Everything rhymes with Billie Eilish
Or, she wants it darker
What, precisely, is a bop?
In the parlance of our times, it is a winning pop song, a three-minute melody that firmly implants itself into your brain, that will induce gluteal movement and incite vehicular singalongs. And it seems pretty clear that no one today is creating bops like Billie Eilish.
Obviously a bop requires a harmony of words and music, libretto and score, and you can’t have one without the other. But my interest is wordplay, so I need to separate the chocolate from the peanut butter. And once this is done, you see the Billie Eilish brand of PB is 100% organic, salty, and most notable for how it seamlessly alternates between smooth and chunky.
Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell’s music is helpfully classified by Wikipedia as dark / electro / emo / experimental / goth / indie / teen / alt-pop, which essentially means genre is dead and she’s remixing the ashes. The 19-year-old has co-written all her music to date with her older brother Finneas in their childhood bedroom, and while this authenticity is certainly part of her carefully managed image, you can hear it on every track. It’s also the not-so-subtle point of differentiation from her peers, who have pioneered the practice of handing out songwriting credits to all their extremely influential influences before anyone has to go to court.
She sings about love, fame, death, Xanax, and other well-worn subjects in clever new ways. Part of that comes from her unsmiling persona, and part of it comes from the sharp contrasts throughout her songs. She has a way with metaphor:
My boy loves his friends like I love my split ends
And by that, I mean he cuts ’em off
(What?)
And her rhymes are consistently good in an unexpected way, as in this riposte from Copycat:
Call me calloused, call me cold
You’re italic, I’m in bold
Call me cocky, watch your tone
You better love me, ’cause you’re just a clone
(Though admittedly I’m a sucker for her textual references, like “Shoulda taken a break, not an Oxford comma.”)
And when she shifts from her hushed whisper to a power belt, it just rocks.
You ruined everything good
Always said you were misunderstood
Made all my moments your own
Just fuckin’ leave me alone
How is Billie Eilish able to update a classic genre of angst and longing, to make it new? The same way Leonard Cohen disproved P.G. Wodehouse’s theory of love songs. Writing in Vanity Fair in 1917, Wodehouse argued that the word “love” was a cosmic affront to all songwriters working in the English language.
“When the board of directors, or whoever it was, was arranging the language, you would have thought that, if they had had a spark of pity in their systems, they would have tacked on to that emotion to thoughts of which the young man’s fancy lightly turns in spring, some word ending in an open vowel.”
Instead they gave us a word that rhymes with “‘dove, glove, above, and shove,” forcing the lyricist to hazard a rhyme that works exclusively for either eye or ear but never both, or to fall back on the true rhymes and be “taunted with triteness of phrase.”
But then Leonard Cohen solved that dilemma. How? He wanted it darker. In Dance Me to the End of Love, he sings “touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove,” and it rhymes and it works because he sells it. The proof: You can’t attend a decent Canadian wedding without hearing it.
Billie Eilish has the persona, the voice, and the rhymes to say old things in a new way. Triteness of phrase is nowhere to be found. And like Leonard Cohen, she only smiles on purpose.
Quick quips; lightning
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
— W. H. Auden
“I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.”
— Bob Newhart
Speaking of...
Things musicians say
Songs to live by
If GWQ No. 125 is a little blurry, you may need to clean your glasses. Thanks to Plum for playing the entire Eilish discography on every car trip of the pando. The podcast Switched on Pop is continually illuminating. What even is a bop, though? Was that Olivia Rodrigo side eye too much? Cue David Spade voice: I loved it the first time I heard it … when it was called Paramore. I was snubbed again by the Grammys, but you know what? Paul Giamatti gave the best performance of 2004 in Sideways and didn’t even get an Oscar nomination. Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is the perpetual dark horse for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. Tap the❤️ below to the end of love.