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For this week’s post I will be covering Billie Eilish’s song “Bad Guy” which is her 5th studio single from her debut album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?. I will be using a Neo-Classical approach; specifically, the Canon to analyze and explain “Bad Guy”. 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).

 There are 5 parts to the Canon approach which are Invention, Arrangement, Style, Delivery, and Memory. All of these elements ask the listener if the song is persuasive. 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

Invention

In an interview Billie Eilish did with Rolling Stone in December 2019 she says that the song is about a boy that likes to think that he is a tuff and bad guy. He exact words being “So you’re a tough guy and you gotta tell everyone you’re tough… okay so if you’re gonna do that, that I’m gonna be all types of fake too. So then great, I’m gonna be the bad type, make your momma sad type, make your girlfriend mad type, might seduce your dad type. Which I’m not that, but if you could be fake with everyone and try to prove that you are something that you’re not I could do it too.” (Stone, 2019). She wanted to make this song to prove to a boy that wants to act fake tough that she can do the same exact thing to him as well and make him see that she’s not some innocent girl that will let him be a bad guy to her. 

Arrangement

“Bad Guy” starts off very different from any of Billie Eilish’s songs. You can hear Eilish slurping spit from taking out her Invisalign retainer from her mouth followed by the line “I have taken out my Invisalign and this is the album” then followed by both her and her brother Finneas laugh. In the interview done with Rolling Stone Finneas states that this wasn’t plan but they were recording in the beginning of the session of “Bad Guy” and Billie Eilish hadn’t taken out her Invisalign yet and then once she did that is when she said the beginning line and they both liked how it sounded and decided to keep it apart of the song. The thing is though that only in the music video for this song is that line apart of the song “Bad Guy” in the album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? This line has its own dedicated song named “!!!!!!!” in the same interview with Rolling Stones Billie Eilish says she made this choice because she thought that if on the album she had it apart of “Bad Guy” and that would be the first thing people heard they would just automatically skip the song. 

Style

The style behind “Bad Guy” is very catchy. From the beat to the lyrics it is an overall good song, definitely one that will get stuck in your head and you’ll find yourself signing randomly. She in the Rolling Stone interview that this song took them over a year to complete because she could not get the harmony right on the vocals. Specially on the beginning of the lyrics when she says “White shirt now red, my bloody nose
Sleepin’, you’re on your tippy toes
Creepin’ around like no one knows
Think you’re so criminal” this method Finneas calls “exact doubles”. This was hard for Billie Eilish because her voice had to be exact for each of these words in these lyrics and the breaths have to be exactly the same. They said it could have been done faster if they used auto-tune but her and Finneas are so against it because they want to be able to sing the song live perfectly. Another cool style aspect of the song is the high hats in the song that she came up with. She did this in Australia while she was on tour. She was on the streets with her mom walking and when she got to the crosswalk and pressed it, it made a certain noise that she loved, she then pulled out her phone and recorded it and showed Finneas and that is how they got the high hats in the chorus of “Bad Guy”.

Delivery

As for Delivery I will be talking about the way the song was delivered as a music video. The music video for “Bad Guy” is directed by Dave Meyers. The video starts off with a yellow background with the famous opening track I talked about “!!!!!!!”. She then kicks through the yellow background and takes her Invisalign out of her mouth and hands it to very strong looking man. She then proceeds to start dancing wildly, the next scene cuts to her getting a noise bleed as mentioned in her lyrics. The rest of the video is her dancing and jumping around, pouring cereal into a man’s mouth, riding on top of a miniature car with a group of men on tricycles. All of this is done in the first 2 minutes and 45 seconds.

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She is just having a great time in the beginning and the colors in this part of the music video are very bright primary colors. Once the video hits the 2 minute and 45 second mark the music changes from a super upbeat happy song to a completely different song. This song in the last part of the music video then goes to a dark room, the colors are red and black. Billie Eilish in the music video is sitting on top of a guy that is doing push-ups. Her whole demeanor is changed including the way she sings this part of the song. She is smirking, wearing a spiked choker, and is doing a slight growl at the camera. 

Memory

This song I would say is one of Billie Eilish’s most memorable song in her career. This song spent 49 weeks on Billboards Hot 100 making it her most famous song. This song was also remixed by Billie Eilish’s number one crush and favorite artist Justin Bieber just a few months after she released it. I saw Billie Eilish 4 times last year in 2019 and each time she opened up a show whether it was at Coachella or on her actual tour she always opened up with “Bad Guy”. The energy the crowd gives her when this song starts playing and as soon as she hits the stage jumping up and down is like nothing else, I have ever experienced. This to me is what makes the song so memorable to me. But the song as a whole and the way the Canon covers it shows that this is a persuasive song to listeners everywhere. The lyrics, sound, rhythm, and music video make it so fun and enjoyable to listen to

Works Cited

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

Stone, R. (2019, December 16). Billie Eilish and Finneas Break Down Her Hit Song ‘Bad Guy’ . Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpx2-EMfdbg