That voice inside your head is Billie Eilish telling you to vote
And as youth vote outreach goes, whoever booked this 18-year-old to sing at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night couldn’t have been lazier or luckier.
Lazy because Eilish is such an obvious choice. She’s an industry-vetted Grammy-sweeper and a precocious Gen-Z poster child who can connect with her peers without unsettling the parents, neatly conforming to a dull person’s idea of rebellious youth (she has fluorescent green hair) while simultaneously flattering that dull person’s most traditional musical tastes (she digs Sinatra).
Lucky because Eilish is a true maestro of the streaming age. She’s an expert studio rat whose biggest songs translate effortlessly through those tiny speakers we plug into our ears and those little screens we push up to our faces. Her best work can conjure a fantastic illusion of intimacy and warmth when, in fact, she’s whispering to us from the cold, faraway murk of the digital void.
Politicians campaigning through a national pandemic are still struggling to learn that trick, delivering their stump speeches to webcams in empty home offices where their applause lines evaporate in unceremonious silence. If they’re smart, they were listening extra close to Eilish on Wednesday night: to how her patient phrasing makes her music sound supremely confident, highly attentive and magnetically humane. Eilish doesn’t blurt, or stumble, or make weird gaffes. She gets everyone to listen by drawing them near.
She sang just one song during the telecast, her new single, “My Future,” which slowly bloomed from an ASMR torch ballad into a fleet disco lullaby. There were lyrics about rebuffing an admirer’s tethering advances — “I’m in love with my future, can’t wait to meet her” — but to suggestible ears the metaphor could be stretched into something optimistic about the unwritten future of the republic. Either way, this music felt personal, and unassuming, and not at all tweaked or contorted for the occasion. It wasn’t a fight song, and it definitely wasn’t “Fight Song.”
Eilish made her position overt with her opening remarks. “You don’t need me to tell you things are a mess,” she said to the camera. “Donald Trump is destroying our country and everything we care about.” She encouraged young people to “vote like our lives and the world depend on it, because they do.”
Then, instead of rushing into her first verse as if our civilization was on the line, she sang on her own quiet terms, making her call to action feel up close and personal. This wasn’t an urgent shout into an empty arena. It was steady and insistent, like the voice in your head.
