搬运译Pitchfork评Billie Eilish专辑When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Simon Joanne

校正：Lynn Liu

作者： Stacey Anderson

在这张大胆而绚丽的处女作中：哥特式风格、重低音泛滥，这位冉冉上升的流行新星创造了自己音乐世界。

Billie Eilish has suddenly become an obscenely famous pop star—the kind with 15 million Instagram followers, sold-out shows around the world, a haute modeling contract, and couch time with Ellen DeGeneres. Her brilliance is an obvious truth; just ask any teenager in America as they wait patiently for the rest of the world to catch up to their consummate taste in pop music.

Billie Eilish在突然之间变成了一位炙手可热的知名流行歌手——在Instagram上拥有一千五百万名粉丝、世界各地极其卖座的演出、与Haute签下了一份模特合同，还上了艾伦秀。她的才华毋庸置疑——你问一问美国现在的年轻人就知道，世界上的人们都等不及想要赶紧跟上他们的流行音乐品味。

Of course, the 17-year-old Eilish is still waiting for her teeth to straighten out. This fact trumpets the arrival of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?: For its intro, Eilish removes her much-loathed transparent braces in a series of lightly gross, ASMR-worthy slurps, and proclaims, “I have taken out my Invisalign and this is the album.” She then dissolves into heaving cackles, the kind that alienates any onlookers too prissy to partake. There are several more oddball moments like this—absent-minded humming to a track, giggling asides—that remind us she’s still a precocious, creative teen girl on this rocket, and all her gothic proclivities don’t cancel out how much she’s enjoying the ride.

当然，17岁的Billie依然在等待着崭露头角，而这便造就了她首张个人专辑（《When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?（陷入睡眠之后的我们都去了哪里？）》）。在开场曲中，Eilish在一系列略显粗俗、让人讨厌、类似于ASMR的声音中，摘下了她的透明牙套，并宣称：“我把我牙套拿出来了，这就是我的专辑。”随后她开始大笑出起来，这种笑声足以让任何旁观者放下包袱来真正参与到这张专辑的音乐之中。专辑中有一些古怪的片段——比如对着伴奏发出心不在焉的哼鸣，或者是在一旁发出咯咯的笑声——她好像一直在提醒我们她依旧只是一个早熟并极具创造力的青少年罢了，而这些音乐中的哥特风倾向也并没有抹掉她对于这趟音乐旅途的享受。

Her rise has been striking: At 14, she put the song “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud, a glassy, straightforward ballad with tearful synths and woozy, Lana Del Rey-indebted crooning. She snared a young fanbase with her hooks and raised her middle finger to pop’s status quo; here was this music that shifted between genres—from pop to Trap and EDM—made by a lawless young female singer sporting baggy, androgynous clothes. She cast her bored, listless eyes upward instead of batting them at the camera. She filled her videos with flowing black tears, plunging needles, and arachnid hors d’oeuvres instead of twirling around sleek cityscapes. Eilish’s creepy eccentricity feels so removed from the pop formula; it helps distance her from the music industry’s historically lewd maceration of teen idols. Eilish just seems sharper, meaner, more self-sufficient—a young star from Los Angeles, in the grand tradition, but one that could only have come along while its hills are burning.

Billie的爆红让人震惊：14岁时就在SoundCloud上上传了“Ocean Eyes”这首歌，这是一首透亮又直白的抒情歌曲，你可以在其中听到感伤合成器音色，也可以听到类似与Lana Del Rey的迷幻低吟。她以个人魅力收获了第一批粉丝并向流行音乐界竖起了中指。专辑中的音乐在不同流派间一直转换：从流行到Trap再到电子舞曲，它们都是由这样一个喜欢穿宽松中性工装服、放纵不羁且年轻女歌手创作出来的。她总是将自己倦怠厌世的眼神向上眺起、跳离镜头。她的音乐录像带没有平滑旋转的城市风光，却充斥着黑色眼泪、背扎针管、生吞活蛛的怪异画面。Billie带有点骇人色彩的古怪风格与流行音乐的标准相去甚远，这也使得她不用像音乐产业中的其他偶像那样靠绝食来塑造完美的性感形象。Billie看起来就像一个锐气十足、刻薄自大的年轻人——一个来自洛杉矶的明日之星，虽依旧没有脱离大的传统，却能独当一面。

The best moments of When We All Fall Asleep play firmly into this formula. Inspired by Eilish’s frequent night terrors and lucid dreams, the album juggles dark compulsions with grim eulogies, balancing her feathery vocals with deep, grisly bass. Like her spirit animal, the spider, Eilish can weave something that is at once delicate and grotesque: In “you should see me in a crown,” she lulls the listener into a false idyll with her murmured lilt, then leaps off the cliff of a tectonic dubstep bass drop, her sneer fully audible. (That the title is cribbed from Moriarty, the beguiling psychopath of television’s “Sherlock,” also speaks to her pull toward the sinister.)

这张专辑里的最佳时刻始终紧密地遵循着这一规范。受到自己频繁出现的梦魇和清醒梦的启发，Billie在这张专辑中有机协调了黑暗的冲动与冷酷的颂词，并在自己羽毛般柔和的声音与强劲压抑的重低音中找到了完美的平衡。就像她的灵兽——蜘蛛一般 ，她总能将普通的事物立马编制成一张精致却怪诞的网：在“you should see me in a crown（你应该看见我带着皇冠）”中，她用低吟出欢快的曲调，给听众造出一种平和的假象，接着她便从悬崖边一跃坠入Dubstep电音的低音鼓点之中，她的讥笑却变得透彻响亮。（这首歌的歌名化用了电视剧《神探夏洛克》中莫里亚蒂——这位满口谎言的精神病患者对恶灵说的话。）

“xanny” plumbs sincere anxiety over more marrow-shaking bass, the kind that could blast apart a few pairs of headphones. Eilish’s voice crossfades over the narcoleptic beat, and slips into full despair, whimpering her most self-aware lines on the record: “Please don't try to kiss me on the sidewalk/On your cigarette break/I can’t afford to love someone/Who isn't dying by mistake in Silver Lake.” Eilish’s lyrics wonderfully underScore how all teen angst is both fiercely sincere and an affect of being only partially informed.

“xanny”一曲，用震彻骨髓、强大到甚至可能震坏某些耳机的低音刻画出一种真实的焦虑感。Billie的声音穿插于这些间歇出现的低音之中，淡入淡出，滑进彻底的失落，呜咽般得道出专辑中自我意识最强烈的歌词：“请别在吸完烟后，在路边亲吻我，爱上一个人太难，但谁又不想要这银湖边的浪漫把戏呢？”这些歌词巧妙地表现了现代青年的焦虑——它是如此残酷地现实，也是只部分知情的影响。

A similar spirit drives “bury a friend,” another early single. Despite the vocoder-style distortion, Eilish’s voice feels even more intimate as she hisses, “Step on the glass, staple your tongue” in a farcical singsong. Eilish has namechecked Tyler, the Creator as one of her greatest influences; in her slightly jazzy trill, too, she also nods to her clearest pop progenitor, Lorde, who cleared much of Eilish’s path with her autonomous creative control, heavy-lidded social observations, and blithely goth aura.

相似的精神同样主导了另一首早期打单的歌曲——“bury a friend（埋葬一位朋友）”。除了类似声音合成器质感的扭曲，Billie在这首畸形的歌曲中发出的嘶嘘细声“脚踩玻璃，舌头钉钉”，显得她的声音更加亲近。Billie曾提到Tyler, the Creator是对她影响最大的歌手之一，在她颇具爵士乐色彩的轻微颤音中，我们同样能听到Billie对前辈Lorde的致敬，正是因为Lorde为Billie这样的新歌手的发展道路清除了不少障碍，Billie得以掌握自主创作权，同时也能在社会严格的注视之下，无拘束地让自己的哥特摇滚无限发光。

Still, all Eilish’s weaponry can’t stop her most overtly pop track, “bad guy,” from going stale. A snappy pulse launches Eilish into a litany of taunts against her partner. Over the rubbery electro beat, she says she’s the “make-your-girlfriend-mad type/Might-seduce-your-dad type.” It gave me pause because it suggests that perhaps Eilish isn’t so far removed from the teen pop continuum as we’ve come to believe: How different is her bragging about statutory rape, culturally, from trussing up 16-year-old Britney Spears in pigtails and plaid? Even if it’s a teen girl’s decision, entirely, to flaunt her sexuality (or engage in provocative roleplay), the line crosses a boundary plenty of adults were happy to cosign.

不过，Billie拥有的武器却未能防止“bad guy（坏人）”这首大火单曲变得陈腐老套。时髦的脉冲将Billie弹射到对于恋人的嘲讽祷文之上。在这些充满弹力的电子鼓点之中，她将自己描述成“可能让你女朋友抓狂、勾引你父亲的那类人。”这也让我迟疑了一下，因为它好像也暗示了Billie也许也和我们渐趋相信的青年流行音乐统一体差的不是很远。吹嘘着法定强奸罪的Billie和16岁时扎着辫子、穿着格子衫的布兰妮又有多大的区别呢？即使这都是这些青年完全自主的选择（展现自己的性感或涉及具有挑衅性质的角色扮演）她们跨过的这条底线依旧迎合了多数成年人的口味。

The quieter moments of When We Fall Asleep nod more to Eilish’s past, and to mixed results. Much like her first EP, 2017’s Don’t Smile at Me, they skew glum instead of macabre, even briefly twee. “wish you were gay” spotlights Eilish’s vocals, which deserved better than being spackled with canned studio laughter and self-involved lyrics in the lamentable lineage of Katy Perry’s “Ur So Gay.” Minimalist, mournful piano ballads like “listen before i go” and “when the party’s over” further prove her vocal talents amid larger inertia. Throw in a cheeky, extended riff on an episode of “The Office” on “my strange addiction”—which smatters in clips of the Dunder Mifflin crew reacting to Michael Scott’s own contentious creative efforts—and you have an album as widely collagist as a teen’s bedroom wall.

这张专辑中较为平静的一些时刻大多与Billie的过去关系密切，这些事件都有着复杂的结局。这些歌曲没有非常惊悚或过度华丽，反而充斥着更多的负面情绪，这一点更像她在2017年发行的第一张EP《Don’t Smile at Me(别朝我笑)》。“wish you were gay”中Billie的嗓音得到了突出，这首歌比Katy Perry那首堆砌自嘲歌词，带有混响的嬉笑声的“Ur So Gay”要好得多。其他的一些简洁而又悲伤的钢琴抒情歌曲，如“listen before i go” 和“when the party’s over”更进一步展现了她的歌唱天赋。在“my strange addiction”中，采样源于《办公室》，在剧中，Dunder Mifflin的工作人员们正在谈论Michael Scott那有争议的创作（他自编自导了一部同名小电影）——你所拥有的这张专辑就像一个青少年卧室墙上贴的剪贴画组合一样。