What's up, everyone
Welcome to the artist series where we talk about the biggest artists in the world and what we can learn from them
You'll notice that I've changed the format quite a bit
The main difference being that we're going to focus on one song at a time
This gives me a chance to do more than one Episode a month, and it makes it easier to take requests from you guys
So feel free to comment below for suggestions now without further ado. Let's take a listen to bad guy, which I haven't heard yet
I'm familiar with Billy of course, but this will be a first impressions video. So we go
So that was bad guy, I like it. I think it's a it's a really great video
The song I think think is a little unremarkable compared to her other releases
But I think it's a really good image song
So it shows us who she is as a character and how she fits into the whole pop scene
Because to me the whole message of this video is, you know, the pop scene is kind of this really clean-cut
really friendly and happy
A perfect little world and Here I am; Here I come. stumbling into it all and, you know, shitting on everyone's cake
So that's kind of, um, that was a very visual metaphor
But that's kind of how I see this whole music video and the lyrics as well. So let's talk about the music here first
Harmonically, it's a super simple chord progression of one one four five, I think
At the end we have this little separate piece
which is I think just on the one. Some super simple chords here 1-1-4-5 is not,
like, by any stretch of the imagination
Complicated chord progression and
Even melodically this is a really simple song. I mean an entire melodies are on the minor 3
So on the on the 3rd degree of the minor scale
And she's adding in some backing vocals later on which at the 5th
Later on the 1 so, you know above that, so the octave
And then we got this "so your tough-guy" section which is kind of like the pre chorus of the song I guess
The melody is also really simple
I mean it revolves around the 1 here and then once we hit that 4 and 5 chords
It moves up to it revolves around and starts revolving around the 5 of the scale
So it's kind of just following the chords. So really this whole thing is super basic in terms of music
So what does make this so interesting as a song
Why is it so appealing to a lot of people and to me as well?
I think the sound of this is just really cool
That's really what it comes down to it's the sound it's the production and it's her performance of it all. You see, the thing is
20 30 years ago, we would never have had these songs which is why the sounds so much like now
You know
This sounds so much like 2019 because it's using a vocal
as a way of singing which we haven't seen before really and that is
Singing really close to the mic in a really low energy
fashion
Why did we see this earlier because it's really difficult to replicate that life because life
This kind of singing is drowned out by the music
Now they've done a couple of things to work with that first of all in the studio
You can just gain up everything as much as you want to and they've surely have done that
There's a lot of compression on the vocals and they doubled it
Double tracked it left and right so it seems even closer to us
So they basically what they did is they recorded the vocal twice and pan once the left one to the one to the right
There might even be one in the center. I'm not quite sure but it's definitely softer
so it's definitely has more of a side effect than it has a
middle with added sides effect. So that is how they did it in terms of the production and her vocal performance is so
low energy. It's so below what we're used to from from singers
In all such terms the arrangement the producers have kind of worked around
this way of performing in that the whole music track is basically just a bass and
Drums and the drums are not aggressive at all. I mean it's like snaps and like a super simple kick drum
But that's really it and I mean the course would get like this this little sign wavy type of synthesizer there
But it's all super basic super simple sounds
But the trick here is in terms of the arrangement that with the bass and a little bit of drums that we have
those are all kind of stay out of the way of Billy because you know
They're all low-frequency material and Billie can sit on top of that with her really breathy high-frequency voice cos breath
Has a lot of high frequencies, so that's how they manage to get around
And I think that's really interesting about the song and that's kind of her whole thing. Right? That's her whole shtick
Is this kind of vocal performance? So that's it pretty much for the music
I don't really have much to say about it in terms of structuring
It's all fairly basic. And of course we have one more little cool thing where she delivers her tagline. I'm the bad guy
Where she probably doubled her vocals as a whisper and then they put a tremolo on top of that or alternatively
Maybe they just doubled the the track the vocal performance
Put a vocoder on top of that which kind of makes it sound like she was whispering it and then put a tremolo on that
I think it's a really cool little effect
And it's the only part where we have a another instrument in the song, which is this really simple sine wave synthesizer
Which is kind of taking up the space as her vocals leave the arrangement. We need something to fill that up. So it stays interesting
So that's already it for the music I don't really have much more to say about it it's a fairly straightforward song
It's mostly about the performance and attitude of the song
So let's look at the music video together and I'm just gonna highlight a couple of things here and there that I think are interesting
and that kind of
Speak to
Billy's image and what they're probably trying to do what the marketing team has thought up what her attitude brings to the picture
So here we go
first of all
this whole video starts with a yellow screen yellow is not the first color you would think of if you think of you know,
Dark almost gothic Billy Eilish, right?
So, um, it's a it's a funny choice, but it makes a lot of sense once we start watching the video first of all
she breaks through that yellow that's uh almost like a metaphor for saying like, hey, you know, I'm
Stopping with all this madness, you know
I'm here to end all of this and in the background we can see blue, which is a complementary color color to yellow
Her hair, obviously, is this turquoise?
which is also a
complimentary so we have
A lot of contrast in here and contrast really is a good key word here because that's really what this whole video is about
I think so
We have these really sterile backgrounds and everyone else except Billy behaves in a kind of sterile fashion, right?
We have this guy here in the black leather jacket who like barely moves a muscle
Who doesn't really do anything and then we have Billy who's like super emotional super high-energy in a way when she's dancing
but also she's looking as if she
As as if she's dead or something
right
then we got this image here where she's wearing like a white blouse or white t-shirt and
She has a nosebleed we have the background which is completely sterile completely
Fake it's it's a perfect background
So to say and I think this is almost like a metaphor for the music industry and it's kind of telling us like hey you
Know what this whole music industry the whole charts are full of perfect music
It's an illusion, you know, none. None of this is real and here comes Billie
- to bleed on everyone's white tennis socks, right?
So that's kind of the the metaphor that I'm seeing here that she's bringing in the dirt
She's bringing in the imperfection and that's kind of what makes her so special. And also did you notice that the yellow jumpers?
She's wearing here the pants look a little bit like a straitjacket
I just that was an interesting little detail and this picture here is well with the knees, you know
We have this really perfect background
Which is all like one color and it's a beautiful gradient and then we have these knees which look, you know
It's a ton of different colors. There's no makeup on them whatsoever
This is a statement guys, you know, this is saying like hey, you know, she's bringing in the dirt
She's bringing in the real the the realism here then we got the the big guys in all the different colored shirts
And her in the background in all black. So there's a lot of contrast there as well
And obviously, you know, their physique is quite different than hers
so there's the contrast there then we have her smearing blood all over her face, which is a horror trope and
speaking of horror tropes a couple of seconds later we go into the chorus and there we see her like
You know doing the crab walk and doing all sorts of things that we you know, we've seen before in horror movies
It's even sped up a little bit which has a little bit of that
The black and white era kind of horror movie flare to me, you know
It gives me a little bit of that sense
And then we have this image of her feeding a guy breakfast cereal in a red desert
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
I mean, it's obviously green screen pretty badly, but I don't think that was the intention here
I mean, it's obviously a very dominant kind of posture that she's in here
You know
I think it's also playing with the idea of like breakfast cereal is such an innocent thing and
That's kind of what she's playing with again. It's that contrast
and
Also, there's there seems to be something about milk, you know
because she's
Dressed all black and then we have the white milk said against that and there was this other video that she did
I forgot what the song was called where she was drinking this black
milk
So I kind of see some ties in with that maybe and then we got the severed heads in the bags
Which is just you know, a little bit of horror here to just spice things up a little bit
So folks, that's it. That's all my thoughts on Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy," which I think is still a really cool song
It's not my favorite of hers
I think it's it's one of our less interesting ones, but it's certainly as an image song
I think it really does the trick, you know
There's every artist every once in a while needs an image song to just show people like this is Who I am
I understand
This is my image
And Arianna has, yeah, Thank you next and seven rings and Billy Eilish has bad guy to just make it super clear to us
How she fits on the map and what she does differently than everyone else?
And that's already it thanks so much for watching folks
If you enjoyed it, please leave a like and subscribe if you want to send me songs or ask me questions
you can do that over on patreon and
Don't forget to comment below which song you would like to do next on this series. Take care folks stay fast
