Billie Eilish has been a mold-breaker ever since rising to sudden fame with the release of her first single, “Ocean Eyes,” as a teenager. In those days, she dreamed of performing live, but she wanted to do it her way: how the guys do.
In a new interview with Complex, Eilish explained that when it came time for her to hit the stage, she didn’t want to conform to the traditional standards that female artists are often beholden to. She explained:
“It’s hard to be a woman in a lot of ways, and one of them is that as an artist, you’re expected to have a certain stage presence, wear a leotard, have a bunch of makeup, get your hair done, wear high heels, and have background singers and backup dancers. Those are all things that I have seen my whole life, and I’ve never seen anything else, it feels like, with women. And men get to just be running around onstage shirtless with the tracks playing behind them, and the whole crowd goes f*cking wild. I looked up to that. That’s what I wanted to be. I didn’t want all that other stuff, even though I thought it was amazing. I was like, ‘I don’t see myself in those female artists,’ and I saw myself in all of these rappers and all these male artists that were just on their own up there, controlling this crowd.”
Eilish continued, “I would just completely wallow in despair, because I was like, ‘I’ll never get to do that. I’ll never be a man. I’ll never get to have that kind of stage presence.’ And I f*cking worked for eight years to get to a place where that’s what I do. I figured out a way to perform in the exact way that I wanted to, and be the artist that I wanted to. Honest to God, every day of my life, I cannot believe that it worked. For real.”
Read the full interview here.
