All the Good Girls Go to Hell. Another one of Billie Eilish’s song from her debut album, that when looking at the title might offend someone or just straight up be taken the wrong way. Today in my blog I will be using a Neo-Classical approach; specifically, the Canon to analyze and explain All the Good Girls go to Hell. According to our textbook Readings in Rhetorical Criticism the Neo-Classical approach is “The goal of this neo-Aristotelian criticism is to identify/predict the success factors and structure from Nixon’s address and ‘discover whether the speaker makes the best choices from the inventory to get a favorable decision from a specified group of auditors in a specific situation” (Hill, 2017).

Canon Approach Explained

The Neo-Classical comes from where rhetoric started, and the Canon comes from the ancient world. The Canon covers 5 different elements when using this approach to analyze any type of material. The first being Invention: meaning how did they come up with this piece of work, second is Arrangement: this could be why is it ordered the way it is or why and how did they come up with words or beat/music in the material, third is Style: this could be the persons style, how they deliver the material, the forth is Delivery: how is it delivered, and finally the fifth element is Memory: which is why is it memorable, meaning how does it stay memorable with its audience. I am going to be covering only two elements of The Canon, being Invention and Delivery. 

Invention

Billie is famously known for only saying partly what her songs are really about, at an interview she did in 2019 at the Grammy Museum she said along the lines of that she really wants her fans to listen to her music and make their own conclusions to what the song is about. When an interviewer at Entercom asked her what this song was about, she said she came up with this song because of Climate Change and Global Warning, she wanted to make a song that she could get across her huge platform and make a difference. (Eilish, 2019) In an another interview done by Vulture there is a a quote that connects what I was saying previously; “I love all of the fan conspiracies about your music. I read somewhere that some fans think that ‘All the Good Girls Go to Hell’ is about climate change. I love that they think that.” I was like, “That’s ‘cause it is.” You can think whatever you want about our music. I love that it’s ambiguous. But that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just true.” (Jenkins, 2019). 

Delivery

Now that we know that this song is about Climate Change, you can now see that delivered in the music video that was put out. Billie in the interview done by Entercom she is talking about how she relates the concept of Climate Change to the video as a whole. The video starts off with Eilish falling from the sky above with crisp white clothes and what she said were angel wings that are massive. When the music starts in the video Billie comes crashing down to earth in a puddle of what looks to be black liquid tar. She then rises from the black tar, her crisp white clothing now pitch black, her eyes also pitch blacks, and her angel wings now start to catch on fire and then start to resemble devil wings. In the interview done with Entercom she said that she wanted the video to be associated with the song title but also with Climate Change. She did this is a metaphor by using the angel like falling from the sky turning into a devil to show how people on earth are causing Climate Change. The angel symoblizes how the world was once pure but with the way humans treat the world it makes it dirty and even catch on fire.  (Eilish, 2019) In her interview with Vulture she mentions how climate change is the cause of wildfires and that “California as a state is that we don’t really have extreme weather in general. There are hurricanes and floods and shit, and we sometimes have earthquakes, but a lot of the time, the natural disasters are not in our backyard. In the last two years, there have been these horrendous wildfires”(Jenkins, 2019). 

Memory

I know I said I was only going to cover two of the concepts of the Canon, but I really wanted to give an honorable mention to Memory. For Memory I wanted to touch on a perfomace that Billie did at the AMA’s, she performed ATGGGTH. During this performance she had fire elements going to mimic and resemble her music video for this song, but the memorable thing she did that had news outlets talking and people on social media talking was the shirt she wore while giving this performance.

The shirt reads “NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET” obviously refering to her song and the meaning of it being Climate Change.

Bibliography

Eilish, B. (2019, September 27). Billie Eilish shares set secrets and metaphor meanings from ‘All The Good Girls Go To Hell’. (Entercom, Interviewer)

Hill, F. (2017). Conventional Wisdom Traditional Form The President’s Message of November 3, 1969.Strata Publishing, Inc.

Jenkins, C. (2019, April 9). Inside the Making of Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?Retrieved from Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/the-making-of-billie-eilish-when-we-all-fall-asleep.html