Until I read a thoughtful article about her a couple days ago at The Federalist, I had never heard of pop superstar Billie Eilish. Being officially “old” it doesn’t surprise me that much of pop culture passes me buy, and I’m happy to let it do so. The state of affairs that is our secular Western culture is deeply shallow and painfully dysfunctional. It’s impossible not to conclude that when 40,000 people a year in America successfully kill themselves. The young superstar herself, having fame beyond imagining and what she dreamed of as a child, deals with depression. I listened to a song or two and wasn’t impressed, but a lot of people are. One video of a new song with her newly blond hair and new look had almost 50 million views. That’s a lot of views! I also found this interview she did a couple years back, and I was struck by this 17 year-old girl being listened to and treated as if she was really, really important. Watch the interview to see what I mean.
This, of course, didn’t start with Billie Eilish. The phenomenon of fetishizing youth culture goes back to at least the 1920s. I recently re-watched a documentary of Frank Sinatra, and he was the Beatles before the Beatles, all the same screaming and fainting teenage girls. Then all of a sudden there was Elvis, and Frank wasn’t so “cool” anymore. Then all of a sudden Elvis wasn’t so young and cool anymore, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo were, and so on. Over the 20th century young became cool and hip and “important,” as if youth itself were something to aspire too. This didn’t happen overnight.
The sociological study of a post-agrarian world as it industrialized into the 20th century is fascinating. I’m a big ideas guy, believing that ideas are the primary driver of cultural and sociological change (think Christianity and the ancient world), but technology has a huge impact on people’s worldviews and their perception of reality, of what is important or not, what is meaningful or not, what is true or not. Tomes have been written on all this, but once adolescence became a thing, youth culture as we’ve come to know it was practically inevitable. Getting rid of God and the secularization of culture didn’t help. The biblical point of all this is that children and young people, pardon the French, are morons (I love that word! Thank you Scrooged and David Johansen, or if you want to see the full taxi ride from hell).
I often pointed out to my children as they were growing up the stupidity of things they’d done (trying never to call them stupid), and I’d tell them, that’s called being young! Children and young people are by definition ignorant. They just don’t know very much, and it is very important that we teach them just how ignorant they are, then encourage them to do the hard work of acquiring knowledge. As I told them, life is a grindstone, it will either grind you down or polish you up. With knowledge, biblical and everything else, it’s much more likely their lives will reflect something shiny and attractive. The Bible calls that wisdom, and youth have very little wisdom. That can only be earned through the crucible that is existence, and the beginning of wisdom, as Proverbs tells us, is the fear of God. Without God, Billie Eilish is destiny.
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