the top awards. 

What happens in between? A home-schooled life with a sorted, LA family unit, the O’Connells — father, mother (neither of whom shown to be particularly pushy), and brother, older by four years, Finneas, who’s also her talented producer and songwriter.

Basically, when she’s not touring like a product, she’s any other artistic kid, albeit in extraordinarily consumerist circumstances — navigating the usual rhythms of friendships, loneliness, heartbreaks, and a driving licence. 

She directs/conceptualises/shoots her videos, don’t we all. Jamming with her brother at home, she’s a ‘content creator’, which is the democratically expressive term for every artiste on the web. The camera is on all of us.    

This is what you notice about Cutler’s film, as I did first with Asif Kapadia’s tragic Amy Winehouse biopic (2015) — the sheer quantum of self-recorded/intimate material that exists for everyone, allowing for visual access unprecedented in the history of Everyman. The celebrity being no exception. All it takes is to stitch smart. Cutler does a fine job.

What would one give for a film that similarly captured from the basement/backstage, Elvis hysteria, Beatlemania, or MJ-madness? What does living inside a documentary film do to young celebrities, though? Where every moment — through iPhone, Instagram or a short selfie-life — is up for review? And every review starts to hurt, because public and its judgments follow? 

Guiding Eilish, in this case, to live forever in the fear of the “meanness of Internet”? Well, the reverse is equally true. Eilish is a firm ‘Belieber’. Like Justin, 27, her God and inspiration, she became star at the speed of light — casually dropping music of/on her own (on Soundcloud). The music-label middlemen are a byproduct. They usually enter once the party’s already on.

The Internet (Spotify/YouTube, etc) also allows for no excuse whatsoever for every generation to discover the new. Agree it’s hard to cut through the clutter. And God knows what will survive anymore.

But Eilish, you can tell, is universally special. She’ll probably stay on in her current teenaged fans’ living memory — her music growing roots of nostalgia alongside. Sure, will play her on loop in the eclectic part of a social evening. Of course, I know, we’ll collectively head southwards to the same old songs, as the night ends!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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