Nothing excites me more than good music. My shrewd music taste can be traced back to my early exposure and appreciation of music as little as I was immersed in Yanni’s music . It was a very weird music choice for a little girl in the 2000s.
I grew up in a family with different taste in music: my dad loved highlife. My mom would always play R&B songs, especially Celine Dion’s albums every morning. I had an uncle was into jazz and classic; another who was into rap and reggae music. With all these preferences, I derived my own music taste. I was already well-versed in several genres of music before I became an adult.
Between my transition from being a teenage to adulthood, the more inclined was towards new music too. Long before a new song becomes a sensation or mainstream, I love to pan it out first, brag about it and broaden my musical exposure.
So I have stumbled and fallen in love with Billie Eilish one afternoon while my sister played “Bitches Broken hearts”. It was my first song of hers:
You can pretend you don’t miss me.
You can pretend you don’t care.
All you want to do is kiss me.
Oh, what a shame I’m not there.
Everybody knows.
You and I are suicide and stolen art.
Pretty mama sews
Stitches into all your bitches broken hearts.
The music of Billie Eilish is psychotic in an alluring way. It is deep, dark and reaches the soul. There is a particular lugubrious experience her music gives. But it is good taste. She writes some of the most sublime songs. However, there are gloomy songs. Telling gruesome stories– that’s how lyrically dark her songs are.
At age eight, she was already singing in the Los angeles children’s choir. She was eleven years when started to write her own songs with her older brother Finneas O’connell. The profoundness of her songs clearly comes from years spent brushing up her songwriting skills and influence of the Beatles, Green day and Avril Lavigne. With a debut song at fifteen years, Ocean eyes, a pure pop song: ballad about longing for reconciliation with her ex. Young but dark at heart.
The mystical nature of her lyrical content is why I crave her. Just the way a fat kid longs for candies.
The darkly stories is the most impressive of her pop songs, becoming another character in each of the songs. In Bellyache, she kills and buries her friends. While in the Hostage, she croons about stealing her lover’s soul and hiding it in a treasure chest. And in Ocean eyes, she is vulnerable and wants her ex back. Sometimes they are sadistic themes, other times they are psychotic and eccentric. Either way, her macabre and sad lyrics is due to her knack for smart songwriting.
My love for her music arouses from how she creates emotions from the littlest things into songs. Her imagination is wild. A very wild rollercoaster. Another form of creativity she employs apart from her succinct lyrics is the performative artisticism in her videos. It is dazzling, deep and all shades of amazing. This is what struck me in her “You should see me in a crown” video. She sings over blaring synths and rapid hi-hats wearing a crown as spiders crawl up and down her body, mouth and face. She only performs slow movements to make unabashedly dark statement of confidence, purpose and unafraid. Its dark undertones giving it a dynamic edge. The “no fear” emotion of the video is suitable for her style and voice, the “I am not playing nice anymore” kind.
Eillish’s vibe is the right kind of eerie the pop world needs. With gorgeously written lyrics, darker and mystical stories told within the songs and sung over melodical and sinister sounds.