The darkness and chaos of Billie Eilish’s music, and that it is so very popular with the youngest demographic, presages major political changes as this cohort matures.

Especially now, after the pandemic and the economic destruction it will cause.

Music like Billie Eilish’s back when I was her age was called “industrial” and it wasn’t all that popular in comparison to hiphop and lighter fare. It couldn’t have been; those were optimistic times and even much of the “dark” music wasn’t very, in retrospect. A lot of it sounds comical today. Anyway, the only young people who liked industrial music then were fringe rejects — like me and my friends. Now something much darker, that scrapes the underbelly of human existence, is the mainstream and Billie Eilish its most sinister specimen. This is why.

I’m not a big fan of historical determinist literature like “The Fourth Turning” that are often touted by futurists. But a valid point that books like that make is that generations are shaped by the historical circumstances they have experienced. We’ve had a generation that has been shaped by terrorism, endless foreign wars in the Middle East, blatant government corruption, decreasing living standards, a financial panic that devastated the global economy, staggering levels of inequality, unaffordable housing and rampant homelessness, and now a global economic depression caused by a pandemic worsened by forty years of anti-government neoliberalism. They are angry and desperate. They’ve seen the world disintegrate in front of their eyes. They’ve endured extreme suffering. Their hopes and dreams have been dashed forever. There’s no way they are going to vote for the status quo when they gain the reins of power (assuming voting is allowed, however, see below).

The pandemic will only heighten this, accelerate it, and the generation who obsesses over Billie Eilish music will destroy the status quo or be destroyed by it in their quest for survival. Easy to predict.