What Was It Made For? The Problem With Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft

I don’t want to say Billie Eilish has succumbed.

From where I’m standing, child stars of her ilk have been worse off, especially in the ghastly era that did irreparable damage to Amanda Bynes and Lindsay Lohan — we’re lucky Britney Spears is even alive. But I feel naive that I once called Eilish the “healthiest” teenpop star of all-time. That was premature, and ignorant of all the forces pushing on someone who released her first hit song, “Ocean Eyes,” when she was fucking 13.

It would be even dumber to continue passing the title around, say, onto someone like Olivia Rodrigo just because she seems like an exceptionally well-adjusted person doing model things with her fame, like trying to distribute Plan B morning-after abortives at shows. Both of these outstanding pop stars still reside in a patriarchy during a particularly ugly era for parasocial fandom and celebrity surveillance, even if they can both afford the mental healthcare that most people reading this can’t. Rodrigo’s most radically progressive action was thwarted by her management, and we’ll probably see worse as the tide eventually turns on a 21-year-old pop star and she’s forced to react in public because the child celebrity knows no other life.

So here’s where Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell is at. Her great debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, felt loose and unforced in a way that felt authentically teenage. The mock-horror album art, The Office snippets, the rapport with only her brother Finneas in the room crafting his own signature sound effects from unusual samples as she got great laughs out of her own budding personality and macabre sonics. The follow-up, Happier Than Ever, cohered even better for me, one of the subtlest and smartest albums by a phenom of her stature in some time. It was even quieter though, and leaned even further into her atmospheric, oft-compared-to-ASMR delivery. It didn’t spin off any hits, though every single sounded immensely better in album context, and the biggest outlier, the title track with its surprisingly loud rock climax, is the one that ended up impressing even the many people who dismissed the album as boring.

So Happier Than Ever did not follow her streak of Grammy glory, surprising everyone by securing the Big Four awards with her debut and then cementing her overexposure by winning Record of the Year yet again with the somewhat forgettable, kinda ominous non-album omen “Everything I Wanted” and then Song of the Year last year with “What Was I Made For?,” her token prestige inclusion on the Barbie soundtrack that both utilized the existentialist sadness she does best and solidified that this is now schtick. Nothing feels worse to a young pop star than the idea that they’re only known for doing one thing, especially when that thing didn’t sell half the second time out.

 

VIDEO: Billie Eilish “SKINNY”

That’s the relatively humane side of the challenges Billie Eilish is now experiencing. Then you have the shitty stuff. Where Happier Than Ever’s opening state of the union was quite a bummer for a 19-year-old (“Things I once enjoyed / Just keep me employed now”), the new Hit Me Hard and Soft starts in the gutter: “People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny.” That shock is the auteur’s intent, though; in her borderline exploitative Rolling Stone profile a few weeks ago, she asked that the writer not disclose the song’s title (“SKINNY”). Where things get away from her is that the following track is supposed to be a vault across the emotional spectrum to showcase a euphoric new danceable side, celebrating her queerness and carnal appetite (title: “Lunch”) before deflating the delicious “tastes like she might be the one” with “been trying hard not to overeat” and praise for how “clear” her lust object’s skin is. The ED subtext is just not the way you hoped it would pan out after she made a statement by wearing complicated, boxy outfits that rejected the objectifying gaze at the (underage) peak of her popularity, or even after Happier Than Ever’s powerful spoken piece “Not My Responsibility” (as in “The body I was born with / Is it not what you wanted”).

You have the avowed refusal to put out any advance singles, a strategy that would’ve been mighty for Happier Than Ever, but here feels just as defensive as her struggling to separate her identity from that of other rich, horny people whose only friends are on the payroll in that RS profile. We already knew from last time that her legions wouldn’t have made one of these ten songs a hit. The fun she had with her trappings-of-fame predicament last time (“had a pretty boy over but he couldn’t stay / On his way out made him sign an NDA”) went largely unnoticed and those of us who did knew it wouldn’t last. Or as she puts it exhaustedly, “21 took a lifetime.” Her wit for rhyming is as terse and interlocking as ever; take a deep breath before you enunciate “the internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny and somebody’s got to feed it.” I just wish there wasn’t a whole cottage industry of awards-show lobbyists trying to shove her into the box of Norah Jones piano lounge. Or maybe I just want someone to blame for “L’amour De Ma Vie.” 

So you also have the half-abandonment of her signature style, which I can’t believe I’m so sad about. Perhaps dogged by complaints about her patented murmur (which FTR are also not her responsibility), Eilish makes a point of Actually Singing, which turns out to sound markedly more anonymous than her Lana-and-Lorde-derived sprechgesang. So if “Birds of a Feather” sounds more like an Oscar-nominated Nelly Furtado tune from an IP film than anything else, I hope Hollywood’s embrace at least leads Eilish to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross taking over behind the boards.

Because even Finneas, either via his ultra-bland solo garbage or his slow homogenization from self-taught weirdo to industry standard, is often failed here by his once-subtle and provocative production choices. The moon-bounce bassline and trip-hop driving “Chihiro” should be more distinct. “L’amour De Ma Vie” is like an audition reel for styles she doesn’t have in the bag, from cocktail Colleen Ballinger to Miley-grade synthpop where she sounds like Kanye calling an ex “so mediocre” through alien Auto-Tune. I say this advisedly, because the dribs and drabs of theater music on Asleep made for some of its best moments, particularly “Wish You Were Gay,” which now plays as a more winning come-out party than anything on her first full-length as an out queerdo.

And if you’ve caught the memes of Shanin Blake without hearing her rapping, it’s hard to imagine it being far off from the self-love-and-ukelele “The Greatest,” which is far from the greatest “Happier Than Ever” she’s done. I really hope she didn’t overwrite all these multipartite mistakes just because that song got the best reception last time. The sizzling neon of “Bittersuite” is alluring slo-mo dubstep, until you realize the title means yet another beat switch for the sake of it and the best thing on the record is actually just the first third of a song.

Hit Me Hard and Soft lyrically and sonically feels like a nadir for an astute pop musician trying to fix everything that isn’t broken; it doesn’t feel soft and it definitely doesn’t feel hard. It simply doesn’t hit.