In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
A grown-up could never defeat “Old Town Road.” It was impossible. All through the spring and summer of 2019, we watched major millennial pop stars cranking out songs that they assumed were going to be major singles, and those songs crashed and burned. Absolutely nothing was going to dislodge Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ boundary-busting freak blockbuster. Lil Nas X understood the cultural tides of the internet better than any established star, and he had the digital instincts to keep his song atop the Hot 100 for a huge chunk of the year. About halfway through the absurdly long “Old Town Road” reign, however, a dark horse contender emerged. Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” didn’t sound anything like “Old Town Road,” which makes sense. Nothing sounds like “Old Town Road.” Nothing sounds like “Bad Guy,” either. But the two songs had some important things in common.
Like “Old Town Road,” “Bad Guy” was recorded in a bedroom, on a computer, by two very young people who were raised on YouTube and SoundCloud and who seemed hostile to the very idea of genre. Billie Eilish was even younger than Lil Nas X. Like him, she had a sharp digital marketing strategy in place before she ever signed a major-label deal. Eilish wasn’t an outsider in the same way that Lil Nas X was. She grew up in Los Angeles, and her whole family was deeply involved with the arts; nobody was trying to convince her to go to college when she really just wanted to make music. She played the music-business game, but she and her brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell had musical ideas that pushed so hard against conventional wisdom that they inadvertently revealed how unwise that conventional wisdom always was. They played around in the margins so cannily that the margins became the main text.
Those two kids, Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish, were fluent in languages that older generations didn’t even recognize as languages. When their two smashes, “Old Town Road” and “Bad Guy,” emerged within a few months of each other, it became all too obvious that pop music was undergoing one of its periodic generational shifts. That shift came right on time. Pop needed new ideas, and Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish had them. For nine weeks, “Bad Guy” sat at #2 behind “Old Town Road,” coming very close to the all-time record for the longest-ever stretch in the runner-up slot. Finally, “Old Town Road” dropped from the top spot, and “Bad Guy” snuck in there for a week. In that moment. Billie Eilish became the first artist born in the 21st century to sit atop the Hot 100. Eilish still hasn’t made another #1 hit since “Bad Guy,” but it doesn’t matter because she’s not the type of artist whose impact really registers when you look through pop history through the weird little keyhole that this column offers. She’s still one of the biggest stars on the planet today. Duh.
I read about Billie Eilish’s childhood, and I get jealous — not because she grew up with incomprehensible wealth or access or whatever but because it feels like nobody ever tried to suck the confidence out of her veins, the way they do with most of us. Must be nice. Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, the daughter of two actors, grew up in Los Angeles. (When Eilish was born, the #1 song in America was Usher’s “U Got It Bad.” That little fun fact made me feel like a decaying mummy, and that’s why I always put people’s birth-date chart-toppers in this column.) I’ve seen people dismiss Eilish as an industry plant or a nepo baby, and it’s true to the extent that she had parents involved in show business. But neither of her parents were making Star Wars movies, just to name one totally random example of why a young pop star’s parents’ names might show up in blue on a Wikipedia page. They met while working on a play in New York together in the early ’90s, and from what I can tell, they mostly did video-game voices.
Billie Eilish’s mother Maggie Baird, who does have a Wikipedia page, has more credits than her father Patrick O’Connell does. Baird had a few roles on soap operas, and she was in the Groundlings improv comedy troupe with a bunch of future celebrities soon after she and O’Connell moved to LA. Mostly, though, she did those video-game voices and had single-episode roles on TV shows like The X-Files and The West Wing. She also homeschooled her two kids, Billie and Finneas. Both kids had total bohemian creative-class upbringings — art classes, acting classes, dance classes, music classes. Billie was named after her grandfather William Baird, who died just before she was born. She was playing ukulele at six, and she joined the Los Angeles Children’s Choir at eight.
Finneas, four years older than Billie, started making music first. As a teenager, he was the leader of the Slightlys, a band of LA talent-show kids who made fuzzy guitar-pop and who played on one date of the 2015 Warped Tour. Finneas racked up some credits as a young actor — Bad Teacher, two episodes of Modern Family, four episodes of Glee. In 2013, Maggie Baird co-wrote Life Inside Out, an indie film where she and Finneas play a mother and son who discover the expressive power of songwriting together. The movie went straight to DVD, and it didn’t set the world on fire or anything, but it got made. Billie was nine when all this was happening. In her Saturday Night Live monologue a couple of years ago, Eilish playfully clowned her mom for writing a mother-and-son bonding movie where her character didn’t have a daughter. It was cute.
It might not be in the movie, but Billie Eilish also learned the expressive power of songwriting from her mother. Maggie Baird wrote songs, too, and she taught her kids how to do it. When Billie was 11, her mother gave her an assignment: Write a song based on all the parts she liked from a movie or a TV show. Billie loved The Walking Dead, so she wrote “Fingers Crossed,” a ballad about life in the zombie apocalypse. Later on, she said that it was her first real song. Finneas helped her record the track, and they put it online. A couple of years after that, Finneas wrote a ballad called “Ocean Eyes” for the Slightlys, but he realized that it would sound better if Billie sang it. Billie needed a song to use for a dance-class choreography assignment, so she gave it a shot.
When 13-year-old Billie Eilish recorded “Ocean Eyes,” she already had a completely unique voice — eerie and still, with the poise and intensity of a classic torch balladeer. You could tell that she loved Lana Del Rey. Finneas laid out all the “Ocean Eyes” music in Logic, using the program’s stock sounds and stacking Billie’s vocals to make choral harmonies. The end result has a strange, hypnotic power, and it remains one of Eilish’s most popular songs. They posted it on SoundCloud in 2015, and it got hundreds of thousands of plays within a few weeks, which left the kids’ heads spinning. Finneas already had a manager at that point, and that manager signed on to work with Billie and encouraged Finneas to keep making music with her. Billie made an “Ocean Eyes” video and put it on YouTube, and we premiered it right here on Stereogum Dot Com. Finneas helped Billie find a publicist, a stylist, and a freelance A&R development operation. She was 14 years old when she went pro.
For those of us who did not grow up surrounded by the entertainment business, this is all a little hard to imagine. The “Ocean Eyes” audio is the second thing that Billie Eilish posted on her YouTube channel; the first is footage from an aerial-silk dance recital. How does a little kid suddenly go into business like that? How does she have the resources to find all these professional contacts when she’s still a baby? But Billie didn’t have stereotypical stage parents, and she didn’t go the regular child-star route of getting herself onto a Disney or Nickelodeon show. Instead, her parents are free-flowing artsy types who also had decades of experience making a living in Hollywood. She and Finneas had just the right combination of artistic encouragement and business training. They also had talent.
In 2016, Billie Eilish signed to Darkroom, an Interscope imprint that a very young exec named Justin Lubliner had only just started. Lubliner essentially marketed Eilish as if she was a SoundCloud rapper, which worked fine for Eilish, who loved SoundCloud rap. He helped cultivate her mystique, and part of that was building up the idea of Billie and Finneas making all their music together in a bedroom studio, rather than pushing her into the pop assembly line. “Ocean Eyes” got a commercial release with a bunch of remixes, and it eventually cracked the Hot 100, peaking at #84. It’s now triple platinum and on its way to two billion Spotify streams. The music industry was abuzz about what this kid was doing.
Billie Eilish kept releasing songs that she co-wrote with Finneas as singles. They messed around with different sounds — acoustic guitars and a reggaeton beat on “Bellyache,” swirling keyboards and trap drums on “Watch,” blown-out synth-noises on “Copycat.” She sang about boredom and depression, sometimes in the most literal ways, as on “Bored,” which she recorded for the soundtrack of 13 Reasons Why, the hit Netflix drama about teenage suicide. Eilish’s managers got very into the idea that she could be the first big star who got her start on streaming platforms, and they started working with Spotify to push her music on playlists. That plan worked out exactly the way they hoped.
Billie Eilish released an EP called Don’t Smile At Me in 2017, and it did well enough to reach #12 on the album charts. On that record, you can hear Billie and Finneas getting more and more playful and experimental with their production, throwing lots of weird sounds into songs that are otherwise pretty conventional. You could hear all the influences at work in her music — Lorde, Lana Del Rey, noisy rap production — but she figured out fun things to do with them. She went out on tour, and kids her age packed into big clubs to sing along with “Ocean Eyes.” She started getting a lot of attention for her fashion sense, a baggy and outré Hot Topic skater-goth situation. For the second season of 13 Reasons Why, Eilish teamed up with fellow young star Khalid for a duet called “Lovely,” and it peaked at #64. (Khalid’s highest-charting single is 2019’s “Talk,” which peaked at #3. It’s a 5.) Weirdly, “Lovely” is now the most-played Billie Eilish track on Spotify — three billion streams and counting. Even after that, though, Eilish doesn’t collaborate with other artists very often. To this day, it’s almost always just her and Finneas.
In 2018, Billie Eilish started releasing the singles that would eventually appear on When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, her full-length debut. On the best of those songs, Billie and Finneas steered into the silly-spooky haunted-house stuff that was part of Billie’s aesthetic ever since she wrote her first song about a zombie apocalypse. That stuff is fun. Songs like “Bury A Friend” and “You Should See Me In A Crown” aren’t anywhere near as dark as they pretend to be, but they have a good time playing around with their updated Addams Family aesthetic. There’s a great Diary Of A Song video where Billie and Finneas (and their mom) talk about making “Bury A Friend,” building the track by manipulating sounds like the dentist’s drill that Billie recorded on her phone at her orthodontist’s office. The videos reinforced the cartoon-macabre aesthetics; they’re full of flickering lights and blacked-out eyeballs. This wasn’t transgressive enough to disturb any actual adults, but I liked seeing someone bringing some flair, some sense of atmosphere, to the game. (“Bury A Friend” peaked at #14.)
The New York Times got Billie Eilish and Finneas to talk all about making “Bury A Friend” in that Diary Of A Song video, and Rolling Stone did something similar when the magazine got them to talk about making “Bad Guy.” On camera, Billie and Finneas are just absolutely charming together, and I love how excited they get to talk about all the goofy little musical decisions that they make when assembling tracks. To hear them tell it, Billie actually made the beginnings of the “Bad Guy” beat on her own, in a bedroom studio that was down the hall from Finneas’ bedroom studio, where they usually worked. Billie had a subwoofer on her shelf that would bang all around and distort the sounds she made, and they made sure that blown-out sound came through in the final track. She came up with a few bass sounds and hi-hats, and she was “pumped” when she got them to work together. They did more with the song after that. Finneas got a recording of Billie laughing, and they messed with its pitch until it sounded like a deranged witch cackle; that’s part of the track now. On tour in Australia, Billie used her phone to record a beeping crosswalk signal, and that’s in the beat, too. I love shit like that.
On that first album, Billie Eilish does a lot of writing from different characters’ perspectives, and “Bad Guy” is sort of like that. The track is a response to some unnamed dude who talks about his own mythical toughness. She uses that against him, chiding him and then describing the control that she has over him, the power that she has to ruin his life. It’s at least partly sexual, with nods to role-playing and power games, but the sex stuff is as playful as the spookiness. As the chorus speeds up, she murmurs that she’s that bad type, make your mama sad type, make your girlfriend mad tight, might seduce your dad type. She never raises her voice, and she stacks her harmonies enough to make herself sound like a choir of muttering, evil gnomes. There’s no real chorus, but the obvious hook moment is when the music drops out and then she drawls out that she’s the baaaaaad guy. A pause. A beat. And then: “Duh!” It’s fun!
In the Rolling Stone video interview, Billie Eilish claps her hands to her face like Macaulay Culkin when she complains that the multi-tracked harmonies “took sooooo long.” She took her time matching her own pitch and carefully enunciating every syllable, so she sounds strange and distinct and comprehensible even if she’s ultimately mostly mumbling like an Atlanta rapper. She did 34 different takes of the “duh,” trying to find the exact right one. In the video, she says, “The song is sooooo — like, it should not be taken seriously, so I had to add a little stupiosity.” And then she and Finneas laugh and point at each other over the word “stupiosity.” Look, I’m trying to maintain critical distance here, but I just like these little guys.
The bass-pulse of “Bad Guy” comes closer to actual dance music and to underground rap than Billie Eilish usually gets in her non-remixed work. It’s got a basic four-on-the-floor pulse that’s been muffled, so it sounds like you’re standing outside a club. On what would be the chorus, Finneas adds in a whining, nattering synth line — the kind of riff that you can sing along to. It sounds like a spy-movie guitar to me, but Billie and Finneas compare it to the Wizards Of Waverly Place theme song. (Selena Gomez will eventually appear in this column.) It all works together in a skittery, insinuating way. It’s as catchy as almost any pop song, but its catchiness comes from cadence and atmosphere, not melody.
With less than a minute left in the track, the music disappears and then, after another moment of empty space, a big boom comes glorping in — a haunted dubstep bass-drop. It doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the track, but it allows Billie to whisper that she’s pretty glad that you’re alone. So this is a pop song with a beat-switch like the ones on “Sicko Mode.” That final breakdown was going to be an entirely different track, but Billie liked the idea of mushing the two tracks together because she’d heard a few rappers do something like that. As inspiration, she cites JID’s “Never” and Isaiah Rashad’s “Stuck In The Mud” — cool tracks to cite, in my opinion. I love the idea that Billie Eilish could hear “Never” and think that she could do her version of that.
In the “Bad Guy” video, the first thing that we hear isn’t “Bad Guy.” It’s “!!!!!!!,” the 14-second intro track that comes right before “Bad Guy” on the album. On that track, we hear a slurping sound as Billie Eilish takes out her retainer, and then she and Finneas cackle over how that’s her album intro. She’d sometimes forget to take out her retainer before recording, and Finneas told her that it was her version of the lighter-flicking sound that you can hear on a lot of Lil Wayne tracks. Originally, that was part of “Bad Guy,” but Billie was smart enough to realize that people wouldn’t want to sit through that every time they played the song. It’s a nice little illustration of their dynamic, the way they found ways to make creative and practical concerns coexist.
The “Bad Guy” video comes from music-video great Dave Meyers, and it’s fucking awesome. It opens with Billie kicking through a bright-yellow wall and then handing her retainer to a security guy, and from there it’s pretty much all memorable disconnected images — Billie bleeding profusely from the nose in an all-blue room, Billie leading a bunch of tatted-up dudes down a suburban street on tricycles, Billie pouring milk into the mouth of some guy who’s already got Lucky Charms stuffed all in there. It’s colorful and silly and visually arresting, and it moves. For me, that’s what a music video is supposed to be — a dizzy visual feast that gives you some sense of context for an artist even if you’ve never heard of them before watching it.
“Bad Guy” and its video came out just as Billie Eilish released her album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in March 2019. The song debuted at #7, giving Eilish her first top-10 hit, and it kept rising from there — at least until it ran up against “Old Town Road.” Billie and her team tried all the old pop-music tricks to give “Bad Guy” the final nudge that it needed to reach #1, up to and including the remix with the guest superstar. Ever since she was a kid, Eilish absolutely loved Justin Bieber, an artist who’s been in this column a bunch of times and who will be back plenty more. She was a Belieber. There’s video of her meeting Bieber at Coachella and breaking down in tears. In July, Billie released a “Bad Guy” remix with Bieber, which made no sense at all. Bieber seems to have a good time on the track, but he adds nothing to a song that was singular without him. I thought it was a bit weak to see a young artist with a left-field hit trying to build it up with such a cynical, conventional gambit. But it didn’t work, and now we can forget that the remix ever happened, at least after I drop this embed in here.
Right after Billie Eilish released the version of “Bad Guy” with Bieber, Lil Nas X released his “Old Town Road” remix with Young Thug and Mason Ramsey, and that was enough to win the dueling-remixes game and keep “Bad Guy” from getting over the hump. So Billie Eilish had to wait. Eventually, “Old Town Road” faded just a little, and “Bad Guy” was right there. The week that “Bad Guy” finally conquered the Hot 100, Eilish’s team did a couple of minor things to help push the song — a vertical video for phone consumption, a cassette single for sale on her website. But those promotional tactics weren’t what did it. It was the song itself — a product of the zoomer zeitgeist, just like “Old Town Road.” When “Bad Guy” reached #1, Lil Nas X congratulated Eilish on Twitter. I’m so glad “Bad Guy” finally won out. The story of this column would feel incomplete without it.
“Bad Guy” went diamond in 2023 — that and “Lovely” are currently her only two diamond singles — and When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? went quadruple platinum. Tons of the tracks from When We All Fall Asleep, singles and deep cuts, made it onto the Hot 100 at one point or another. None of the others reached the top 10. None of them hit anywhere near as hard as “Bad Guy.” I remember being faintly disappointed when I heard the whole album and found out that it had a lot of ballads and, like, ukulele songs. Everything else didn’t have the same devilish charm as “Bad Guy.” Soon after the album’s release slow-pulsing and morose ballad “Everything I Wanted” came out and reached #8. (It’s a 6.)
Early in 2020, it became clear that Billie Eilish was not a music-business outsider anymore, if she ever really was. At the Grammys, Billie Eilish swept all four major all-category awards, a near-unprecedented feat. “Bad Guy” won Record and Song Of The Year, When We All Fall Asleep got Album Of The Year, and Eilish herself took home Best New Artist. Only one other artist in Grammys history had ever gone four for four like that: Christopher Cross, someone who’s been in this column a couple of times. It worked out better for Eilish than it did for Cross. I will confess: This level of overpraise made me less interested in Eilish, not more. Around the same time, Eilish released her theme for the James Bond movie No Time To Die, and she and Finneas won an Oscar for it in 2022 even though the song itself is mid. (It took the movie a while to come out because of COVID delays. “No Time To Die” peaked at #16.) Before she was old enough to buy a beer, Billie Eilish was halfway to an EGOT. On top of that, the Grammys gave her Record Of The Year
Anyway, it wasn’t Billie Eilish’s fault that she kept racking up trophies. When she accepted that second Record Of The Year award, Eilish pointed out that future Number Ones artist Megan Thee Stallion “deserved to win,” which was true. Eilish kept working, cranking out new music during the pandemic. She and Finneas wrote the songs for 4*Town, the fictional boy band in the Pixar movie Turning Red. Finneas has done well for himself outside of his work with Billie, but his only Hot 100 hit as an artist is the 4*Town track “Nobody Like U” — he’s one of the voices — which peaked at #49. In 2020, Billie started releasing singles that would later appear on her sophomore LP Happier Than Ever, which was significantly more restrained and traditional than her debut. Some of those songs were hits, and one of them, the dim “Bad Guy” echo “Therefore I Am,” made it to #2. (It’s a 5.) But the only Happier Than Ever song that really grabbed me was one of the ones that stopped just outside the top 10: the title track, which turns into a kickass alt-rock fuzzbomb halfway through and which peaked at #11.
I didn’t love Happier Than Ever, but it firmly established that Billie Eilish was not an industry-hype mini-phenom, that she was in it for the long haul. Now, she’s part of the pop firmament. She can tour arenas and headline huge festivals whenever she wants, and everything that she does commands a certain level of attention. In 2023. Eilish contributed another sleepy ballad, “What Was I Made For?,” to the Barbie soundtrack. (It peaked at #14.) I think that song is boring as hell, especially compared to some of the brighter and friskier tracks from the same movie, but plenty of people disagreed with me. At last year’s Oscars, Billie Eilish and Finneas once again won Best Original Song. She was 22 years old with two Academy Awards, and she remains the youngest person ever to win multiple Oscars.
Last year, Billie Eilish released Hit Me Hard And Soft, her third album. It’s pretty good! During its promotional cycle, Eilish came out as queer. That’s something else that she has in common with Lil Nas X, though we didn’t know it back then and maybe she didn’t either. Lead single “Lunch,” a flirty and explicit ode to same-sex attraction, peaked at #5. (It’s an 8.) But the real hit from Hit Me Hard And Soft turned out to be one that fans picked. Eilish didn’t release advance singles, making the point that she wanted people to experience the record all at once, and you know rock critics love to hear that shit. The “Lunch” video didn’t even come out until a bit after the LP. Over time, listeners gravitated toward “Birds Of A Feather,” a slight but pretty new wave love jam. “Birds Of A Feather” topped charts all over the world, and it was one of last year’s biggest hits, but it couldn’t get past #2 on the Hot 100. (It’s a 7.)
So that’s Billie Eilish! She’s a big deal! From what I can tell, she will remain a big deal for the foreseeable future. She’s been famous for nearly a decade, and she is still only 23 years old. After her album came out last year, Eilish got in on former Number Ones artist Charli XCX’s whole Brat Summer phenomenon, jumping on the remix to Charli’s horny-trashy electoclash jam “Guess” and making it even hornier and trashier. That “Guess” remix peaked at #12, giving Charli her biggest Hot 100 hit since the summer of “Fancy” and “Boom Clap.” (That’s as an artist. As a songwriter, Charli will appear in this column very soon.) The “Guess” remix was also one of my favorite songs of last year, and it doesn’t really sound like anything else that Eilish has ever done. I have no idea where Eilish’s career will go from here, and that’s exciting. But I’d be surprised if she doesn’t find her way back into this column some day.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: LA ska revivalists the Interrupters released a supremely goofy 2019 “Bad Guy” cover, with horns doing the keyboard riff, and it’s one of the band’s biggest songs now. Here’s the live-in-studio video that they made for it:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Do a booooooook buy. Duh.
