Billie Eilish

DISCOGRAPHY

Don't Smile At Me (EP, 2017) 7/10

When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? (2019) 6.5/10

Happier Than Ever (2021) 6/10

Hit Me Hard And Soft (2024) 6.5/10

   Born December 2001, Billie Eilish O'Connell was raised in the upper-class of Los Angeles to a family of actors and musicians. She and her brother, Finneas, were homeschooled to their personal interests, which allowed both of them to advance their musical abilities. Billie would start performing in public at age 8 and write her first song at age 11, while Finneas began learning to write, engineer and produce music at age 12. By 2015, Billie and Finneas were recording songs together and uploading them to SoundCloud. Billie's dance teacher would request the pair to write a song for their class's choreography, and the result was Ocean Eyes, an homage to the depressive alt-pop wave among artists like Lorde and Lana Del Rey. After the song's viral success on SoundCloud, Finneas' manager would urge him to work with his sister in future projects. Billie's main interest was dancing at the time until a growth plate injury would halt her ability to perform, thus she began focusing on a music career with Finneas in 2016. 

    By 2017, the O'Connells would release the Don't Smile At Me EP, a brief but stellar addition to the alt-pop world with its fused influences of alternative R&B, trap, electropop and adult contemporary lounge-singing. 

   The phenomenon of her fame peaked with the single Bad Guy and her first LP When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?

   RJ Cutler would direct The World's a Little Blurry, a documentary following Billie's rise to fame from her debut of Ocean Eyes to the tour following Where Do We Go. 

   The film delivers a staggering amount of home footage, some of it intimate and unflattering — which is good if it humanizes the celebrities, but not always if it indirectly exhibits Billie and Finneas as spoiled brats. That said, Billie is not often compromised in this manner, and comes across as genuinely approachable and grateful for her fame, while her brother Finneas is relentlessly pretentious, disrespectful, and arrogant. (What I remember most is when they record a song and a crewmember tangentially mentions that a sound reminds them of a certain band in an obviously complimentary manner, but the O'Connells get irritated, so Finneas responds with "People who don't make music always say that bands sound like other bands." Every time I walk through the exchange in my head, especially considering how casually the two of them mention not listening to many artists anyway, I want to hit him with a bat.) 

    Billie's worst moment is perhaps the end of shooting her first music video, whereupon she openly whines to her parents that she should direct all her following music videos, with the director not far from being out of earshot. (Though to be fair, given the creative quality of Billie's music videos following Bad Guy, her having total control wasn't the worst idea and in fact makes her seem less corporate to an extent.) And, from a working class perspective, it's hard to swallow seeing Billie get a sexy Challenger sport car for her sixteenth birthday in the midst of America's class division, but we also see her struggle with Tourette's syndrome and concern over the authenticity of her art. 

   The film has several endearing moments and Billie is a natural dispensary of charisma. The scenes of her struggling to keep her emotions together in the midst of her break-up, her having to surrender her dance career due to a growth plate injury, as well as trying to stay polite in a demanding industry where everyone wants her attention with anxiety about breaking into rudeness, are notable strong points. The scenes of her obsession with Justin Bieber along with the moment they meet and embrace each other is also a satisfactory peak to seeing her dreams come true despite all the rapid changes that come with fame. 

ROCKUMENTARIES

RJ Cutler: The World's a Little Blurry (2021) 5/10