Billie Eilish is in the midst of promoting her excellent second album, Happier Than Ever, which dropped on July 3oth.
The 19-year-old pop juggernaut recently sat down with The Guardian, for an extensive profile that saw Eilish grapple with fame, body image, and the power that social media has in warping her opinion on herself.
In ‘Not My Responsibility’, a spoken-word interlude off Happier Than Ever, Eilish confronts the sickening and bleak media circus surrounding her body. The track was first unveiled during Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? arena tour — before it was cut short amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Watch ‘Not My Responsibility’ by Billie Eilish
“The body I was born with, is it not what you wanted? If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers, I’m a slut,” Eilish recites.
Eilish admitted to The Guardian that she still struggles with her body image. “I see people online, looking like I’ve never looked. And immediately I am like, ‘Oh my God, how do they look like that?’” she said. “And I mean, I’m very confident in who I am, and I’m very happy with my life…I’m obviously not happy with my body, but who is?”
Eilish also takes umbrage with her celebrity peers who “promote unattainable body standards,” she says.
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“It’s completely fine to get work done – do this, do that, do what makes you feel happy. It’s just when you deny it and say, ‘Oh, I got this all on my own, and if you just tried harder, you could get it.’ That makes me literally furious. It is so bad for young women – and boys, too – to see that.”
Despite working through difficult feelings relating to her appearance, Eilish remains perplexed why so many people seem to care about the way she looks.
“We only need bodies to eat and walk around and poop. We only need them to survive. It’s ridiculous that anybody even cares about bodies at all. Like, why? Why do we care? You know, when you really think about it?,” she said.
“Why do we care about hair? Why does everybody hate body hair so much, but we literally have an enormous thing of hair on our heads, and that’s, like, cool and pretty. Like, what’s the difference? I mean, I love hair, and I do crazy things with my hair. I’m as guilty as everybody else. But it’s so weird. If you think about it hard, you go crazy.”
