Billie Eilish has been promoting her new 3D concert film and starting lots of discourse. First there was vegan discourse (a classic), and now we're back to the evergreen subject of phones at concerts, which is also topical considering Phoebe Bridgers' current no-phones shows.
Scenes from Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour Live In 3D show audiences made up of thousands of fans, and it's impossible to ignore the amount of phones in the air, replicating the moment into infinity. You can't help but wonder if it's necessary for so many videos of the exact same thing from different angles to exist. Eilish, however, has a different take.
"My generation and the generations below, we love to film stuff. All I do is film stuff and take pictures of everything all the time," she said in a recent interview with NME about the concert film. "I guess some people do it for clout or whatever, but who cares?"
"You want to share what you experience," she continued. "For me, when I would go to concerts or festivals or whatever I would go to, I would film every single minute of it, and you know what I would do? I would watch every single video that I took over and over and over and over until I had the audio of the crowd memorized."
She added, "An important part of the culture is that we are all on our goddamn phones and it keeps us connected. It's like yes, there are huge cons and social media is dark, but the idea that we get to share through the internet and I wouldn't have a career without the internet. I wouldn't have fans. I wouldn't have the connection that I do without the internet."
The concert film director James Cameron (who outlined his problems with devices in 2014) similarly addressed the issue in an interview with etalk, saying, "At first it put me a little off. It's like, 'Just be there. Just put your phone down and be there.' But what I realized is there's such a strong bond between her fans with each other. They all felt that they were there to bring it back to their friends who couldn't afford or couldn't travel."
Watch both interviews below.
