Is Billie Eilish really changing pop stardom?

BILLIE EILISH is a very modern kind of pop star. She’s both a product of the internet and someone who’s been carefully nurtured by the big corporations. She makes music that sounds as if it’s been expertly finessed, but she and her brother wrote, recorded and produced all of her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” at home on their own. While the idea of “authenticity” has come to be increasingly distrusted in pop (it tends to mean old white dudes with beards and acoustic guitars harking back to Bob Dylan), hers is offered as proof that she is a real reflection of teendom, rather than a focus-grouped, committee-driven idea of it.

If you search for her on Instagram, you’ll find 1.9m posts under #billieeilish; there are hundreds of thousands more posts about her under different hashtags. You can find online advice about which of her lyrics to use as captions (“When you’re feeling deep and philosophical,” one post counsels, “‘The friends I’ve had to bury, they keep me up at night’” is a sage choice). According to the New York Times, she is “redefining teen pop stardom”.

All of that would just be guff, of course, if Ms Eilish’s music were no more than cleverly packaged awfulness. But it’s not. “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” owes a clear debt to Lorde (minimal, hip-hop inflected) and to Lana Del Rey (drowsily narcotic, romanticising darkness), but it also sounds fresh and imaginative. It’s richly melodic, and her resistance to overloading the production means those melodies have room to shine. There are also moments so odd that they leap out. The wholly irrelevant samples from the American version of “The Office” in “My Strange Addiction” somehow manage to be charming rather than distracting.

While Ms Eilish’s lyrics might cause older listeners to roll their eyes a little at the unadulterated misery of it all, there is startling imagery and real cleverness in her music. The use of numerical counting down in “Wish You Were Gay” (a song that is a great deal better than its title suggests) is the kind of trick Cole Porter might once have employed. There are so few missteps on the album—perhaps only the combination of a ukulele and a babyish voice on “8”, which is wholly out of keeping with the rest of the record—that it is a pleasure to listen to from start to finish, an increasingly rare occurrence for big pop albums, which tend to be frontloaded with the best songs for the benefit of streamers

Nevertheless, the New York Times might be overselling it a little. The new kind of pop stardom has been brewing for some years now. Would-be pop stars once had to impress the gatekeepers of music—record labels, radio, television and press—if they were to find an audience; because the nascent stars were everywhere, the adults usually found out about them at the same time as the youngsters. Now, though, any parent checking their teenager’s Spotify playlist is likely to find a list of completely unfamiliar names. The ability to self-release music through Spotify, to self-promote through Instagram and YouTube, for your music to be shared through group chats, to communicate directly to fans on social media—all of this means that it is possible to become a pop star without ever going near those old gatekeepers. For the first time in decades, a generation gap has opened up in pop music.

The thing that’s new about Ms Eilish is that her online stardom has crossed over into the mainstream. “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” has been the best-selling album in Britain over the past week; the Radio 1 playlist, unusually, lists not just a single song of hers on its A list, but an undisclosed number of “tracks from the album”. That is because she has employed both the new model and the old model. She was picked up by an “artist development” company called Platoon in January 2016, and soon after released her first song, “Ocean Eyes”, directly to SoundCloud (where it has been played 16.4m times). Straight after that, she signed to Interscope, a major label, and for the last two years she has been carefully nurtured by Apple Music (which also bought Platoon late last year). Apple yearns to differentiate itself from Spotify by being the streaming service that promotes artists, rather than just songs.

A lot of old-fashioned industry muscle has gone into this redefinition of teen pop stardom. And with the major labels resurgent—revenues from recorded music were up by 9.7% in 2018, for a fourth consecutive year of growth—you can expect to see more of these online teenage stars embracing the benefits of the multinationals. Meet the new star, same as the old star.