Billie Eilish - No Time To Die

Baggy clothed cybergoth anime raver Billie Eilish has unveiled her Bond theme. Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell was born on December 18, 2001. Billie grew up in Highland Park, an LA neighbourhood 30-minutes away from The Graceland Inn, West Hollywood. Her parents are actors and named Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell. Billie's brother is Finneas O'Connell. Finneas is a singer, songwriter, record producer, musician, and actor. You may have seen him in the popular television show Glee - where he played Alistair. Finneas wrote Billie's debut single Ocean Eyes. He originally wrote it for his own band but Billie recorded the song and the rest is history. Ocean Eyes came about because one of Billie's dance teachers asked if she or her brother could write a song to choreograph a dance routine to. Ocean Eyes soon became increasingly popular when it was put on SoundCloud.

After Ocean Eyes went viral on SoundCloud, Hillydilly, a music discovery website, discovered it and posted it on their website. Billie says she is inspired by hip-hop music. In an interview with Teen Vogue, Billie named Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, A$AP Rocky, Big Sean and Drake as influences. She also said that singer-songwriters Aurora and Lana Del Rey inspire her. Billie Eilish's net worth is estimated to be roughly $6 Million. Billie says she maintains creative control over her music and music videos. She says she would hate to relinquish control of this because it would make her feel like any other manufactured pop product. Billie says she would rather die than have every aspect of her career run by the record company.

Billie still lives with her parents. Despite her wealth and fame, she has lived in the same modest two bedroom house her whole life. To celebrate the release of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Billie launched a museum exhibit which featured 14 immersive rooms inspired by every track off her album. Billie says that she wears clothes that are too big for her because she doesn't want her body to be objectified. Billie also says she doesn't have the most natural smile and therefore sometimes looks a bit miserable. Billie says it is a complete misconception that she came from a rich showbiz family. Her parents were actors but not famous ones. They struggled to make ends meet and sometimes had to work regular jobs. "It wasn’t like, ‘My movie star parents’ at all. They’re working actors who I wish had more of a career. I wish they were famous and that’s why I became famous. But that’s not how it is."

Billie's debut EP Don’t Smile at Me was released in August 2017. Billie is the first artist born in the 2000s to have a number one album. Billie has over two million Twitter followers. Ocean Eyes has around 200 million streams on Spotify. Billie has synesthesia. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. "Every person I know has their own color and shape and number in my head, but it’s normal to me," says Billie.

Vice.com says that Billie Eilish is a big part of a trend in pop music to be darker and more downbeat. 'We might be witnessing a trend in downbeat pop, but arguably it’s cyclical. Or maybe it’s that we’re given more choice than ever before. The music industry has shifted since The Black Eyed Peas were big in 2009, with the advent of streaming and playlist culture allowing genres like alternative pop and rap a global audience like never before. Perhaps we’ve always been into moody pop music, but nauseating earworms like Happy and I Gotta Feeling bellowed with more dominance. And in this current climate, music like Eilish’s makes sense. Listening to anything stupidly upbeat as the world burns around us isn’t going to be anything less than maddening. It’s sad music, for sad times; mood music, for the mood of the world.' Mood music for the melodramatic gloom of a Daniel Craig Bond film?

I quite like Billie Eilish. She seems like a nice person and also feels more genuine and less manufactured than most modern singers in that she wasn't a Nickelodeon teen star or anything like that and her music literally emerged from a bedroom. There is a problem with Billie Eilish though. Most of her songs sound the same. This is not exactly the most eclectic artist when it comes to musical styles. It's that mumble-vocal whispery very low-key downbeat style that seems to be the fashion these days. Ocean Eyes is very good but beyond that you do reach a point where it's hard to tell Billie Eilish songs apart in the end. They all blend into one another. Fine if you like that but there isn't much variety.

We've heard this 'mumble mourn' type of Bond theme in the Daniel Craig era before and I'm personally bored to tears of it. It's high time (God Damnit!) we had an upbeat Bond theme or maybe even a pure instrumental (I always think of what the Propellerheads did in their remix of OHMSS or how perfectly the Mission Impossible theme works in the titles of the Tom Cruise series). I would love the next Bond theme to be much more Live and Let Die or OHMSS than Sam Smith. Sadly, the latter is basically what we get with the Billie Eilish song. It's Sam Smith all over again - if not as bad (nothing, and I mean NOTHING, could ever be as bad as Sam Smith's Bond song).

Billie Eilish is another classic example of the studio hiring someone they know is popular rather than going out of their way to find a great Bond song. As soon as it was announced that Billie Eilish was going to do the Bond theme you knew exactly what the song was going to sound like. No Time To Die doesn't subvert any expectations whatsoever. This is EXACTLY what you expected. A mournful very low-key depressing song that never actually goes anywhere. You wait for the song to kick into gear and do something but it never really does. It just ambles along in the same fashion all the way through. Songs like this are like a perfect metaphor for the Daniel Craig era. A bit miserable and pretentious. Not much fun. A little dour and joyless.

If this song is the last of the Daniel Craig era (and one would assume it surely will be - even Barbara Broccoli can't possibly have the chutzpah to take another ridiculous break and then return with a 60 year-old Daniel Craig) then you would have to say that this era of Bond has featured very bland and forgettable songs. Quantum of Solace and Spectre had the two worst songs in Bond history and I even thought the Adele song was sort of boring despite being the best of a bad bunch. Saying that Adele had the best of the Craig Bond songs reminds me of Animal Crackers when Groucho Marx says to Margaret Dumont - "Why, you're one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, and that's not saying much for you!"

It seems like a strange move for No Time To Die to have a song that feels like such a blood relative to the Sam Smith song in terms of style and mood again so soon. You'd have thought they would try to do something different but they don't really seem to care. They just pick a flavour of the month singer and let them get on with it. Maybe Barbara Broccoli loves these depressing mumbled Bond theme songs. For all we know she might be sitting in a darkened Hollywood mansion mumbling along to Billie Eilish as we speak.

I'll grant you though, the run of subpar Bond songs is by no means restricted to the Daniel Craig era. The Bond themes for the Brosnan films were a mediocre and forgettable bunch too. The best Bond song of the Brosnan era was Surrender/Tomorrow Never Dies by David Arnold and k.d. lang but they chucked that on the end credits! You'd have to go back to the 1980s to find some great Bond songs. The Bond theme song is an area where EON definitely need to pull their socks up. They should look for something a bit more timeless rather than just hire whoever is popular on Spotify this week. It would be awfully nice too if we could finally have a break from these downbeat mumbled Bond themes. They really have become a drag.

- Jake

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