Maeve Higgins: Resistance to female views proves their power
As globalised and homogenised as pop music has become, it is the American experience that Eilish reflects with most clarity.
For one thing, it’s $50 (€43). For another, it’s official Billie Eilish concert merchandise and I would feel like a fraud for not buying it at one of her gigs.
The sentiment on the T-shirt is succinctly yelled on the track ‘Happier Than Ever’ from her new album of the same name. The album came out last week and already its success in sales and streaming have cemented Eilish as one of the most popular and powerful pop stars in her native US and around the world today.
As globalised and homogenised as pop music has become, it is the American experience that Eilish reflects with most clarity.
The way Americans consume so voraciously surely helps create the backlash to such consumption.
Eilish is hardly punk. Her output is carefully managed, orchestrated to include the right blend and timing of tours, releases, merchandise, and collaborations.
Since signing with Interscope Records in 2017, her image is slick to the point of corporate and she is rarely off-brand. But whatever the mechanics behind it, her music speaks to me.
I’ve been listening to and it’s got that same sense of fun mixed with melancholic realism that her past albums have, with more emphasis on the latter.
This is hardly a surprise — Eilish and her brother, songwriter Finneas O’Connell, made the album during the past year and a half of plague. It seems that even the most privileged and protected people have experienced a loss of control in our hugely altered world.
Like many of us, living in an unpredictable and scary time has made Eilish reflect on her life, short as it’s been so far.
Ignore her and you’ll miss bangers like ‘NDA’, which could make you dance around the kitchen of your seaside Airbnb so much that the little shell vase judders right off the windowsill.
You’ll also miss the insights in tracks such as ‘Getting Older’, when she says: “Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now. Things I’m longing for, someday I’ll be bored of.”
We can all understand the endless cycle of getting what we want and almost instantaneously wanting something more, something different.
These lines send cold fingers of recognition through me — and I’d imagine through anyone who makes a living from what they once saw as art or pleasure.
Eilish did not appear glittery and fully formed after coming through the child star to pop star pipeline that gave us Justin Timberlake and Ariana Grande. She seems like a person compelled to express herself through art by something invisible and mysterious — the need to be creative.
This is the thing that pushes so many of us to write, to film, and to tell stories, which become a vital and enriching part of our lives — as opposed to a side hustle that becomes a series of commodities that takes off publicly and, perhaps, even takes over privately.
As a child, Eilish idolised Justin Bieber, then a teenager himself. Not just any teenager obviously, the most famous teenager on the planet. The two have since met and collaborated, and it seems they are now friends.
I was struck by Bieber’s emotion when discussing Eilish during an interview with DJ and music journalist Zane Lowe on Apple Music.
“I just want to protect her. I don’t want her to lose it. I don’t want her to go through anything I went through,” Bieber said, tearing up.
He doesn’t specify what he went through, but he has been open about his substance addictions and turbulent mental health.
“I don’t wish that upon anybody. So yeah, if she ever needs me, I’m just a call away.”
The trappings of fame are surely seductive and fun, especially when they include money and power. But there are far richer and more powerful people than pop stars — business dorks and tech guys who got lucky or kids who were born into it, like any number of Saudi princes.
Nobody knows where they live or what they do all day. Nobody watches them and has opinions on their work, their lifestyles and, in the case of girls and women, their actual bodies.
To me, fame itself appears less like a fun perk of making work others enjoy and more like being hunted for something you don’t even have.
Being hunted and watched and judged are preoccupations on a number of tracks on — the public fascination with her body, the stalkers, the media spotlight so intense it means that someone she may potentially sleep with has to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
In ‘Not My Responsibility’, she sings: “If I wear what is comfortable I am not a woman. If I shed the layers I’m a slut. Though you’ve never seen my body, you still judge it. And judge me for it. Why?”
These are famous people’s problems, but can easily be translated into the real and online lives of teenage girls and young women today. Like them, Eilish is weary and wary, but always ready to push back and fight towards a better time.
She has not asked to be the voice of this American generation, but her songs, sighs and mutterings really do strike a familiar chord.
Perhaps Eilish’s music is not that deep — perhaps she just uses words that rhyme, paired with music so catchy it’s hypnotic. I doubt that is it though.
I care about that. I remember feeling confusion and later, when I understood more, fury, when people shut me down because of my youth and, mainly, my gender.
It’s intriguing to me now, to pay attention to these young women’s voices as well as, and this is important, to pay attention to those who want them silenced.
Obviously, as Eilish might say, it would be better to just f***ing leave them alone. But what about the mighty resistance to allowing women to speak, the resistance that shows up in shame, in scrutiny, in dismissal?
All of that is evidence the people doing so are trying to destroy something they fear. All of that is evidence of our power.
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