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Tribune News Service

“This is kind of dark,” Billie Eilish says, “but recently I was reading Kurt Cobain’s suicide note.”
The 21-year-old pop superstar is snuggled on a sofa at a Los Angeles studio – black trousers, black and red hair – and sets down the acai bowl in her hands to explain.
“It’s horrifying. I mean, all of it is the most tragic s*** I’ve ever heard. He was such a pure person and talent,” she says of the late Nirvana frontman, “and I feel so much deep, deep, deep sorrow for him and his life and where it went.
“In the letter he’s like, ‘I have everything in the world, and I absolutely hate it.’ He was so ashamed that he wasn’t enjoying it. And I get why he was feeling that way,” she adds. “It’s just not what you think it’s going to be.”

Eilish did not wake up this morning burning with the desire to complain about being a world-famous celebrity, which is what she has been since her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, went quadruple-platinum and made her the youngest person in history to sweep the Grammy Awards’ four major categories in a single night.
But the singer is describing the emotional circumstances that shaped her single, “What Was I Made For?,” in which she sings about having forgotten how to be happy over the saddest-sounding piano chords in the world.
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Cobain, who died in 1994, comes up as an artist she and her brother-producer, Finneas O’Connell, look to frequently for his understanding of the loneliness of success.
“It’s that existential-crisis vibe where you could be sitting in a room with people you love,” she says, “and you’re like, Oh, my God, what the f*** is going on with my life?”
Should it come as a surprise that this ballad of a young woman’s disillusionment arrived as part of the Hollywood juggernaut that is Barbie?


Greta Gerwig’s pretty-in-pink blockbuster is loaded with music, including streaming hits by Dua Lipa, Charli XCX and the duo of Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.
Most of the film’s songs share its frothy spirit and sleek surfaces; yet “What Was I Made For?” is different: smaller, slower, infinitely more introspective.
Gerwig says she asked Eilish and O’Connell to write “Barbie’s heart song – the song that is deep inside her core that she doesn’t even completely know is there but that she starts to hear more clearly throughout the film”.
We all cried
Greta Gerwig, Barbie director, on the production crew’s reaction to Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For?’
The director recalls receiving the siblings’ demo, with just Eilish’s vocals and O’Connell on piano.
“It totally wrecked me,” Gerwig says, adding that she immediately played it for her partner, Noah Baumbach, with whom she wrote the movie, and for others involved with the production. Their verdict?
“We all cried.”

They are hardly the only ones with whom the song has connected. A nine-week No. 1 smash on Billboard’s alternative music chart, “What Was I Made For?” has racked up more than half a billion streams on Spotify and YouTube and recently earned five Grammy nominations, including for record and song of the year.
Now it is in the running to compete for original song at the 96th Academy Awards in March.
“Turns out it got huge,” says Eilish, who won the original song Oscar in 2022 with “No Time to Die”, her and her brother’s sumptuous and melancholy theme from the James Bond film of the same title.
Accepting the prize that night at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, the singer looked genuinely thrilled to have earned one of the highest honours in show business – “We promise not to lose these,” O’Connell joked as he hoisted his statuette.

What Eilish can see now is that the external validation she received as a celebrated teenage phenom did a real number on her sense of self-worth after an adolescence marked by depression.
“2019, that period of my life when I dyed my hair green, I was completely unstoppable,” the Los Angeles native says.
“I felt like I was on the moon. And I remember at the time being like, I’m finally happy. I’d never been happy before, and I just wanted to stay happy. Then a couple years happened. Covid happened. Another album happened,” she continues, referring to 2021’s Happier Than Ever.

“I got older and fell back into being a human and not being happy all the time – having good moments and having bad moments. Last year got really bad. And I just kept being like, ‘God, I miss 2019 so much. When can my life feel like that again?’”
Through talks with her brother and her friends, she eventually grasped that she had been “basing all my happiness on all these things in the material world that you have no control over and that will inevitably change”. She shrugs.
“This song has a lot to do with that. ‘I used to float’ – that’s what 2019 felt like,” she says, quoting the first line of “What Was I Made For?” before dropping the next one: “‘Now I just fall down.’”

Eilish thought she had devised a plan for contentment by going blonde-bombshell around “Happier Than Ever” – a dramatic shift from the edgy goth look that helped make her such a sensation.
But the hair began to feel like a costume in which she lost her identity. “I completely had no idea who I was,” she says. “I came up with this whole aesthetic, and I just got swallowed up into it.”
She cut the blonde hair short, which registered as an improvement, then she went brown for a spell. “I look back at that and I’m like, ‘Who is this brunette?’” she says. “A brunette! That wasn’t me.”

Finally going back to black restored her creative mojo to the point that she could funnel her thoughts of disappointment and futility into music – into a song inspired, as it happens, by one of culture’s most iconic blondes.
Eilish, who recently weathered a high-profile break-up with singer Jesse Rutherford of the LA rock band the Neighbourhood, has been thinking a lot about maturity as she and O’Connell wrap up work on Eilish’s third LP.
“It feels somehow very different from the rest of what I’ve ever put out,” says the singer, who is turning 22 on December 18. “Like, now I’m in my 20s – oh, my God, that’s so weird – and I’ve never been an adult putting music out before.”

With her re-entry on the horizon, I ask if she has heard some of the big pop records that have defined 2023. SZA’s SOS? “Great – I love it,” she says. Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts? “Adorable.”
Does she feel a kinship with Rodrigo, who was born 14 months after Eilish and who similarly rocketed to pop stardom as a teenager with her monster 2021 ballad “Drivers License”?
“I think everybody’s experiences are so individual,” she says. “Nobody has had anybody else’s life, you know? But I do feel a protectiveness over Olivia. I have a song called ‘Goldwing’ from my last album that’s kind of about her.
“I’ve never said that to anyone. It’s not only about her. I was just thinking about her when I was writing it. She was coming up, and she was younger than me, and nobody had ever been younger than me,” she adds with a laugh.


“Goldwing” opens with a few lines from a hymn that Eilish sang as a kid in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus; later, she sketches a portrait of looming exploitation that Barbie might recognise:
“They’re gonna tell you what you want to hear/ Then they’re gonna disappear/ Gonna claim you like a souvenir/ Just to sell you in a year.”
“Olivia was getting big, and she was just, like, this little dainty child,” Eilish says of the performer who got her start in the Disney universe.
“I felt so nervous. I was worried about her. She came up in that acting world, and people are so weird. I don’t know – I just felt very protective over her. And I feel that way to everyone.”

She mentions Ariana Greenblatt, who plays a crucial role in Barbie as a moody middle-schooler. “She’s 16, and I literally want to cry about her sometimes,” she says.
“I just see myself in all these young girls. And it’s the girls, man. Boys can handle themselves. They’re dudes – they don’t have to deal with it like we do,” she says with a sigh.
“I just want to hold everybody in a little glass box and never let anything touch them.”
If you have suicidal thoughts or know someone who is experiencing them, help is available.
In Hong Kong, dial +852 2896 0000 for The Samaritans or +852 2382 0000 for Suicide Prevention Services. In the US, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For a list of other nations’ helplines, see this page.


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Fame and celebrity

‘I was completely unstoppable’: Billie Eilish on fame, learning from her Barbie song, protecting Olivia Rodrigo and her blonde and brunette phases

Eilish arrives for the world premiere of “Barbie” in Los Angeles on July 9, 2023. Photo: TNS

Pop superstar Billie Eilish attends the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She reveals how her success and sense of self-worth contributed to her hit Barbie song “What Was I Made For?”. Photo: Getty Images

Kurt Cobain of Nirvana during the taping of an MTV Unplugged show in New York in 1993, a year before his death. Photo: Getty Images

Ken (Ryan Gosling) and Barbie (Margot Robbie) in a still from Barbie. Photo: courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Eilish performs during the 94th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on March 27, 2022. Photo: TNS

Eilish arrives for the world premiere of “Barbie” in Los Angeles. Photo: TNS

A still from the “What Was I Made For?” music video. Photo: YouTube/@Billie Eilish

Eilish at the “No Time To Die” world premiere in London in September 2021. Photo: Getty Images

Finneas O’Connell and Eilish at the “Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell in Conversation” panel at the 2018 ASCAP “I Create Music” expo in 2018 in California. Photo: Getty Images

Eilish on the red carpet at the 94th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Photo: TNS

Fans rejoice as Blackpink end speculation about their future in K-pop, with Jisoo, Jennie, Lisa and Rosé all signing new contracts

Lisa, Jisoo, Rosé and Jennie of Blackpink perform onstage at the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California in April 2023. Photo:  Getty Images

Blackpink members (from left) Lisa, Jisoo, Jennie and Rosé attend the 2022 MTV VMAs. Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images/TNS

Blackpink pose with their medals following a special investiture ceremony to present them with Honorary MBEs at Buckingham Palace in London. Photo: Victoria Jones/Pool/AFP

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Fans cheer during Clockenflap 2016. Photo: Jonathan Wong


Jarvis Cocker at Clockenflap 2018. Photo: Chris Lusher

Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys performs in March 2023 at Clockenflap. Photo: Sun Yeung

Fans cheer during Clockenflap 2016. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Collar x RubberBand perform in March 2023 at Clockenflap. Photo: Dickson Lee

Attendees dress up at Clockenflap in March 2023. Photo: Dickson Lee

Kid Ink at Clockenflap 2017. Photo: James Wendlinger 

Spectators at Clockenflap 2017. Photo: Handout

The Chemical Brothers close Clockenflap 2016. Photo: Chris Lusher

Robert Del Naja from Massive Attack at Clockenflap 2017. Photo: James Wendlinger 

A cash confetti storm during A$AP Rocky’s set at Clockenflap 2015. Photo: Clockenflap

The first Clockenflap festival in 2008. Photo: Chris Lusher

Stormzy at Clockenflap 2017. Photo: James Wendlinger

Umbrellas in hand, the crowd enjoys the performance by Jose Gonzalez at Clockenflap 2016. Photo: Jarrod Watt

Denise Ho at Clockenflap 2015. Photo: Jonathan Wong

U-God (left) of the Wu-Tang Clan talks to the media while backstage at Clockenflap in March 2023. Photo: Dickson Lee

Franz Ferdinand at Clockenflap 2013. Photo: Jonathan Wong

David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics and notes for 2 songs from ‘Ziggy Stardust’ album could fetch US$125,000 at auction

David Bowie during a performance in the 1970s. Photo: Getty Images

Detail from the cover of David Bowie’s 1972 “Ziggy Stardust” album. Handwritten lyrics to two tracks from the album, “Suffragette City” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”, are expected to fetch up to US$125,000 at auction.

David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for “Rock’n’Roll Suicide”. Photo: Omega Auctions

Bowie’s lyrics for “Suffragette City”. Photo: Omega Auctions

Abang Adik movie review: Taiwanese actor Wu Kang-ren stars as a deaf-mute in acclaimed Malaysian drama directed by debutant Jin Ong

Wu Kang-ren (left) and Jack Tan in a still from “Abang Adik”.

Wu Kang-ren (front) and Jack Tan in a still from “Abang Adik” (Category III, Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese), directed by Jin Ong.

Wu Kang-ren in a still from “Abang Adik”.

Jack Tan in a still from “Abang Adik”.

Lifestyle

Entertainment

Culture

Music

Pop superstar Billie Eilish reveals how early success in her career and the self-worth it brought her contributed to her hit Barbie song ‘What Was I Made For?’
She shares her worries about Olivia Rodrigo, why she dyed her hair black after going blonde and brunette, and her thoughts on Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide note


What has Billie Eilish, pop superstar, learned from ‘What Was I Made For?’ She reveals how her own success and sense of self-worth contributed to her hit Barbie song, and what she thinks of Olivia Rodrigo.


American cinema

Olivia Rodrigo

Billie Eilish

Dua Lipa