How Billie Eilish performed upside down on SNL

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/03/how-billie-eilish-performed-up.html

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I’m not impressed with Eilish musically.

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I want to see that performance done weightless.

SNL cast, crew and a few brave audience members… on the Vomit Comet.

That would be the stuff of dreams… or recurring nightmares…

… and I’ll give kudos to Ms. Eilish for hard work … she had a head start on a lot of fronts, but that’s life. She’s running with it… it will be interesting to see where it goes…

Like this?

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That :+1: :grin:

This might be an idea too, but those things make a lot of noise, might be hard to get the mics to pick up the performer’s voice properly…

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OK, thanks for letting us know :+1:

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This morning I listened to an interview with the Raconteurs and heard something I didn’t expect – Jack White praising Billie Eilish and her use of technology in music.

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Jim Jarmusch has talked about how much he likes Billie Eilish in seemingly every interview he did for The Dead Don’t Die

So Billie Eilish will probably be in his next movie

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Edit - let’s get that with the music!

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i really like her, but it’s also cute to see Gen Z get excited discovering stuff that was done almost 70 years ago.

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I never knew (until this piece) about that Fred Astaire scene. I was certainly familiar with the later use of the technique in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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I’m sure most folks already knew how it was done.

That said, it sounds like she was lip-syncing or singing over another track of her vocals, her voice seems doubled.

I heard this song for the first time last week and had to stop and listen for a second, good or bad the entire sonic palette of the song is hypnotic.

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They would have had a bit of a cleaning job on the plane, but I guess they’re used to that.

Oh! That is nice and well done by Fred Astaire! I actually wanted to comment that I had seen this done before but that the transition from floor to wall are usually more awkward then what Billie Eilish does here. But that’s not true, Fred totally beat here there too, way back then :smiley:

The song title “Dancing on the ceiling” reminded me of another artist that has done this trick:

And then because I like this effect and want to share more video’s that employ it, this video by a Dutch band, the turn-y bit starts at 1 minute 30:

TIL that SNL region blocks YouTube but not Instagram.

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And it’s a different technique from that used when…

Penn & Teller did it first in 1986.

…they were actually upside-down.

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I only just watched the “making-of” video. They reference the exact Fred Astaire video and she already had two sprained ankles before they even started. So I take back anything that could be considered as criticism or critique on Billie from my previous post. :slight_smile:

One new (small) point of critique though, the camera shakes a bit when the room rotates. That could and should have been prevented by the set builders of SNL.

I think it’s cool that this was precisely her influence, too!

Sure, but she did it live with two sprained ankles!

Also, I think this shows that not all millennials/gen Zers are ignorant of the past, which is great to know!

Again, this was done live, so given that, it’s still damn impressive.

This is pretty common on SNL, because the sound is notoriously horrible.

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Gen Z, feminism, “it’s been done before repeatedly” and all that other stuff aside, this was 100 times better executed than Halsey’s “multi-talented” performance last season.

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