Billie Eilish Doesn’t Know if There Will Ever Be Another Billie Eilish

比莉·艾利什不知道未来是否还会出现下一个比莉·艾利什

Nearly a decade ago, Billie Eilish, then 13 years old, put “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud and catapulted to global super stardom. 近十年前，当时年仅 13 岁的比莉·艾利什（Billie Eilish）将《Ocean Eyes》上传到了 SoundCloud，随即一跃成为全球超级巨星。

It was the kind of ascent aspiring singers dream of, propelled by a platform that at the time wasn’t known for unearthing pop stars. But if you ask her now, even Eilish, now 24, doesn’t know if someone else could replicate her success. “Oh my god!” she says when asked where the next Billie Eilish might be discovered. “I have no idea.” 这正是无数怀揣梦想的歌手所渴望的崛起之路，而推动她成名的平台在当时并未被视为发掘流行巨星的摇篮。但如果你现在问她，即便已是 24 岁的艾利什本人，也不知道是否还有人能复制她的成功。“天哪！”当被问及下一个比莉·艾利什可能会在哪里被发现时，她说，“我完全不知道。”

These days it’s common for new artists to share their music on SoundCloud, but back then it was still relatively new. “I’m very curious to see what the future holds,” Eilish says. “I don’t know where the next whoever is gonna come from. I can’t wait to see them and I can’t wait to cheerleader them, whoever it may be.” 如今，新晋艺人在 SoundCloud 上分享音乐已是常态，但在当时这还是个相对新鲜的事物。“我对未来充满好奇，”艾利什说，“我不知道下一个‘某某’会从哪里冒出来。我迫不及待地想见到他们，也迫不及待地想为他们加油喝彩，无论那个人是谁。”

If they ever come. Ten years ago artists could build followings, like Eilish did, through livestreams, Instagram posts, and videos on social media. In 2026, the landscape looks very different. Everyone seems to know, or claims to know, how to beat the algorithms to get streams and views, but very little of it feels authentic, especially in a world full of AI slop. Eilish and her fans grew up online, but they may not want to hang out there the way they once did. 如果他们真的会出现的话。十年前，艺人可以通过直播、Instagram 帖子和社交媒体视频来积累粉丝，艾利什就是这样做的。到了 2026 年，环境已经大不相同。每个人似乎都知道，或者声称知道如何通过算法来获取流量和点击率，但其中很少有真实感，尤其是在一个充斥着 AI 垃圾内容的世界里。艾利什和她的粉丝们是在网络上成长起来的，但他们可能不再像过去那样愿意沉浸在网络世界中了。

Eilish, to be clear, still believes true talent can break through the noise. Art, she says, should be “attainable for everyone” and the internet, while messy, enables that. “There’s all sorts of technologies now where it seems like we’re all doomed, but we’re not,” Eilish tells WIRED. “If we keep making real stuff, real art made by humans—live music, live audiences—I don’t see that ever dying.” 需要明确的是，艾利什仍然相信真正的才华可以突破噪音的干扰。她说，艺术应该是“每个人都能触及的”，而互联网虽然混乱，却实现了这一点。“现在有各种各样的技术，看起来我们都注定要完蛋了，但事实并非如此，”艾利什告诉《连线》（WIRED）杂志，“如果我们坚持创作真实的东西，坚持创作由人类制作的真实艺术——现场音乐、现场观众——我不认为这种东西会消亡。”

If anything, Eilish’s new concert film Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), out May 8, serves as a testament to IRL connection from a performer known for her online relationship with her fans. Shot in 3D—by Eilish and James Cameron, no less—the film was made to immerse the audience in the concert experience. In between footage from shows on her most recent tour, there are interviews with acolytes about their connection to Eilish’s music. The movie can feel like fan service, but it also demonstrates the value of collective experiences. A call from an internet darling to go out and touch grass—even if it’s in a multiplex. 如果说有什么意义的话，艾利什于 5 月 8 日上映的新演唱会电影《Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)》证明了这位以线上粉丝关系闻名的表演者对现实连接的重视。这部电影由艾利什和詹姆斯·卡梅隆（James Cameron）亲自拍摄（3D 格式），旨在让观众沉浸在演唱会体验中。在最近巡演的演出片段之间，穿插着粉丝们讲述他们与艾利什音乐之间联系的采访。这部电影可能感觉像是给粉丝的福利，但它也展示了集体体验的价值。这就像是一位网络宠儿在呼吁大家走出网络、拥抱现实——哪怕是在电影院里。

By the time Eilish released “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud in November 2015, “Gangnam Style” and Justin Bieber had proven YouTube could lead to hits, but few pop stars, save for maybe Taylor Swift, were as publicly online as their fans. Eilish used a playbook from hip-hop artists like Chance the Rapper and the collective Odd Future—who had built their own internet undergrounds through video-sharing sites and downloadable mixtapes—to attain massive super stardom. Her former manager Danny Rukasin told Billboard in 2019 that it was important that Eilish have a complete persona like Chance and Travis Scott, adding “there’s a little bit of that hip-hop zeitgeist in this project.” Not too long after, the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica was calling her “the first SoundCloud-rap pop star, without the rapping.” 当艾利什于 2015 年 11 月在 SoundCloud 上发布《Ocean Eyes》时，《江南 Style》和贾斯汀·比伯（Justin Bieber）已经证明了 YouTube 可以造就热门歌曲，但除了泰勒·斯威夫特（Taylor Swift）之外，很少有流行歌星像他们的粉丝那样活跃在网络上。艾利什借鉴了 Chance the Rapper 和 Odd Future 等嘻哈艺人的成功经验——他们通过视频分享网站和可下载的混音带建立了属于自己的互联网地下王国——从而获得了巨大的超级明星地位。她的前经纪人丹尼·鲁卡辛（Danny Rukasin）在 2019 年告诉《公告牌》（Billboard），艾利什拥有像 Chance 和特拉维斯·斯科特（Travis Scott）那样完整的人设非常重要，并补充说“这个项目中有一点嘻哈时代的精神”。不久之后，《纽约时报》的乔恩·卡拉马尼卡（Jon Caramanica）称她为“第一位没有说唱的 SoundCloud 说唱流行歌星”。

During her ascent, many profiles of Eilish made hay of her popularity online, complete with Instagram and Spotify stats. Fan accounts popped up to share and reshare all of Eilish’s music and shenanigans. Her notoriety as a Gen Z artist, says Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago who has studied internet fandoms, also made her a “really useful rhetorical figure for music journalists to articulate industry shifts in the digital age.” 在她崛起期间，许多关于艾利什的报道都大肆渲染她在网上的受欢迎程度，并附上了 Instagram 和 Spotify 的数据。粉丝账号纷纷涌现，分享和转发艾利什所有的音乐和趣事。芝加哥大学研究互联网粉丝文化的音乐学家保拉·哈珀（Paula Harper）表示，她作为 Z 世代艺人的名气，也使她成为“音乐记者在阐述数字时代行业变革时，一个非常有用的修辞人物”。

The internet enabled all manner of indie acts to find their followings, but when technology promises more access to artists, fans expect it as part of their experience of music. The dynamic becomes circular, Harper says, “and then that increased access to (purportedly) musicians’ real lives and personalities encourages fans, listeners, and critics to read music more closely as expression of that artist’s identity.” This also leads to fandoms that treat posts as Easter eggs, where details are assumed to be a clue to an artist’s life. 互联网使各种独立艺人都能找到自己的粉丝群，但当技术承诺提供更多接触艺人的机会时，粉丝们便将其视为音乐体验的一部分。哈珀说，这种动态变成了一种循环，“这种对音乐人（据称是）真实生活和个性的更多接触，鼓励了粉丝、听众和评论家更仔细地解读音乐，将其视为该艺人身份的表达。”这也导致粉丝群体将社交媒体帖子视为“彩蛋”，并假设其中的细节是了解艺人生活的线索。

Eilish, who signed with Interscope label The Darkroom in 2016, seems to have understood this. As she was preparing her debut LP When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? she was followed by a documentary crew for what would eventually become The World’s a Little Blurry. In it, her brother Finneas, with whom she’s written most of her songs, notes that she is “so woke about her own persona on the internet that I think she’s terrified of, like, anything she makes being hated.” 2016 年与 Interscope 旗下的 The Darkroom 签约的艾利什似乎很早就意识到了这一点。在筹备首张专辑《When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?》时，她被一个纪录片摄制组跟拍，这部纪录片最终成为了《比莉·艾利什：模糊的世界》（The World’s a Little Blurry）。在片中，与她共同创作了大部分歌曲的哥哥菲尼亚斯（Finneas）指出，她“对自己在互联网上的人设非常清醒，以至于我觉得她很害怕自己创作的任何东西被讨厌。”

She needn’t have worried. When We All Fall Asleep, released in 2019, immediately shot to number one on the Billboard 200 and she ended up winning five Grammys at the age of 18. 她不必担心。2019 年发行的《When We All Fall Asleep》立即冲上了公告牌 200 强专辑榜榜首，她最终在 18 岁时赢得了五项格莱美奖。

That kind of success, Harper notes, can have knock-on effects. Whenever someone is made the face of a new—”purportedly more egalitarian, less gatekept”—ecosystem thanks to tech, that artist becomes a focal point for critique, especially when people begin to question whether their rise is purely meritocratic. 哈珀指出，这种成功会产生连锁反应。每当有人因为技术而成为一个新的——“据称更平等、门槛更低”——生态系统的代言人时，这位艺人就会成为批评的焦点，尤其是当人们开始质疑他们的崛起是否完全基于个人能力时。

As early as 2019, BuzzFeed News was questioning whether Eilish’s ascent was entirely organic, citing relationships her family had with the entertainment industry and that she was backed by industry gatekeepers, like Spotify. “Eilish is one of the first artists I heard associated with the term ‘industry plant,’” Harper says. (If she is, consider me fooled.) 早在 2019 年，BuzzFeed News 就曾质疑艾利什的崛起是否完全自然，并列举了她家庭与娱乐业的关系，以及她得到了 Spotify 等行业把关人的支持。“艾利什是我听到的第一批与‘行业傀儡’（industry plant）一词联系在一起的艺人之一，”哈珀说。（如果她真是这样，那我也被骗了。）

This was at the beginning of a now rampant conversation around authentic discovery online. 这标志着围绕“线上真实发掘”这一话题的讨论开始，而如今这种讨论已变得非常普遍。