The rap artists Billie Eilish would “be nothing without”
Having started making music at just six years old, Billie Eilish’s tastes are eclectic, effortlessly tapping into influences as wide-ranging as The Beatles to Justin Bieber. Her gritty, emotionally terse ballads often speak to her more overtly emotional muses, the likes of Lana Del Rey and Amy Winehouse. But as her ardent fans will appreciate, Eilish’s tastes extend to rap and hip-hop. Although this may sound unexpected, given her tendency towards almost whispered vocals, the young singer has always been quick to share who are the key artists from each genre that inspire her.
“I just felt like I had been completely missing a world,” she once said on discovering rap. “I really was like: ‘Oh, shit. This is what I’ve been missing. This is what I like’.”
Over the years, in numerous interviews, Eilish has revealed that Childish Gambino and Tyler, The Creator remain two of her most admired artists. As for Tyler, The Creator, she owes her introduction to him to a horse riding camp instructor.
“We were in the middle of a lesson, just goofing off, [and] she was like ‘have you heard of Tyler?’ I was like, ‘No,’ and she was like ‘Wait what do you mean? Your profile picture is literally him,’” Eilish recalled during an interview with Rolling Stone. “It was true, I had Tyler, The Creator as my profile picture before I even knew who he was, because I just thought it was a cool picture. She played me ‘Tamale’ which was huge at the time. Still such a fucking good song. Then we listened to ‘Tamale’ with a bunch of five-year-olds riding horses around us.”
Equally, Eilish was introduced to Childish Gambino on a complete fluke after her longtime collaborator and brother, Finneas, shuffled his iTunes playlist to land on one of his biggest hits.
“I just put everything on shuffle, and I found this song called ‘Heartbeat,’” she said. “Immediately, I just stopped what I was doing. I looked at my phone, and it said it was this artist named Childish Gambino. I remember just sitting there looking at my phone, playing the song – and I just was in awe, I felt like I was introduced to a new world. It was a crazy, crazy moment.”
Praising those two artists has been a consistent theme throughout her career. Even as far back as 2018, Eilish was taking to Instagram to reflect on her performance at Tyler’s Camp Flog Gnaw festival and what it meant to her. She seemed almost starstruck when he returned the praise, writing: “I would never in a billion years have thought these words would come out of this man’s mouth,” going on to say: “Wow. I would be nothing without you Tyler, everyone knows it.”
It was never as if she was playing favourites either, as just weeks after her explosive set at Camp Flog Gnaw, she covered Child Gambino’s song ‘III. Telegraph Ave. (‘Oakland’ by Lloyd)’, showering him with as much praise by telling Noisey: “Childish Gambino created me. That’s a God – you can’t even put him in a list with other people.”
