Billie Eilish Doesn’t Want To Be Involved In This Fucking Shit, But She’s Launching A Voting Initiative Anyway

Jim Dyson/Redferns

Billie Eilish Doesn’t Want To Be Involved In This Fucking Shit, But She’s Launching A Voting Initiative Anyway

Jim Dyson/Redferns

This year’s forthcoming election was already fucknuts insane, and now it’s been driven even further into the realm of insanity and uncertainty with the news about Trump testing positive for COVID-19. But for now, we should all proceed under the assumption that this election is still happening and that people need to vote in it. To that end, Billie Eilish has just announced an initiative to get her generational cohort to vote with her. She doesn’t sound happy about having to do it.

In a video posted last night — right around the time, actually, that Trump tweeted about his diagnosis — Eilish announced her big plan to get young people voting. The video, seemingly filmed on an iPhone in the dark plays out as one big eyeroll. A supremely over-it Eilish says, again and again, that she wishes she didn’t have to care about this stuff, but that she does anyway:

I wish, uh, that I didn’t have to be making this video. Because I really wish I could just not give a fuck and it would be fine, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this stuff. Buuuut [sighing] as much as I don’t want to be involved in this fucking shit — uh, as in politics and as in, um, this election [sarcastic laugh] — I think it is incredibly important that we all involve ourselves. Even if we’d rather stab ourselves in the face than talk about it, we need to talk about it.

Eilish’s plan is this: Anyone who texts the word “Billie” to 50409 will learn if they’re registered to vote and, if they’re not, how to get registered. She explains that she’s doing this especially for people like her — people who have only just hit voting age and who might not otherwise want to participate in this whole thing. And while Eilish doesn’t endorse a specific candidate, she does mention racial injustices and climate change, so do the math. “This is a pledge,” she says — meaning, if you text that number, you’re promising that you will vote. Here’s the video, a minor masterpiece of fuck-this-shit aesthetics:

Eilish just dropped the music video for the James Bond theme “No Time To Die” yesterday.

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