(No. 4) 'Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now'
Reflections on a Billie Eilish concert, academia, and self-expression
Last weekend, I went to a Billie Eilish concert in London with my parents. Aren’t you a little old to have parents chaperone you to a show, Rachel? I wasn’t the one who bought the tickets or even initiated the conversation about seeing Billie in concert, though. My mom is the Billie fan of the family, and seeing her perform live was her dream come true.
I’ve always enjoyed Billie’s music—I know a surprising amount of lyrics for someone who never knows the words to songs (I normally only know melodies, and unfortunately for everyone around me, I can’t hum or sing in tune)—but I wasn’t a diehard fan going to the show. My main feelings going into the concert were a mixture of anxious and indifferent. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been gathered in a group of that size, and the combination of Covid anxiety mixed with fear of being crushed (recall the Travis Scott concert) was enough to give me second thoughts about going at all. When we were ushered to our seats in the uppermost tier of the arena, my anxiety only increased; it was so steep that I had to physically grab hold of people to make it to my seat for fear of toppling over the edge (something that happened at a Harry Styles concert in Glasgow days later, so my fear wasn’t totally unfounded). I was happy to be there for my mom, but I wouldn’t have gone on my own or even with a friend.
Staring into the vast arena, I wondered what it was about Billie Eilish that could bring 20,000 people together. What brought them here? What did they get from her music? My mom and I went for a wee break between the opening act and Billie’s concert, and I’ve never been in a women’s bathroom queue that moved so quickly: no more than 10 seconds per pee. There was some kind of shared adrenaline, electricity, urgency in the room, as if missing Billie’s entrance were akin to missing the opening of heaven’s pearly gates.
But as the lights descend and spotlights circle around the crowd to an electronic hum, something happens to me. ‘YOU MADE ME HATE THIS CITY.’ Billie’s voice reverberates throughout the arena, lyrics from her single, Happier Than Ever. White lights flash to reveal her on stage, only to resume complete darkness. Strobe lights pierce the pitch black arena, a drumbeat picks up pace, an electronic thump pulsates with my heartbeat. My breathing quickens as the drums crescendo into something of a thunderclap.
Like a burst of sheet lightning, the stage lights up, and something is propelled on stage from a trap door below, Heimliched from six feet under: something with space buns, a baggy t-shirt and bike shorts, and kinesio tape.
It’s Billie Eilish, and the crowd goes wild.
The lights flash red. Blood. Fire. Danger.
‘WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
WHY DON’T YOU RUN FROM ME?
WHAT ARE YOU WONDERING?
WHAT DO YOU KNOW?’
Those caps aren’t for Billie’s voice. I was screaming her lyrics at the top of my lungs as if they were my own; a little monster inside of me had taken control of my body.
The concert came after a rough week. I had given an academic presentation to an audience with members significantly more senior than me, only to be yelled at—yes, publicly yelled at—for speaking too quickly.
JESUS, CAN YOU SPEAK SLOWER? I CAN’T THINK AND TAKES NOTES THIS QUICKLY. She boomed, my face, also in front of a camera for online participants, going tomato red. i’msorry… yesofcourse… i’llpausenowand… NO SERIOUSLY RACHEL, JUST SPEAK SLOWER, HOW CAN YOU EXPECT ME TO THINK AND WRITE MY IDEAS DOWN WHEN YOU KEEP GOING AND SHARING NEW INFORMATION? The yeller then turned to the person next to her, I MEAN AM I WRONG? COULD YOU KEEP UP WITH HER?! THIS IS RIDICULOUS! The questionee attempted to deescalate the situation without success. NO REALLY, CHILL OUT. TAKE A SIP OF WATER, RACHEL. BREATHE. JUST GO SLOWER!!!
You know that feeling when you’re harassed on the street? How, despite the fact that you’ve experienced it loads of times before (you probably even walk with your guard up and avoid certain streets), it still catches you off-guard and paralyzes you? Your throat closes, you freeze, and become smaller—both physically and metaphorically? And how, only after the fact, when the immediate danger has dissipated, that you feel angry, can articulate the injustice and depths of your rage, message your friends (misspellings and caps lock abundant), and all the fiery comebacks that had eluded you at the time now flow freely?
Well, this was sort of like that. Except I still had another 40 minutes of presenting and another 90 minutes of a workshop to lead. And all eyes were still on me. So, I continued. Throat closed, mouth tight, suppressing anything I felt to just get through the presentation.
Don’t get me wrong. I was talking too fast. I’m naturally a fast talker, but I was also nervous (visibly so, I imagine) and needed to get through more material than was fit for the allocated time. Nevertheless, I had never before been yelled at in a work environment, nor had I witnessed someone shouting at a presenter, let alone for something so harmless in the scheme of mistakes. I thought maybe someone would say something to me privately after the end of the presentation, offer some reassurance. Maybe someone would even be bold enough to say that she was out of order.
But those words never came.
And the tears erupt on the bus ride home, my mask suffocating and wet, until I collapse into bed and drown the world out. I can’t even message my friends.
I wasn’t the only one to mess up in front of an audience last week, but the reception couldn’t have been more different.
‘I don’t want a love I can’t afford,
I just want you to love for free,
Can’t you see that I’m ge—…
Don’t know the words. I literally don’t know the WOOoOrrDDS!!!’ Billie’s confession punctures her cooing rendition of her song, ‘bored.’ In front of 20,000 people, she has forgotten the lyrics.
The audience doesn’t boo. They don’t jeer. They don’t yell, mock, or laugh.
Billie doesn’t withdraw or suppress her emotions.
Billie lets out a sound—something between a laugh and a scream. The instrumentals resume. Helping her along, the audience sings her lyrics with her—for her—their words a sea keeping her afloat and carrying her safely to shore.
There’s this pervasive idea that emotionality is antithetical to good work, to professionalism, to producing good arguments. This is true for most jobs under capitalism. Having feelings and opinions are dangerous lest they lead to resistance or wanting your humanity recognized; they are not conducive to being a good little worker-bee. You should keep calm and carry on, and produce as much as possible without complaint.
I’ve been thinking about these themes in the context of my own work. In academia, objectivity is the most prized academic virtue, something we are taught to strive for. If you want to be taken seriously, you’d better keep your feelings, your beliefs, and ultimately, yourself, out of your work. This is something that has been hammered into me both directly and indirectly. One professor advised me against mentioning activist or feminist anthropology in the methodology and literature review of my doctoral thesis, because my examiners ‘wouldn’t look favorably upon anything openly political.’ I’m currently writing an academic paper where I have to remove personal pronouns—as if there’s no ‘I’ in the research, as if it were carried out by some impartial and external researcher (I actually write ‘the researcher’ when referencing myself—lol).
Of course, objectivity is a farce. We all come to our work as people with experiences, identities, points of view—what anthropologists like to call positionality—and we are all embedded in, not separate from, webs of power. To think you’re objective most likely means you’re representing the status quo. It doesn’t mean you’re any less subjective than anyone else, just that you’re not interrogating your relationship to power structures and recognizing how your subjectivity shapes your worldviews.
This repression of the self is not only encouraged in academic research but it’s embedded within the whole academic culture. During a lunch break for a day-long workshop a few months back, I pitched a fiction idea to my mom (writing down story ideas is one of my favorite pastimes). The protagonist, who keeps their thoughts to themselves at work in order to be the best worker-bee possible, eventually loses their voice and becomes invisible (permanently and literally, not just metaphorically, but also metaphorically). If they don’t find a way to their voice again, they will roam the earth in limbo forever, never seen and never heard. I imagine this story as horror-meets-social-commentary, and it’d be some big allegory about self repression under capitalism (but it’d also be fun and scary, because no one likes fiction that’s trying too hard to shove a message down your throat).
It’s probably not too difficult to work out that the protagonist wasn’t imagined out of nowhere. Before the lunch break when I pitched this idea to my mom, I had made what I thought was a banal comment to my colleagues that social justice should be a part of academic work, only to spark a debate where I discovered I was in the minority. Later, when people were complaining about poor wages in academia and I mentioned that we could always unionize, I was met with silence. A doctoral student came up to me later and described it as a mic drop moment.
Since then, I have mostly withdrawn from group conversations in academic spaces. But I’m still visible—just visible enough to be told I’m doing it all wrong. And with just enough of a voice to apologize.
What occurred to me after the concert was that people aren’t drawn to Billie for her professionalism, or at least this idea of capital-p Professionalism that we’ve been taught to embody—the kind of persona that demands repression of the self, leaves little to no room for error, and strives to be palatable for the greatest number of people. People didn’t queue for hours to stand as close to the stage as possible or travel hundreds of miles because they wanted to see Billie perform a faultless show where she remembered every lyric, or because they wanted to listen to emotionless renditions of songs that could have been rehashed by any singer with a lyric sheet. She doesn’t have 47 million monthly listeners on Spotify because she keeps her thoughts to herself.
Billie’s magic is in her rejection of these expectations and in her unapologetic self-expression. And that is why people love her. We can see this expression in her lyrics, her style of dress, her self-directed music videos. It’s why so many other artists have said that Billie helped them find themselves—even Harry Styles, who is praised for his authenticity. It’s why the man two seats down from me at the show was on his feet the whole time with his hands held in prayer, treating every song like a hymn in a sacred place of worship. It’s why teenage girls leaving the concert shouted, ‘YOU MADE ME HATE THIS CITY’ in unison, and why a woman with grey hair on my right jumped up and down like she was in a mosh pit during Bad Guy. It’s why my mom, a woman in her sixties, can recite every lyric and has watched Billie’s documentary four times (at least that’s the number she’s willing to admit to).
Billie’s power comes from going deeper into her self, not hiding from it. From expressing her feelings and her internal monologue, not quieting them.
And the magic of Billie is not subdued in her moments of ‘failure’ but ignited in them. It wasn’t just the charm of forgetting her own lyrics on stage that made me fall in love with her, but how she responded to those fuck-ups: a frustrated laugh-scream that we’ve probably all done when practicing a presentation or recital in front of our closest friends but would never dare do in front of an audience, let alone one of 20,000 people; crying and seeking comfort in her closest friend and brother Finneas when still performing on stage, rather than pretending she was okay; yelling into the mic to let out her frustration.
Imagine if I hadn’t blabbered an apology during my presentation but had unleashed my inner monologue instead: ‘Blah! SO sorry guys, I’m ridiculously nervous! Can we take a 5-minute break and dance to Lizzo for a bit?’
(Hint: this would not have gone over well, but it’s fun to imagine. Or maybe unleashing my inner monologue when it seems inappropriate is a way to enact change, even though it feels scary? Food for thought.)
Billie did apologize (she’s not entirely free of societal expectations either), but in the Billie-est way possible: ‘I’m sorry I’m a fucking wreck!’ she bellowed into the mic, before coming front and center on the stage and letting out a primal scream.
But what I wanted to tell her was thank you. Thank you for creating a space where we can all be fully expressed in our rage, our vulnerability, our pettiness, our heartbreak. Thank you for showing us that our power is revealed in our fuck ups, not concealed by them. Thank you for reminding me that what makes me special isn’t in my ability to suppress my personality, my beliefs, and my feelings, no matter how much academia tries to convince me otherwise.
Also, Billie, it’s okay to rest and even to leave the stage. You don’t owe us anything. Judging by the reactions of other fans in the audience—‘Billie, it’s okay!’ and ‘We love you, Billie!’—I don’t think I was the only one with these thoughts.
And finally, thank you for helping me find my voice. For giving me the courage to be seen, even if it’s just in my writing, for now.
Since experiencing this ecstasy of self-expression, of being alive, I have found myself browsing ticket websites to see if I can get a seat for another Billie concert. Something inside of me has been unleashed: the me with the desire to say what’s on my mind, to articulate my feelings, to explore the world through my subjectivity, to swear when I mess the fuck up (I actually like swearing, sue me), and to have the license to fuck up in the first place. I want more of what I felt that night.
Of course, I can’t live a life where I only express myself concert to concert, and ultimately, as much as Billie’s music resonates with me, and as much as her lyrics feel like mine, those stories belong to her.
Deep down, I know the real trick isn’t in finding more concerts to attend, but tapping into the symphony already inside of me.
And seeking—no, creating—arenas of my own.
Encore!
Thanks for reading, friends. Hope you enjoy this essay—flaws, typos, and all. Comments are open. Also, the title of this essay comes from Billie’s song, Getting Older. Have a listen.
This is as good and as enlightening as anything I've read recently from columnists for major publications. You ought to share this with higher education publications and something like The Guardian, too. Great job!
Mom here! That was one of the best nights of my life. I’m so happy we were able to share those moments together. You’ve done a wonderful job of expressing what it meant. It was more than a concert. Thank you. And Getting Older is my favorite song on the album. :-)