Billie Eilish reveals the truth about herself in new music video

Billy from the very beginning of her career aspired to take part in the soundtracks of films, as this is the easiest path to promotion, beaten by many artists. Starting with trump cards, she became known as the youngest musician to write music for a James Bond film. Now Billie has touched another legend – the ideal of the world of glamor and plastic, a completely artificial Barbie girl.

The simple dramaturgy of the new clip is that Billy, in a blond wig and a bright yellow dress against a spotty light green background, symbolizing, apparently, the spring of her life, is sitting and playing in clothes for dolls. Moreover, she takes out various branded men’s suits for Ken, Barbie’s puppet fiance, from the suitcase (any casual viewer who does not know the artist’s creative path in detail may think so). Looking lovingly at each item, she hangs them on a toy clothes rack. Then this whole idyll experiences a little stress due to a micro-earthquake. Following the shaking of the table, a powerful jet of air blows into the face of the big girl, which symbolizes a gust of wind, and blows the entire rack from the table along with the clothes. Billy patiently collects mini junk and tries hard to enjoy either dreams of the future or memories of the past. But as soon as she manages to eliminate the consequences of the incident with the wind, water begins to pour from the ceiling. Billy-Barbie is no longer able to fight this natural disaster, having left her little things in a doll suitcase with discontent, she proudly runs away from the already empty frame, her legs spread ridiculously in round-toed shoes with a transverse strap on plump yellow heels.

“Well, what is criminal here?” – our stage revolutionary Irina Allegrova would sing … Really, what? Let’s figure it out.

Russian young musicians no longer call such simple videos clips, they say, they say: “What are you?! It’s just a mood video ”(from the word mood – mood). We still have expensive complex musical films in fashion. In the director’s environment, clips for pop in professional jargon are called “vomited images.”

But Billy, who is successful from all sides, does not do such nonsense, all her videos are concise and revolve around a single image. Therefore, the video about Barbie does not stand out from the general concept of Billy’s work. Unexpected here was only the appearance of a girl who was seen with all the fingers of one hand in beautiful dresses at public events, and always – a rebel and a mess …

Fans, as soon as the video became available, rushed excitedly to discuss the new creation and look for some global meaning behind it all. Like: what if Billy wanted to say that she fondly remembers that great era that has gone? “Great” girls who ran away from school call the start of Billy Eilish’s career … That is, 9 years ago.

For example, the fans saw that Billy took out of the toy suitcase not Ken’s costume at all, as an inattentive audience might think, but a mini version of her own Grammy 2020 costume. Upon closer examination, it turned out that all these clothes are copies of her own outfits (and with huge logo brands so that everyone notices and remembers, of course) from different clips and shows of past years. Since Billy, having a feminine figure, performed all this time in shapeless oversized outfits, in the video, dressed in a fitted Barbie dress, she seems to say goodbye to her teenage past. But at the same time, as promotional photos for the single, the artist’s management still issued images in which the singer appears in the same dimensionless jeans, as if taken from a cartoon donut lover Homer Simpson.

In general, Eilish’s entire ordinary wardrobe looks as if only huge obese people live in the city where she lives, and all the clothes in stores are exclusively for them, and online trading with cheap Chinese clothes has not yet been invented. This image was created for her by the stylist of one of the world’s leading luxury clothing brands at the very beginning of Billy’s career. The image emphasizes her deliberate teenageness, even childishness, cynically making her closer to children who fanatically consume pop culture. If you look closely, in the clips Billy always plays under a small, even a preschooler. At the same time, on her clothes, even plain T-shirts, one can usually easily notice the brand markings. So that children from an early age, looking at their idol, absorb information where they will subsequently have to carry their money.

Even at the premiere of the Barbie movie, she came to the monstrous mega-sneakers, which she said that in them she looks like a giant baby who is just learning to walk. Billy often mentions in interviews that she came up with her image, and baggy clothes help her cope with body shaming, the shame of her own body. But this is easily questioned, since it was too quickly and professionally packaged as a product for mass markets and sold for use by global clothing brands – a kind of icon for broadcasting their interests. All the products accompanying her personal brand, including dolls and other merchandise, appear on the market instantly. She even published a book about herself with personal photographs. Obviously, a whole dream factory is working around the girl, monetizing her popularity to the maximum. No wonder her parents, who are professionally engaged in the field of show business, from the very beginning taught their children – Billy and her own older brother Finneas – to various types of performing arts. Now he and his brother are working together on the songs that Billy performs.

It is obvious that all this teenage rebellious punk style (due to which she became close to the youngest and most devoted fans) was thought out from the very beginning and carefully verified by the hands of professionals to the millimeter. She, along with all the creativity, was literally made by specialists. By the way, in this vein, it is interesting that Billy is the fetus of in vitro fertilization (the late child of actress and film producer Maggie Byrd). It is not surprising that writing a song about a doll so stirred up the young soul of a girl. And the question “Why was I created?”, the title one in this song, turned out to be painfully relevant for her. As the singer admitted in an interview, he was so deeply hidden in the bowels of her psyche that the girl did not suspect it before.

Perhaps, after another couple of years, the world will hear real stories from the formation of a future star, and not legends invented in PR offices. Let us recall the chilling stories of Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, over which their parents dominated … But it is possible that everything is completely different in Billy’s family, and the mother-film producer participated in her rapid career as a singer only with love and affection.

Now Billy claims that the song “What Was I Made For?” (“Why was I created?”) not only about the doll, but also about her personally, her life and what she really feels. The text sounds like it’s from inside Barbie’s empty rubber head. Perhaps it is this emptiness that is symbolized by the empty frame of the clip in which Billy Barbie plays in her clothes. Confusion runs through this empty head: “What was I made for? / I looked so alive, but it turns out I’m not real / I’m the one you paid for, what am I for? / I don’t know how to feel, but when – can I…”

Teenage girls are delighted with this creepy message. Because for them this issue is relevant, they are already aware of their separation from the family, their uniqueness in something, they are aware of the need for some kind of personal path. But who they are and what exactly they feel, and in general why all this is an open question. Therefore, they, who only yesterday associated themselves with the doll-princess, are now listening with tears in their eyes to the “terrible truth” from Billy …

In an interview, the pop star recalls how, last December, she suddenly thought about writing a song about Barbie for her, and was extremely surprised at her idea. But suddenly this topic itself began to unwind around her. In January, after watching a cut of the film, she was delighted with what she saw. She was offered to think about a song for Barbie, but she was in a creative crisis at that moment, and could not squeeze anything out of herself. Surprisingly, her brother Finneas, who usually has a thirst for creativity, was also at zero. “I felt lost, just like in this song,” Billy says of his condition this winter.

About Barbie as a toy in general, Billy said that she never associated herself with this doll, as she has too unrealistic a body for a person. She was just a toy for her, to which there was no particular attachment: “I never wanted to be like her, it’s not about me.”

“When I did start writing the song, I thought only about Barbie, her story, her life. Not about my feelings, not about my life… Finneas and I both tried to tell the story of the doll in the song. So the first version appeared. A couple of days later I listened to it again… and wow! Honestly, it’s all so similar to me! It was as if I was writing about myself and in some incredible way conveyed the experience of my life. About her further work on the image, Billy admitted that he literally captured her: “I seemed to be pulling Barbie out of myself.” As it turned out, writing stories about other people is much easier for her than writing about her real feelings.

The idea for the video came to her almost simultaneously with the lyrics of the song, in the margins of the drafts she was already drawing her profile with a doll haircut, imagining herself in a yellow dress against a green background. But what exactly she was doing on the table and what, in fact, the clip was about, came much later in the process of discussing the idea with the whole team.

It is not yet reported whether the singer will give up her bashful teenage oversizes. One thing is clear: the artist has finally come to grips with her own feelings, which is usually like opening a pandora’s box and entailing all sorts of public showdowns. It’s time to stock up on popcorn.