This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
A grown-up could never defeat “Old Town Road.” It was impossible. All through the spring and summer of 2019, we watched major millennial pop stars cranking out songs that they assumed were going to be major singles, and those songs crashed and burned. Absolutely nothing was going to dislodge Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ boundary-busting freak blockbuster. Lil Nas X understood the cultural tides of the internet better than any established star, and he had the digital instincts to keep his song atop the Hot 100 for a huge chunk of the year. About halfway through the absurdly long “Old Town Road” reign, however, a dark horse contender emerged. Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” didn’t sound anything like “Old Town Road,” which makes sense. Nothing sounds like “Old Town Road.” Nothing sounds like “Bad Guy,” either. But the two songs had some important things in common.
Like “Old Town Road,” “Bad Guy” was recorded in a bedroom, on a computer, by two very young people who were raised on YouTube and SoundCloud and who seemed hostile to the very idea of genre. Billie Eilish was even younger than Lil Nas X. Like him, she had a sharp digital marketing strategy in place before she ever signed a major-label deal. Eilish wasn’t an outsider in the same way that Lil Nas X was. She grew up in Los Angeles, and her whole family was deeply involved with the arts; nobody was trying to convince her to go to college when she really just wanted to make music. She played the music-business game, but she and her brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell had musical ideas that pushed so hard against conventional wisdom that they inadvertently revealed how unwise that conventional wisdom always was. They played around in the margins so cannily that the margins became the main text.
Those two kids, Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish, were fluent in languages that older generations didn’t even recognize as languages. When their two smashes, “Old Town Road” and “Bad Guy,” emerged within a few months of each other, it became all too obvious that pop music was undergoing one of its periodic generational shifts. That shift came right on time. Pop needed new ideas, and Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish had them. For nine weeks, “Bad Guy” sat at #2 behind “Old Town Road,” coming very close to the all-time record for the longest-ever stretch in the runner-up slot. Finally, “Old Town Road” dropped from the top spot, and “Bad Guy” snuck in there for a week. In that moment. Billie Eilish became the first artist born in the 21st century to sit atop the Hot 100. Eilish still hasn’t made another #1 hit since “Bad Guy,” but it doesn’t matter because she’s not the type of artist whose impact really registers when you look through pop history through the weird little keyhole that this column offers. She’s still one of the biggest stars on the planet today. Duh.
Fresh music, bold entertainment, and men’s fashion—one tight email a week.
