Billie Eilish in Frankfurt: Everyone becomes a fan

Billie Eilish is in town.

One at every traffic light.

Sometimes there are even two, three, on the bike, on the subway: short cargo pants, wide short-sleeved shirt, sneakers, hair tied in pigtails, dyed.

Around the Frankfurt Festhalle, where the one, only and true pop singer Billie Eilish is supposed to perform on this oppressively hot, windy evening, you can guess how long her doubles (and also doubles) must have waited for the performance this Sunday: mountains of bottles and bags of crisps and torn posters and a few exhausted parents who have to cool down in front of the gate to the site after dropping off their children.

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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If they didn't go in directly, into the huge hall - to sing along there for two hours.

Maybe because her kids sang Billie Eilish's songs—"Bad Guy," "Getting Older," "Bury a Friend"—so often that they eventually knew them by heart.

But it's more likely that they'll be able to sing along to the songs because they've become fans themselves.

It's easy, at some point you automatically sing along in the hot hall, vaguely fixed on the text, but that doesn't matter because everyone sings and it's all about this spirit: about the jointly generated happy noise about it, here and now and at this point at the same time to be Billie Eilish in the world.

For two hours that you had been waiting for not just on a hot Frankfurt afternoon, but for two years.

Billie Eilish had canceled her 2020 world tour because of the pandemic, but recorded a new record, "Happier than Ever", now she's here.

Jumps out of a hatch onto the spacious stage, where otherwise only her brother on his many instruments and drummer Andrew Marshall accompany her.

One jump – and the Festhalle almost flies apart, everyone is screaming so loud.

After that, we celebrate as well as possible in this atmosphere.

"Take a deep breath, sit down for a moment," Billie Eilish calls out again and again, "are you okay?" Stupid question.

Then Finneas waves fresh air at her.

Extras are not negotiated

Billie Eilish is the star of today's pop music.

A 20-year-old from Los Angeles who wrote songs as a child and produced them at home with her older brother: rebellious, wise, compelling songs about being young, about love, dumb guys, pain and shame and self-empowerment.

She radiates a power of identification, more intense than the other identification figures in pop history before her, perhaps because she doesn't say: Come into my circle, everything will be fine - but because she keeps expanding this circle until everyone can belong.

Billie Eilish has discovered the inclusive power of pop music.

An art form that actually lives from gaining distinction, from being initiated into a secret that not everyone understands.

But Billie Eilish does not exclude, but includes.

She opens up, she invites, she says: Be there, no matter what you look like.

And almost everyone in the Festhalle looks like her anyway.

But it's not just Billie Eilish's image, the style of her hair or clothes, it's also her songs: You can hear this inclusivity even in a very early hit like "Ocean Eyes".

Hear how deep Billie Eilish is in American popular music history, hear it in the way she sings, how she also looks for the big show gestures.

In the spring she had won the "Oscar" for the best film music for the Bond song "No Time to Die", which not only playfully joins the list of great Bond songs like "Goldfinger", but also in her own work .

She has now confessed her love for the American singer and actress Julie London (1926 to 2000) to the presenter David Letterman, an influence that one would not have expected at first but hears immediately.

It shapes the songwriting in a similar way to the pumping basses and beats of today's hip-hop.

Billie Eilish also practiced using the Autotune program with Letterman.

Apparently everyone should really take part, including the old white men.

Billie Eilish sings for two hours, everyone sings in the festival hall, then it's over.

Extras are not negotiated.

This is also a sign of joint care work between the artist and the audience.

Outside, the many Billies immediately tell each other how it was.

And so the air glows a little more.