There are only 12 notes in Western music, so pop is genuinely a place where the phrase “nothing new under the sun” holds up, but it’s how you subvert the old into something new that matters. Billie Eilish has proven to be a master of this since emerging in 2015 alongside her brother Finneas O’Connell. She has coupled simplicity with forward-thinking progression to create something that is effortlessly catchy and invigoratingly fresh.
One track that defines this essence is her smash hit that doesn’t even have any chords, just a baseline and a couple of notes: ‘Bad Guy’. The song helped to propel her to teenage stardom. It felt anthemic and revolutionary upon release, which makes the simplicity of it all the more ingenious in many ways. The song simply applied the basics of blues rhythms to hip-hop production and threw in her whispery vocals to add a whole new layer of texture.
The Rolling Stones also procured the lessons of the blues and applied them to rock ‘n’ roll in their pomp. And it proves very revealing about the lineage of pop music that ‘Bad Buy’ and The Rolling Stones’ heavily-bracketed 1965 classic ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. In both songs, two notes are played in harmony with the beat (the initial dun-dun), and then the second section of the riff is all off-beat. This creates a sort of melodic call-and-response within the song, giving it a catchy dynamic. Thereafter the songs diverge, but this initial defining riff pairs almost perfectly and renders both driving earworms.
This syncopation is something that Eilish uses to keep you guessing. The lazy humming in the track is even incorporated despite being a slightly different key just to second-guess the listener, which draws you into the song, and you almost don’t realise just how simple it is. In fact, it is so simple that it doesn’t even bother having a chorus, the hook that people sing along to is just the synth tune (do-do-doodoo-do-do).
The fact that the finished song bears almost no resemblance to The Rolling Stones despite the same on-on-off beat rhythm is another mark of one of Eilish’s key innovations: along with Finneas, the stress often seems to be on sound production rather than traditional musicology. All the tireless layering in the studio and the fluttering sounds that enter the song are what push it along rather than a typical melodic hook. This is a very modern way of looking at songwriting, and it defines the brother and sister duo as pioneers of the age.
All great music takes from the old and brings something new to it. As Nick Cave once explained: “The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation — everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music — the great artistic experiment of our era.”
Eilish may well not have even realised her riff correlated with an old classic, but it is her grounding in timeless sensibilities that allow her to barely even think about making the basics work and pushing on with her innovation.
