New rules: the destruction of the female pop role model
Somewhere between Britney and Billie Eilish, liberated by social media and their direct relationship with fans, millennial and Gen Z women claimed the right to be complicated pop auteurs
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While Billie Eilish has reinvented pop with her hushed SoundCloud rap menace, creepy ASMR intimacy and chipper show tune melodies, there’s also something reassuringly comforting about her: as a teenage pop star, she has fulfilled her proper duty by confusing the hell out of adults. It’s largely down to her aesthetic: a funhouse Fred Durst; a one-woman model for the combined wares of Camden Market. Critics have tried to make sense of it, but when editorials praised Eilish’s “total lack of sexualisation”, she denounced them for “slut-shaming” her peers. “I don’t like that there’s this weird new world of supporting me by shaming people that may not want to dress like me.”
To Gen Z’s Eilish, not yet 18, it is a weird new world. She and her millennialpeers have grown up in a decade in which pop’s good girl/bad girl binary has collapsed into the moral void that once upheld it, resulting in a generation of young female stars savvy to how the expectation to be “respectable” and conform to adult ideas of how a role model for young fans should act – by an industry not known for its moral backbone – is a con. “It’s a lot harder to treat women the way they were treated in the 90s now, because you can get called out so easily on social media,” Fiona Apple – who knows about the simultaneous sexualisation and dismissal of young female musicians – said recently. “If somebody does something shitty nowadays, a 17-year-old singer can get on their social media and say, ‘Look what this fucker did! It’s fucked up.’”