Billie Eilish’s music is so powerful and just pulls at all of your emotional chords in your body. In this blog post I will be analyzing Billie Eilish’s song Hostage, which is from her EP album titles Don’t Smile at Me. This song was written by her and her brother Finneas in 2017. I will be analyzing this song using a Neo-Classical theory; Logos, Pathos, and Ethos. Logos means the word, so logos is the appeal to reason. Pathos is the appeal to emotion which is just another way of saying what emotions you are feeling when listening to a certain song. Ethos is the appeal to character, so basically to see if something overall has a good sense, good will/trustworthiness, and good morals. “To persuade is not the function of rhetoric but to investigate the persuasive factors inherent in the particular case…;for example, it is not the function of medicine to bring health, rather to bring the patient as near to health as possible in his case.”(Burgchardt, 2017). But for this song I will only be applying logos to the lyrics of this song.
When looking at the logos portion of this theory and how the Hostage as a song appeals to reason I would say that when you listen to this song and pay attention to the lyrics and what it is saying people would be able to relate to it if they have been in a similar situation while in a relationship with a significant other. I say this because this song is called Hostage because it is about her relationship with a lover that she literally wants to keep as a hostage. In the chorus the lyrics are a perfect representation of her wanting to keep her lover as a hostage.
” And let me crawl inside your veins
I’ll build a wall, give you a ball and chain
It’s not like me to be so mean, you’re all I wanted
Just let me hold you
Hold you
Like a hostage” (Genius, 2017)
Throughout this entire songs she does use metaphors like the one in this chorus saying “I’ll build a wall, give you a ball and chain” this meaning that she wants to keep her lover as close as possible and she could do this by putting a ball and chain on him so he would be able to leave her side ever. I think that people are able to reason this and relate to it because sometimes you can be put into very toxic relationships that you know aren’t good for you but you want to keep that person around because you can be very comfortable and because you also just love them so much, even though it isn’t a good relationship.
Billie Eilish’s music is extremely heartfelt and is so personal that it really makes you so emotional. I was having a conversation with my mom about this song and just about Billie Eilish in general and she was saying how whenever she hears a song by Billie for the first time she starts to get choked up and a little emotional. I asked her why and she said its because when she sings she really means what she is saying and does it with so much passion. When my mom said this I was just like “WOW”. The fact that an 18 year-old girl can make my mom an older woman relate to her music is just so powerful. The way Billie Eilish can make people of all ages reason with her music and really appeal to them is amazing.
Bibliography
Burgchardt, C. R., & Jones, H. A. (2017). Readings in rhetorical criticism. State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc.
Genius. (2017). Retrieved from https://genius.com/Billie-eilish-hostage-lyrics
Alexa Mendez’s Blog 
I read this!
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Good post 🙂 I’m going to leave a little list of typos/grammatical errors that need to be revised.
-I think the vert first sentence should be rephrased. Something like “Billie Eilish’s music is extremely powerful, and really pulls at the emotional cords in your body.”
-There’s a typo in the second sentence – change “titles” to “titled”
-Take the word “but” out of the last sentence in the first paragraph
-Rephrase the first sentence in the second paragraph (it’s a little too wordy)
-Take the word “this” out of the first sentence in the third paragraph, and change the word “would” to “wouldn’t” in that same sentence
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Once again, your post was amazing! I noticed you said you were going to discuss logos and you had also discussed a little bit of metaphors. Towards the end you discussed a little emotion and it made me want to hear more about the ethos and the pathos Billie brings to the table. Of course her music definitely speaks for itself, but I truly
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You’ve set up the method here, and you chose a good portion of the song to analyze. I think the various metaphors could be interesting for you to revisit in a future post, by the way, if you want to try tropological criticism 🙂
I think you actually end up talking primarily about identification (how the song makes people feel like it’s very real — which is really about narrative fidelity primarily) and about her ethos (how she seems genuine — which is what your mom is responding to here). So, I think instead of setting pathos and ethos aside, grab onto them when you revise this for the final post 🙂
Keep up the good work!
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