2019 was a record year for Billie Eilish : her debut album “ When We Fall Asleep, Where do We Go? ”, Which arrived on the market on 29 March, has shocked the pop genre and climbed the heights of the world rankings allowing it to collect numerous awards including six nominations for the Grammy Awards and the recent award as woman of the year on the prestigious Billboard magazine .

From the height of his eighteen years, completed on 18 December, Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O ‘Connell – this is the name of the young American artist at the registry office – has already traveled the street: the comparison with the market for Billie comes in 2016 with the release of the unpublished ” Ocean Eyes “, which went viral on the major streaming music platforms in a short time. The climb to success continues unstoppable: the year after the singer-songwriter released her debut EP ” Don’t Smile at Me “, the successful single ” Bellyache ” which will be followed by ” Bored “, ” Watch ” and ” Copycat ” and in 2018 it starts its first world tour .

Billie Eilish is a true child prodigy , as the French cousins ​​would say. Daughter of theater actors, she has always grown up in an environment full of stimuli that has allowed her to best express her musical streak. At the age of eleven he writes and interprets his first songs in the house in Higland Park where he lives with his family. His most precious and trusted collaborator is his older brother Finneas (former actor of Glee and Modern Family, now musician, co-producer and arranger), with whom he has established a strong emotional bond and great complicity.

Despite her young age, the young Billie Eilish has an out of the ordinary artistic attitude and a strong awareness of her own means: her songs are produced and recorded in the home environment without any external infringement. From a stylistic point of view, the artist prefers to focus on the timbre element , reducing the instrumental part to a few chords. The wise use of vocal filters to give space to the whisper, gives the songs that ghostly atmosphere and the hypnotic tones that distinguish them. The icing on the cake that makes Billie Eilish unique in its kind are its pungent and uncanny texts that completely deviate from most of the material present in today’s pop scene.

What led Billie Eilish to emerge is to have put to rest the restlessness , the bewilderment and the desire for rebellion typical of every teenager: in his songs with a gloomy and melancholic line he tells of dramas, unease, emotional turmoil, lost friendships and amorous disappointments bringing everything to excess. The themes dealt with by the singer with extreme ease are very dear to millions of teenagers who fully identify with her by choosing her as their icon.

The choice to include in her dark pop and indie songs typical of electronic music and other musical genres is not accidental: it is as if the Californian singer-songwriter wanted to bring out also through her sound the contrasting feelings that harbor in her heart and in that of his peers. Billie Eilish’s music is therefore certainly a more innovative and more refined product than the classic pop ballads with frivolous contents to which we are accustomed today: it is precisely this intimacy that makes it so magnetic and interesting.

Also as regards his live performances , Billie Eilish brought a breath of fresh air. Unlike the other pop stars, he prefers a rather sparse scenography. Her shows are mainly based on continuous movement : the young singer-songwriter has studied dance for many years before devoting herself to singing and knows perfectly well what are the appropriate movements to combine with her songs. Despite her introverted character, she appears fully at ease on the stage where, in addition to dancing like a madwoman, she converses animatedly with the audience, inciting him to have fun with her.

Another aspect that sets it against the trend is the fact that it follows a somewhat unusual style even in clothing. Billie Eilish always dresses in oversized clothes (sweatshirts, oversize shirts and baggy trousers), often and willingly overlapping several layers of clothes. The reason is simple: beyond questions related to practicality, the young artist is not at all interested in being attractive and does not consider it correct that people judge a person according to their forms. In a hyper-sexualized society in which the self-image has a strong value, the choice of the singer therefore appears bold as well as provocative.

Thanks to her artistic sensitivity , her shrewd vision of the world and her undoubted talent, Eilish has managed to impose herself artistically on an international level while maintaining an attitude far removed from the aesthetic and expressive canons of pop as we know them. If with a single LP he has completely upset the logic of today’s music scene, it is legitimate to ask himself what we should expect from this prodigy girl in the not too distant future.

Now everyone wants it, because Billie Eilish, like it or not, is the new world musical phenomenon, capable of earning the esteem of money order rockers – such as, for example, Dave Grohl – and of the audiences of international festivals, as well as that of the public more generalist and world famous pop stars such as BTS . Yet – we can be sure – the singer from Los Angeles, California , has no intention of capitalizing on her popularity by accepting all the musical guests that she has been seeing to submit in recent months. Billie Eilish herself explained this in an interview with the American magazine Spin.

“I don’t like working with other people”, she assured, who has in her brother Finneas (in the photo, in the background) his only and faithful collaborator: “It’s something that happens in my head, and it’s strange. I don’t like mixing friendship with music, for any reason. I never play my songs to my friends until they are completely finished. I don’t like being watched by people while I work, and in any case I’m very good for on my own, so everything is ok. ”

The concept was already expressed a few days ago during an interview given by the artist to Alexis Petridis, the British Guardian’s top musical signature: “Collaborations are not something that interests me very much,” Eilish said, “And is something that they always ask me and that I really don’t want to do. It is not something against anyone, I simply don’t feel the need. I love music, I love other artists, but I hate how much – as soon as I meet a colleague – everyone gets they talk about our probable collaboration. Why can’t I simply be friends with someone who does my job? I don’t say that I will never collaborate: simply, now I am not trying to do it ..

I feel sad when you are sad. I feel happy when she is happy. I feel angry when she is angry, ”writes a fan of Billie Eilish, 13-year-old Amelia, on Instagram. The hard core of the fans of the eighteen-year-old singer-songwriter are the Gen Z-ers, teenagers between 13 and 17 years, for the majority girls, much more mature than the age can reveal. A bit like their heroine, who at 17 made her debut with “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”.

The album, released last March, reached number one in America, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. It has become the best-selling debut album in America in the last ten years (both among men, women and groups) with over 313 thousand copies in the first week of publication. To date it has totaled over 24 billion streams worldwide. Not only that: Billie Eilish is officially the first artist born in this millennium to have reached both position n. 1 of the records that of the singles and is the third female artist in the last 31 years with more songs on the top of the Billboard Alternative Songsairplay chart (together with Alanis Morrissette and Sinead O’Connor).

To understand this fulminating rise, just peek through the letters of the fans. “Billie’s songs often tell stories or express feelings that I had difficulty understanding,” writes Saima, a 13-year-old Danish woman, who said that the music of the singer-songwriter from Los Angeles helped her to overcome a difficult moment. This emotional connection is a common thread between all fans who send messages from Italy to Australia.

“Her lyrics are so raw and true, they help me get through good and bad times,” writes 15-year-old Australian Joelie. “I am a warm hug and they taught me not to worry about what others think and instead of being myself.” Because the girl from “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” Not only reinvented pop with her threatening rap, but also upset the pop star’s canons. Fluo, oversize, baggie, exaggerated, “without gender”, it has torn down the combination of the good girl-bad girl of pop, giving life to a generation of young female stars who have no intention of conforming to the ideas of adults on models for Young people. She, like Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana, belongs to that rare kind of artist who every two-three decades redefines the rules of the game and the collective imagination, crumbling the certainties of music marketing. The first rule that Billie has subverted in a handful of months is that to break through at 17 it is not essential to be a sexy teenager with the silhouette of an ordinance, perhaps branded from head to toe and covered with make up.

“It represents the antithesis of the pop generation that many kids grew up with,” says designer Samantha Burkhart. From the total lack of sexuality in its aesthetic to the heavy use of horror visual elements in its music videos, Eilish is ushering in a new era in pop.

“Billie doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion,” writes a 13-year-old Belgian fan. “Wear what you want and don’t care about people who speak badly of you.” “I love Billie’s style,” adds Megan, a seventeen-year-old from Michigan. “It invites me to be myself and wear what I want.” In her lyrics, the singer-songwriter seems to touch the collective desire of the generation of post #MeToo girls, to take control and be directors of their creativity.

Billie Eilish’s music – full of contradictions: sweet but dramatic, childish and mature at the same time – is the soundtrack of this complicated new millennium. Appointment for July 17, 2020 at the MIND Milano Innovation District – Expo Area, when the world tour of the new pop star will also stop in Italy with a single event.

THIS IS THE TOP20 OF 2019:

1.Billie Eilish – “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”

2. Nick Cave – “Ghosteen”
A masterpiece of poetry and music with which the artist elaborates mourning through the imagination.

3. La Municipàl – “Bellissimi Difetti”
The Apulian band formed by the brothers Carmine and Isabella Tundo is the Italian surprise. Ivan’s funeral leave their mark.

4. Giovanni Truppi – “Poetry and civilization”
As in the case of La Municipàl, this album is also a demonstration that you can make music without being banal, addressing social and political issues.

5. Bruce Springsteen – “Western Stars”
Some critics have “branded” him as a cowboy record. Mistaken. It is unquestionably one of Bruce’s most intimate, intense and reflective. As in his 1982 masterpiece, “Nebraska”, Springsteen focuses more on the voice. And on words.

6. Sam Fender – “Hypersonic Missiles”
The 24-year-old from the working-class is a rare talent. The rock America of the Boss and Tom Petty moved to Newcastle.

7. Cesare Basile – “Cummeddia” Difficult
songs, Basile continues the process of drying up the music. The eleven tracks are talkin ‘blues that mix Sicily with desert blues and Mississippi blues, bluegrass and electronics.

8. Big Thief – “Two hands”
The Brooklyn band’s second album of the year is more earthly than “UFOF”, the bright collection that arrived in the spring. Here they sing about death and illness, elementary concerns that nevertheless reach a sort of upper level thanks to the tenacious, cracked songwriting that is rapidly affirming them as Brooklyn’s answer to Crazy Horse.

9. Caleidø – “Make silence”
The Misterbianco band rides the indie-pop wave: between the lines you can see the portrait of a generation poised between melancholy and despair, a sense of confusion and emptiness.

10. Mario Venuti – “Soyuz 10”
Nostalgia for a new world, made of sounds, words and feelings of the past. The album is a sort of manifesto of an artist who can perhaps be called the last of the old and the first of the new songwriters.

11. Luca Madonia – “The pyramid”
Among the echoes of the Denovo and the Beatles, it is a dip in the musical atmospheres of the sixties in the company of many friends. A sound journey with great class and elegance.

12. Felice Marsili De Medici – “Aut de Gamme”
Battisti and Luigi Tenco, the songwriter-indie and Ennio Morricone, Manu Chao and South America, blues and waltzes, Cesare Basile and punk folk, cowboys and Indians. There is all this in Felice Briguglio’s album in Catania, aka “Felice Marsili De Medici”.

13. Partinico Rose – “Songs for Sad and Angry People”
After talented nuns and meteors, a voice out of the chorus finally arrives from Ragusa. A powerful wall of guitars, a voice that recalls Robert Smith of Cure, an explicit language (English), strong-colored interpretations, a rock album played with grit and cleanliness.

14. Fontaines DC – “Dogrel”
The image of the Dublin band is as vivid and impetuous as Joyce’s visions. Songs of a rude, swaggering and cheerful beauty, but even the ballads are equally good, with a piano-pub sadness.

15. The Murder Capital – “When I Have Fears”
The other post-punk success story of Dublin with Fontaines DC, in The Murder Capital there is still a touch of lyricism. Beyond the metronome garage-rock, frontman James McGovern seems to be writing a Gothic novel.

16. Iggy Pop – “Free”
The sensational turn of the Iguana, which flirts with jazz like the David Bowie of “Blackstar” and with the poetry of Lou Reed. A melancholic, bitter, twilight disc for the survivor of the “sacred triangle” of rock

17. Mannequin Pussy – “Patience”
For their first album with the legendary pop-punk label Epitaph Records, the Philadelphia quartet blends punk trash with melodic, great hymns of anguish and regret. Listening to the singer Marisa Dabice grinning, crying, wincing and roaring in “Drunk II” means entering her shattered psyche. He sings with a ferocity rarely listened to in the easy listening playlist of the current indie; his presence practically vibrates the whole band.

18. Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains
Stories of depression and despair are easier to take with full knowledge of the happy ending. “Purple Mountains”, ” David Berman’s latest album, released twenty-six days before taking his own life at the age of 52, does not offer this luxury. Several songs – “The dead know what they are doing when they leave this world behind”, from “Nights That Won’t Happen”, or “There is no way to last here so long” from “All My Happiness Is Gone” – seem to point to what would have happened. Hearing them now is emotionally overwhelmed.

19. FKA Twigs – “Magdalene”
The British singer-songwriter, musician and dancer alternates between a painful falsetto and a tight, scratchy voice, full of regret. “Cellophane” is an extraordinary song.

20. Celeste – “Compilation 1.1”
Jamaican blood, born in Brighton, in his voice full of feeling and moving we hear those of Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Paul Weller called her to his court. His name is Celeste, the rising star of British new wave jazz.

The 2019 was the year of  Billie Eilish . She released her debut album ” When We All Sleep Where Do We Go? ” Which consecrated her as an international music star, she held a sold out world tour (which also made a stop in Milan ), with her magnetic personality she became an  icon of style , she got six Grammy Awards 2020 nominations and she turned 18. And the list is still long!

Yet another proof that this is about to end was an incredible vintage for Billie there is this last record: his Wikipedia page is the most viewed of all 2019 by a living singer . In the musical environment, only Freddie Mercury did better than her.

The list of the most viewed pages of Wikipedia in 2019 was compiled by the user Andrew G. West, who put together a series of raw data that the portal makes available to the community. Andrew has not taken into consideration the Wikipedia home page , which has always been the one visited here.

Billie recently explained in an interview why she doesn’t want to collaborate with other artists.