Page 10 - My FlipBook

BILLIE AND HIP-HOP

Billie was eleven years old and sitting on her bed
listening to music. She shared her music library with
Finneas and didn’t know half the tracks on it. With her
player on shuffle, “Heartbeat” by Childish Gambino,
a song she had never heard before, came on, and she
was awestruck. Here was a world she’d been missing.
This is what she liked. Billie had met hip-hop.

At the time that “ocean eyes” hit SoundCloud in 2015,
that same streaming platform had become a gold mine
for those looking for innovative hip-hop acts. There
was an exciting proliferation of punk rap, mumble rap,
emo rap, and trap-influenced SoundCloud artists. Billie
dived headfirst into this scene and came up loving Tyler,
the Creator; XXXTentacion; Ski Mask the Slump God;
Lil Pump; and others who were making DIY lo-fi tracks
(often, like her and Finneas, in their own bedrooms).

Billie continued to have a voracious appetite for hip-hop.
BILLIE EILISH—FROM E-GIRL TO ICON
Like many teenagers, she loves Travis Scott, J. Cole, A$AP
Rocky, and Drake (at one time she said “The Motto” was
her favorite song) but also rappers like Denzel Curry, Earl
Sweatshirt (“I wana have his kids,” she tweeted in 2018), and
Tierra Whack. She still takes great delight in discovering new
talent and has promoted emerging artists such as Leikeli47,
Smino, Moses, Dominic Fike, and British rapper Mehki Raine
(formerly Crooks), who contributed vocals to “bury a friend.”

28