Billie Eilish – Ocean Eyes, Bury a Friend, Bad Guy, When the Party’s Over
Lizzo – Juice, Truth Hurts, Like a Girl, Good As Hell, My Skin
‘Duh!’ Billie Eilish didn’t even write a chorus for Bad Guy, her Billboard Hot 100 number one, leaving it as an instrumental. The verses (‘so you’re a tough guy, like it really rough guy’) are sung plainly with a layer of computerised vocal line on top, but that ‘duh!’ stands out unadorned by digital effects. Billie was a teenage popstar for a teenage audience who appreciated her candour and her way with melody.
Billie often talks about mental health issues and sexuality: she suffered depression after injury halted her dancing, while her baggy outfits counter any hint of sexualisation. She and her actor brother Finneas, who serves as her producer and co-writer, are children of two actors; their mum was in the same improv troupe, the Groundlings, as Will Ferrell.
As a kid of the social media age, it is scary that 38m people (as of September 2019) follow her Instagram page, which used to be called @wherearetheavocados. She told NME.com that she doesn’t look at it because of the trolls and haters; she also deleted her Twitter account around the time of her album release.
Traditional media is also attracted to her: she was on the cover of the August 2019 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, tidying her room while talking to her interviewer. Finneas describes his sister’s vocal range as ‘between a whisper and a hum’; her tour manager likens her to Portishead or Nine Inch Nails. You can definitely hear it on her breakout hit Bury a Friend, in which layers of Billies intone the album’s title: ‘When we all fall asleep where do we go?’ The satirical line ‘I want to end me’ leads into the breakdown section of the song, which is superbly produced and sounds like Billie’s friend is inside a coffin, so claustrophobic is the percussion.
Before the album and her EP came Ocean Eyes, an astonishing song with a brilliant melody and steady beat. It reminds me of Teardrop by Massive Attack, which I hope is a high compliment. Billie sings ‘I’m scared’ even as she looks into her beau’s huge eyes.
When The Party’s Over, opening with several Billies humming and oohing in harmony, has a chorus which repeats the hook ‘I could lie, say I like it like that’. It’s a break-up song whose video (watched over 380m times as of October 2019) has Billie crying bloody tears as she sings ‘Let’s just let it go, let me let you go’. The one-syllable words match the elegant piano chords on a song which is the centrepiece of her album.
Rather scarily, Billie Eilish is still only 17. Can she be the star of the 2020s, or will she tire of life on the road and in the magazines? Maybe she’ll go to college and tour in the summers, but she seems unstoppable at the moment.
Likewise Lizzo, who plugged away for the entirety of the 2010s before emerging into the mainstream suddenly in 2019. Lizzo plays the flute, wears golden outfits and is Missy Elliot incarnate. Yet it took her years of hustling to break into global consciousness. Previously she had been a sort of cult figure, big in the gay community and with those who knew their hiphop. Then came Juice, the first single from her Cuz I Love You album of 2019. I very rarely have moments when music stops me dead but, when Radio 2 played Juice at 9.20am, I almost stared at the radio. Every line of the song – ‘If I’m shining, everybody gonna shine’, ‘I’m like Chardonnay, get better over time’, ‘yadda-ya-ee’ – is quotable, and Lizzo’s delivery is technicolor. Helped by a fun video, Juice became my favourite song of 2019 on the fourth or fifth day of the year.
Yet it was never a big hit. By September 2019 it only had 35m views. She played it at Glastonbury and in her NPR Tiny (‘Ass!’) Desk session, but why was the world not connecting to it? Was it because a big black woman singing about confidence in spangly outfits was too shocking and new? Was Lizzo just a cartoon version of a fierce black woman?
The album kicks off with the title track, which proves Lizzo can sing as well as play flute. Like a Girl, track two, opens with the line ‘woke up thinking I might just run for president’; presidential candidates, including black woman Kamala Harris, have spoken of their love of Lizzo, while the album is small-p political in the way pop music has tended to be in the 2010s. Lizzo namechecks Serena Williams, TLC and Lauryn Hill and has an awesome chorus which will hit hard in her live shows, which she calls ‘church with a twerk’. Sasha Flute, as she calls her instrument, has its own Instagram page; Lizzo is using social media brilliantly, even if she didn’t like that some music critics didn’t unanimously praise her work (something Lana Del Rey copied later in the year).
The enormous hit from the album wasn’t actually on the album. Truth Hurts had come out in 2017, with a glossy video showing Lizzo in a wedding dress. Over three chords (C, G and A minor) and a ubiquitous digital-cymbals trap beat, the lyric contained more quotable lines (‘I don’t play tag bitch, I been it’ is my favourite) and the melody is singable in the extreme, because the same melody is sung seven times in the chorus, hammering home the melodic point.
After a performance at the BET Music Awards, in which Lizzo descended from a massive cake, more people were interested in the song; after her MTV Video Music Awards medley with Good As Hell, another hit from before Cuz I Love You, Truth Hurts rose to number one on the Hot 100 to become the second rap sung by a woman to get there since Fancy by Iggy Azalea in 2014. What’s more, Truth Hurts is eligible for the 2020 Grammy Awards with a song that is outside the eligibility period. They have bent the rules for someone who doesn’t play by them anyway.
Good As Hell, which followed Juice onto the Radio 2 playlist (aimed at families), is grounded in the fun chorus: ‘I do my hair toss, check my nails/ Baby how you feeling? (Feeling GOOD as HELL!)’ is a lyrical and melodic hook to match the bridge, where Lizzo encourages her addressee to leave a man ‘if he don’t love you any more’. I wonder how many women (or, indeed, men) have felt the empowerment to do this by the biggest pop star of 2019…
Oddly, like Good As Hell, My Skin came out in the cycle for her second album Big Grrrl Small World. Prompted to write it by a bare-all online video (lines from which appear in the song), Lizzo anticipates the focus on body positivity towards the end of the 2010s. ‘I woke up in this…I can’t wash it away’ goes the chorus over a very minimalistic musical backing, while Lizzo sings and raps of how ‘I gotta love it, no conditions…I wear my skin like a peacoat’. Though the song lacks the funkiness of the big hit records, it is a suitably naked track that reveals Lizzo to be more than a flute-and-twerking cartoon.
Like Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish, Lizzo is using the artifice of pop to smuggle in some decent messages of self-worth to an audience. In 2020, Lizzo’s audience will be listening in greater numbers than in 2015 and 2016, which is certainly good as hell for all concerned.