Billie Eilish at the O2: How the musician reinvented what it means to be a pop star for the Gen Z generation
Billie Eilish has always done things her own way. From speaking openly and directly to her fans about mental health and other personal issues, to carving out a now instantly recognisable style, to dressing as a pinup girl in British Vogue, Eilish has never done things that are predictable.
Her latest surprise is that an extended cut of her June 2022 Happier Than Ever O2 concert is screening at cinemas globally, for one night only, this evening. Eilish tweeted that, “due to overwhelming demand” 300 additional locations were added to the worldwide screening.
The film, which was first live-streamed as part of Apple’s Music Live series, has been directed by music industry stalwart Sam Wrench, and has recently received a Best Music Film Grammy nomination. It has been described as a “visual extravaganza”.
All 27 songs from the concert are packed into the 95 minutes film which also contains touching moments between Eilish, her audience, and her brother Finneas.
Tickets are on sale and can be found here. The film is streaming at dozens of London cinemas including Vue, Cineworld, Picturehouse, Everyman and Empire.
On the eve of another first for Eilish, we take a deep dive into the life of the musician who reinvented what it means to be a pop star.
Due to overwhelming demand, 300 additional locations have been added for "Billie Eilish: Live At The O2 (Extended Cut)", exclusively in theaters on Friday, January 27 for one night only. Tickets are on sale now. https://t.co/Y3P2ZDHoTI pic.twitter.com/QdErP3IEkf
— billie eilish (@billieeilish) January 17, 2023
Since the singer uploaded her first single Ocean Eyes to Soundcloud in 2015, she has become the first person born in the 21st Century to win an Oscar as well as the youngest person to headline Glastonbury, has won eight Grammy awards, has released two albums, has been on tour six times (with one stop at the sold-out Madison Square Garden) and is now worth approximately $50 million.
But unlike other young musicians who have come before her – from Britney Spears to Christina Aguilera, Selena Gomez to Justin Bieber – Eilish has managed to carve out a very different version of what it means to be a pop star. From the very beginning, she has been outspoken about environmental issues, body image, mental health, Tourette’s Syndrome and abuse, and created an instantly recognisable style, wearing baggy and bright clothes with matching hair and long fake nails as a way to stop her body from being overly scrutinised.
Unlike many of her peers, she shares her deepest secrets and obsessions with her fans, creates strange, sometimes dark music videos and has songs that sometimes detail teenage fantasies and death. And it has won her a legion of fans, with 107 million followers on Instagram, 48 million followers on TikTok and famous fans including Stormzy and Bieber. She had graced the cover of US Vogue, has released two perfumes and was listed on this year’s the BBC 100 Women list alongside activists Tarana Burke, Judith Heumann and Hadizatou Mani, and Bolivian politician Eva Copa.
Eilish has reinvented what it means to be a pop star. Her openness and seeming ease with herself (which is partly due to having a strong support system – Eilish makes music with her brother Finneas and has toured with her parents from the beginning of her career, living with them until 2019 and still staying with them regularly), plus the way she communicates with fans online, makes her out as a pop star for the Gen Z generation.
Here we track her unique path as she turns 21.
Music
Eilish had hoped to go into a career as a dancer until she suffered a serious hip injury aged 13. After that, she started seriously working on songs with her older brother Finneas, who had his own band. The duo were home-schooled, brought up by two jobbing actors Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell: “It just was very organic and kind of made sense in our lives to kind of follow their lead and what they were interested in,” Baird once said.
It was only several years later, when Eilish and Finneas (who both have a form of synaesthesia) uploaded the track Ocean Eyes to SoundCloud for Eilish’s dance teacher to listen to, that the singer was catapulted into the limelight: the track totted up hundreds of thousands of plays in weeks.
Speaking to the BBC in December Eilish said: “I look back fondly for the most part, but, you know, it was so funny to be a 14-year-old girl with my 17-year-old brother and, you know, just doing hundreds of meetings constantly... It was a lot of meetings with people that didn’t know how to talk to 14-year-old girls.”
In a Harper’s Bazaar interview back in 2017, Eilish said: “That’s all I hear... What’s it like being 15?’ Oh my God, I don’t know. It’s the way that I feel. I’ve never been older. Ask me every single year and I’ll give you the same answer.”
After that Eilish went from one hit to another with at least a dozen singles – including US number one Bad Guy – under her belt before her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was released in 2019.
It won three Grammys, went multi-platinum as well as to number one in the Billboard 200, and was well-received by critics, with one UK newspaper saying that the album, “captures one of those rare moments when an artist knows exactly how her audience feels because she feels the same way too” and with music magazine Q saying, that it spoke “powerfully both to her peers and to anyone who remembers how youth can sometimes feel like an overwhelming weight”.
A year later, Eilish and Finneas wrote No Time to Die, the theme song for Daniel Craig’s final outing as Jame Bond. It was the song that won Eilish her first Academy Award (she was just 17 years old), features orchestration by Hans Zimmer and became her first UK number one to boot.
It came as no surprise, then, that in 2021 when she released her second album Happier Than Ever it was showered with praise: NME said the album proved Eilish was “one of her generation’s most significant pop artists”, and Rolling Stone called the album “downright heroic” and called it a “dark, painful, confessional album where [Eilish is] choosing not to settle into the role of America’s beloved kooky kid sister.”
Mental health
Although Eilish was in every sense not an average teenager, her songs’ reflections on relationships, abuse (Eilish said her 2021 song Your Power was an “open letter to people who take advantage — mostly men” and has said she was abused as a minor) and mental health speak directly to her peers and the teenage experience. She has suffered from depression, cut herself and had even planned her own suicide at one point, which she spoke about on a pre-Grammys Gayle King special in 2020.
She said: “I don’t want to be too dark, but I genuinely didn’t think I would, like, make it to, like, 17,” adding, “I remember crying because I was thinking about how... the way that I was gonna die was that I was gonna do it.”
Eilish’s experiences may sound uncommon, but America’s National Institute of Mental Health found in a 2020 study that major depressive episodes were most prevalent in adults aged between 18 to 25 and that 4.1 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the country had experienced at least one major depressive episode in their life.
The singer also has Tourette’s Syndrome which she spoke about it in an interview with David Letterman released this year. Eilish said: “For me, they’re [the small tics] very exhausting...” but added that she had “made friends with it now”.
She has also suffered from night terrors throughout her life, telling music magazine Fader in 2019 that her lucid dreams were one of the biggest influencers of her debut album. She said: “The album is basically what happens when you fall asleep... I’ve always had really, really bad night terrors. I’ve had sleep paralysis five times.”
She said that recurring dreams, “affected me in my life. It affected the way that I viewed things, and how I was talking to people, and how I was thinking. I just was different. It was because of my dreams. It was changing me as a person.”
Social Media
Eilish has a hot-cold relationship with social media. Like most people born after the Millennium, she knows how to use the platforms in a way older generations just do not. She has hundreds of millions of followers across her different accounts who she speaks to as if they are her friends, and she broke an Instagram record in March 2021 when a photo of her newly dyed blonde hair garnered 1 million likes in just six minutes.
However, Eilish has become slightly warier of her platform as she gets older. Speaking to the Guardian in July 2021, she said: “With social media, I can’t use it as much because it will live there for ever... and everyone besides the fans will also see. So that’s annoying. It’s like if you wanted to whisper a secret to a friend of yours, but while whispering it, they had a microphone in their ear, and it was shouting to 80 million people. You know what I mean? That’s how it feels.”
She added: “I have this need to tell the fans these things and talk to them, and I used to do that, because it was a really tiny amount of people, when I first started out. And I would tell these whole stories about what happened and laugh about it, and it would become like an inside joke with the fans. But then those stories never go away.”
Speaking to Vogue in July 2021 she said: “Every interview I did when I was 15 is still out there, and I think about it constantly.”
Body Image
Eilish has also been open about her struggles with her body, which puts her in step with millions of her fans.
In 2020 she wrote, produced and starred in the short film Not My Responsibility, in which she gave a monologue about body shaming and the scrutiny her body has come under in the limelight – Eilish also released the film’s audio as the ninth track on her second album. In the film, she says, “The body I was born with, is it not what you wanted? If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers, I’m a slut.”
In an effort to outflank her critics, Eilish chose to go for a more revealing pin-up girl look in a June 2021 British Vogue photoshoot: on the cover she is wearing a bodice with a latex skirt, revealing a full cleavage. Some fans were outraged, feeling that Eilish had sold out, folding to the pressure for female artists to be sexy, something she had always seemingly pushed back against. However, Eilish explained in the interview that, “My thing is that I can do whatever I want”.
Speaking to the Guardian a month later she said: “I’m very confident in who I am, and I’m very happy with my life… I’m obviously not happy with my body... but who is?”
She added: “When I’m on stage, I have to disassociate from the ideas I have of my body... Especially because I wear clothes that are bigger and easier to move in without showing everything – they can be really unflattering. In pictures, they look like I don’t even know what. I just completely separate the two... Because I have such a terrible relationship with my body, like you would not believe.”
However, in the sixth edition of the filmed Vanity Fair interview that she does each year, which was released at the end of November, Eilish said: “I’ve had a very big transformation this year with my fitness lifestyle. It’s been a really insane process, and I feel better about myself than I ever have... I just look completely different than, like, ever before, kind of, which makes me feel proud. I worked really hard on it, and I just wanna get really fucking buff.”
Beliefs and activism
Eilish’s beliefs also align with many of her peers: she is vegan and is concerned about feminist issues and environmentalism – she apparently replaces her rider with a list of green standard requests.
In Glastonbury in June, the same day that America’s Supreme Court had voted to roll back Roe v. Wade, Eilish said: “Today is a really, really dark day for women in the US... I’m just going to say that because I can’t bear to think about it any longer.” In the Guardian, she also said, “I wish people actually gave a shit about global warming, because I feel like I’m the only one... So, I don’t know. If we die, we die. And I think we probably will. The good thing is that the world will survive. The world knows what it’s doing.”
Her hobbies are varied: As well as enjoying dancing – fans can see her years of training as she stomps and bounces around on stage – Eilish is an equestrian: “That gives a lot of adrenaline and needs a lot of strength, and it’s exhausting. That is a big stress reliever for me. I’ve been less angry and emotional since I’ve gotten back into that,” she told the Guardian.
So here is a woman who has grown up in the limelight, but has remained, somehow, defiantly free. Speaking to Australian Vogue about growing up so exposed she said: “When you’re a fucking teenager, you don’t really know yourself, so you’re trying to figure yourself out. That was the hardest thing for me: I didn’t actually know how I really felt. So I just came up with this facade that I stuck to”.
As Eilish turns 21, seven long years after Ocean Eyes was released, there is clearly no one doing it like her. She is a pop star for the Gen Z generation, but her appeal is universal.
