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Billy Aylish is loved and appreciated, so why is she trying so hard to prove she is "real"?

The world treats Aylish as a singer who tells the truth about life, extraordinary among all the stars of the hour - but is she really different?

Her second album, "Happier Than Ever", is varied and fascinating, but her need to prove that she is not fake is very felt throughout - and the result is only more deceptive

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• Billy Aylish

• Tom York

• Dave Grohl

Avi Goldberger

Friday, 06 August 2021, 00:00

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In February 2020, 18-year-old Billy Aylish took to the stage to sing.

The artistic part of the ceremony, the so-called.

For most viewers, probably those over the age of 25, this was their first encounter with the singer.

On stage took a slender girl, with strange hair.

Some are green, some are black, in a not very symmetrical division.

The audience expected to hear something new from Ilish, to understand what made the rebellious girl such a success among teenagers in the past year.

But Aylish surprised and went for the most conformist possible.

"Yesterday", she began singing, "All my troubles seemed so far away" - and the audience cheered hysterically as Aylish conservatively renewed the Beatles' famous song, as a tribute to all the celebrities who died that year and whose pictures appeared on screens behind like Kirk Douglas, Peter Fonda, Doris Day, Kobe Bryant and others.

This performance at the Oscars was another amazing episode in the success story of Aylish - a teenager who together with her brother recorded angry songs for girls in the bedroom and a few years later became one of the biggest consensus in music today.

Someone who is admired by teens and their parents alike.

Compared to how most of the pop world is perceived today, the public treated Elish, now 19, as a true, authentic, brave, extraordinary singer among all the stars of the hour with a battery of writers, producers, consultants, stylists and the giant corporations behind them.

But is Aylish, who is releasing her second album, "Happier Than Ever" this week, really different?

More on Walla!

Like her music, the film about Billy Aylish also turns out to be something completely different

To the full article

Aylish (Photo: AP)

Her debut EP, "Don't Smile at Me", was released in 2017.

It was a collection of several singles, produced by Phineas, Aylish's older brother, at his home.

It was a glimpse into the life of a not-quite-conventional 15-year-old.

She sang about everything that was supposed to interest her contemporaries.

Things like heartbreak, mental state and the like.

The feeling was that there was a record of something real here: a somewhat strange girl writing things in her bedroom.

Then, her brother records her and wraps her in beats.

They upload it to YouTube, which becomes a window into what's going on in this girl's life.

On the face of it, this whole DIY creation was supposed to be very niche, which would at most become a viral hit in some scenes - but instead the seemingly-innocent-and-small project became an extraordinary phenomenon when Dave Grohl, the man from Nirvana, compared Aylish to the late Kurt Cobain in early 2019 .

"What she has with the audience," Grohl said in an interview, "is like what Nirvana had in 1991."

no less.

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Grohl's quote became the headline of the day on various cultural channels in America and the buzz around Aylish became insane.

Aylish was quick to respond and a month after the quote she had already released her debut album, "When We All Sleep, Where Are We Going?", Which like all of her work was produced by Phineas.

From the second the album came out, it exploded: the success was so great, that within a year Aylish became a powerful, famous, influential woman, with tens of millions of dollars in the bank account.

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A post shared by BILLIE EILISH (@billieeilish)

It is perceived as a kind of modern Cinderella story: the not-so-beautiful and not-so-acceptable girl from the suburbs opened her mouth and told the truth about life.

In the age of ornate singers, Aylish has become the ultimate alternative to them, and proof that even today it is still possible to create things from the heart.

But in our world everything is cynical, and as much as we would like to believe that everything in Aylish is true, unfortunately it is impossible to reach such success dimensions today from just making music at home on the laptop in the bedroom.

You don't have to be a detective to find out that at the age of 14 Aylish was signed to a pre-record contract with Apple Music, so that those would promote her breakthrough.

At the same time, Aylish closed with a management company, a publisher, and a subsidiary of fashion giant Chanel, so that they could design its look and style. Today they have, in fact, become its patrons.

No longer weird?

In a fascinating interview given in 2019 by two Ailish executives to Music Business Worldwide magazine, they detailed step by step the strategy that led the singer to extraordinary success. "Billy is perhaps the only artist of her kind," Brandon Goodman, one of the two, explained in an interview. "But there is no doubt that in order to be globally successful in such a way, it took a powerful organization of people, who worked restlessly to make Aylish the most talked about artist in the world."

But both Goodman and the rest of the factors that accompanied Aylish's early career were surprised by the direction her success took her to. Their original vision recognized her target audience as pretty similar girls to her - introverted young women. And there are plenty of them. At first this was indeed the case, but as success increased, awareness of it increased, and adults, no less young, seemed to connect with it.

why?

The reasons for this can only be guessed.

Maybe Aylish reminds them of themselves in their youth, maybe their adolescent children.

Maybe it's someone young doing music that is not pop that excited them and maybe her way from the margins to the center, as artists have done in the past, is what winked at them.

Also the fact that the right influencers brought the appreciation to her helped of course: it was not only Grohl who said he went to her show with his daughters, but also Tom York from Radiohead who said something similar.

Aylish's manager said that after York attended the singer's show with his daughter, he met Aylish behind the scenes and told her she was "the only one today doing something that is fucking interesting in music."

When such people are revered by the parent generation give a seal to the music that their teenagers hear - this is the perfect jackpot.

ungrudging.

Tom York (Photo: GettyImages, Matt Cardy)

But the appreciation of the previous generation of the rock world also had the opposite effect. Aylish may be the voice of her peers, but those who appropriated it and adopted her into their lap are members of the duplicate or even triangular generation. Aside from the celebrities celebrating, the Oscar appearance, or the adult radio and media networks that embraced her, Aylish has also become the youngest singer to win a Grammy for Album of the Year (picking up no less than seven awards in two years). Afterwards, she was cast to sing at the age of 18 the theme song of the latest James Bond movie, a relatively young age for this job. Madonna, for comparison, had to be 42 years old to be considered mature enough for the role, and Tina Turner 56 years old. That's where it came from.

At this point Aylish was scheduled to embark on never-ending global tour to hit the iron. Then the corona did come and everything was shut down - but not in her case. Her tremendous success has begun to forget that, but being at home is exactly where Aylish started, it's where she's especially strong. Thus, for a year, with most of the world stuck at home, Aylish dripped songs for us, which would make up the album "Joy Than Ever".

The first segment, “My Future,” came out in June 2020, at the heart of the closures. In the song, which received relatively cool reactions and success, Aylish sounded optimistic. The rhythms and sounds were cheerful, Aylish's singing a bit jazzy, Julie London style, and the lyrics - not to mention the lyrics. The depressed and acute girl suddenly declared that she was "in love with her future". Many raised an eyebrow: Has success changed Aylish? Is she now, when she is a young famous millionaire, no longer a strange girl?

In response, we received on November 20 the second single from the album, "Therefore I Am", which in its angry and somewhat gloomy sound reminded Billy of the first album. "I'm not your girlfriend," she sings in the chorus, "I think, so I exist." Aylish in the old style was received much better than the optimistic Billy, and the single became a huge success. The question that arose, then, was whether on the album we would get more from Billy of "My Future" or of "Therefore I Am ".

The following singles only sharpened the question.

The third single came out in April - "Your Power" - and was a kind of minor ballad with melancholy acoustic guitar and style singing that singers like Kirstin Hersh, Hop Sandovell or Kim Deal created 25 years ago.

"Your Power" introduced something a little different.

Aylish sings quietly, a little in completion, about a bad relationship, about heartbreak.

No longer as a girl / girl, these as a young woman.

By the time the album was released last Friday, two more singles had come out of it: "Lost Cause," which was released a month ago, seemed like a sequel in style and theme to "Your Power";

"NDA" which came out just a week before the album is a bit like "Therefore" - angry, monotonous and megalomaniacal, with Aylish talking about herself a lot.

The line between intimate and voyeuristic

The entire album, which was also produced by Phineas at his home, includes 11 more tracks that are quite divided on themes and style like the pre-singles. Aylish either speaks of herself, or of the heart. Sometimes she is optimistic, sometimes pessimistic.

The first song on the album, "Getting Older", is almost sung by Aylish in a whisper. When you turn up the volume to better understand it, it is actually more absorbed in the bass and music - and to hear it clearly you actually have to turn it down (!). It's a trick that goes on throughout the album, as if to tell us: it's an album to hear quietly, without interruption.

In the opening song, which is supposed to tell of her puberty or aging, Aylish sings in a hymn that "what I once enjoyed, today it keeps me employed." It is unclear if this is a critique of her status at the moment. Most girls his age make a living as waitresses, but Aylish laments about her luck. It's a confusing passage, but it's convincing. After all, who really knows what he wants to do in life at 19? In any case, the song puts the listener in its gloom straight into the depths of the piece. But then, in the end, as the atmosphere warmed up, this passage was interrupted with a kind of growling dog angry - this time, the apparent message is different: Do not fall asleep. There is a lot of interest here.

The album continues in whispers, with the early singles woven into it, and also turning an album you hear for the first time into something already very familiar and accessible. Despite this, it is clear that it was very important for Aylish and Phineas not to get bored on the album and each section is in a slightly different style, each song has its own something special. This is not at all an album in a uniform stanza, as is customary to do today. "Happier Than Ever," in that sense, is fascinating.

In the first part these surprises are relatively accessible and predictable, for example when Elish makes Bossa Nova (in "Billie Bossa Nova") or church music that develops into electronics (in "GOLDWIG"). The second part of the album is more intriguing. "Not My Responsibility", for example, the eighth section that begins the second half of the piece, is for its rather delusional fears. Aylish does in this song a Spoken Word segment that reviews all sorts of reactions she has received online about her appearance, and her reaction to them. This is a mesmerizing, important and unusual piece. Not something you hear every day.

Amidst all the whispers and manifestos, Aylish tries to mention here and there that she is also a singer, but she does that too with an asterisk. In the "Everybody Dies" segment, she sings a beautiful ballad and also manages to reach impressive vocal ranges - but unlike how other singers would probably record such a song, it sounds like Elish and Phineas insisted on recording the entire song in one continuous take. Thus, after each line that Aylish sings, she is heard taking a deep breath and then continuing. This is the kind of thing that is usually cut in production, but not in Aylish. For her, everything must sound real.

The feeling is that the simple songs, the ones that describe Aylish's life and her feelings, are the closest thing to the real thing there is here. But this need to prove that she's not a pike is very noticeable throughout the album, and we have to admit that it's a bit of a hindrance as well. This preoccupation with authenticity sometimes becomes voyeuristic. For example, when she finishes the album with another ballad with an acoustic guitar, "Male Fantasy", do not really know how to digest it: she says she tries not to eat, that she watches porn, that she goes for treatment - all this is very exciting, but the line between intimate And authentic to voyeurs is dwindling. When that happens, Aylish is not very different from all those singers "with a plastic body" that she describes in the song "OverHeated" and tries to differentiate herself from them.

Everything is pretty confusing with Aylish.

Along with the regular version of the album, Spotify also came up with a version that at the end of each Aylish song tells about.

It is strange.

The whispering, angry, slightly broken singer is heard talking like a normal American girl.

A bit loud, with a lot of confidence - as if there is a difference in the personas.

There's the character of the singer - and there's the real Aylish who plays the singer.

What within all this creation is the truth?

It is very difficult to decide.

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