Beabadoobee

Bea and a bee

Oo-Ee-Oo-Ah-Ah Ting-Tang Walla-Walla Bing Bang Yabba-Dabba-Doo Bing-Bong Bingly-Bungly-Boo (born 3 June 2000), stagename Beabadoobee, is a Filipino-British musician, lo-fi enthusiast, romantic recluse and alleged "singer-songwriter". Despite what the so-called experts at Wikipedia would have you believe, Beebadoobee has yet to exhibit any measurable form of singing throughout the entirety of her supposed "career". Agencies deem this blemish most evident in her physical inability to sing opera and shoot lasers from her eyes simultaneously, a standard otherwise widely accepted in the modern assessment of vocal prowess.

An internationally recognised representative of the "Artists Who Can't Sing" category—a classification system used to distinguish between performers who possess vocal ability and those whose performances consist entirely of gently exhaling over soft guitar loops—Beebadoobee's "career" has been established on attempts not to wake one's parents whilst recording a breakup song at three in the morning.

Early life

Oo-Ee-Oo-Ah-Ah Ting-Tang Walla-Walla Bing Bang Yabba-Dabba-Doo Bing-Bong Bingly-Bungly-Boo was born in Iloilo City in the Philippines on 3 June 2000 to Bum Biddy-Biddy-Biddy Bum-Bum, a former kazoo-based performance artist, and Makka-Pakka Akka-Wakka Mikka-Makka Moo, an abstract interpretive dancer best known for inventing the genre of postmodern nap-time. Bing-Bong Bingly-Bungly Boo's birth certificate cites her full name as "Responsible For Crashing The Hospital Printer", however, after multiple government agencies attempted to register her birth before realising they "couldn't remember how to say her name".

At age three, Bing-Bong Bingly-Bungly-Boo's family relocated to London, where she began composing her first number using no more than a broken ukulele and a scented rubber. It is alleged that her first word, uttered around this time, was "vibe". Home-schooled by a sentient lava lamp named Mr. Drizzleswish, Bing-Bong Bingly-Bungly-Boo spent much of her adolescence whispering melancholic poems into mason jars, soon to be released as her debut EP.

Musical career

Rise to "fame"

Bing-Bong's "career" truly took shape in 2017, when she began uploading a series of lo-fi tracks to Instagram and YouTube. It was here that her sound, described by critics as an "exhalation into a pillow", began to gain attention. Her early work consisted of recordings taped from the confines of her own bedroom during midnight hours, in pursuit of the most ambient sounds from within the realms of auditory perception—dogs barking at heavy gusts of wind, the hum of her refridgerator, her very own breath—to list but a few examples. These resonations were released online under the pseudonym Beabadoobee—a combination of the initials of "Bing-Bong", i.e. "B.B.", and "doobie" (after all, nothing captures the relaxed air of indie music like a nickname echoes the name of a stoner's pet rock)—perhaps given how even "Responsible For Crashing The Hospital Printer" was a mouthful far too hefty for her social media accounts to handle without triggering a meltdown.

Her breakthrough supposedly came with Coffee, a track that resonated with listeners who were undecided as to whether it was about a coffee addiction or simply a desperate plea for caffeine-induced clarity. Having gathered the attention of record label Dirty Hit Records, she signed with them in 2018, securing a deal that reportedly marked the beginning of her venture into the mainstream music world. The release of her debut EP Headlice in March 2018 was said to follow soon after, although some sceptics argue the EP was more of an ambient noise compilation, albeit sprinkled with a touch of the ever-present "I-was-trying-to-compose-a-song-but-forgot-to-orchestrated-a-concerto-of-sighs-and-gasps". Still, the EP found somewhat of an audience, cementing her status in the "dirty hit" category of indie music—raw, unpolished, yet strangely addictive.

Whispergate scandal

Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, according to the Vocal and Sonic Authenticity Bureau

In early 2025, Beabadoobee became the subject of the highly-publicised Whispergate scandal after an anonymous source leaked information claiming that the singer's vocal abilities were, in fact, a carefully orchestrated act of deception concocted by her publicist, Seymour Butz.

Following these leaks, the Vocal and Sonic Authenticity Bureau (VSAB), a global organisation that evaluates and categorises musical artists based on their vocal abilities and sonic authenticity selected Beabadoobee as the concrete, official representative of the "Artists Who Can't Sing" category, owing Rebecca Black an apology in the process. The Bureau, notorious for its exacting standards in assessing vocal competence, had previously placed Black in the category after her cover of the Bob Dylan hit "Friday" faced widespread ridicule for its perceived vocal inadequacies. Consequently, the decision to crown Beabadoobee the new figurehead of this category shook the music industry, further intensifying debates about what constitutes "authentic" singing and whether emotional resonance can compensate for a lack of pitch.

In response to her coronation as #1 Vocal Virtuoso of Silence, Beabadoobee notoriously crashed out on TikTok, calling the Bureau's board of directors "men who get no girls" and "incels" in her story updates, on the assumption that their option to bestow this title upon her was rooted in bias against her sexual identity. The truth, however, was far simpler—she couldn't sing opera, shoot laser beams from her eyes, and survive the Great Fire of London all at once, unlike NBA YoungBoy, the Bureau's highly revered and coveted official representative of the "Artists Who Can Sing" category.

Musical style

Often categorised as "lo-fi indie", though the term "indie" seems to be used here as loosely as possible, Beabadoobee's musical style revolves primarily around the gentle strumming of a guitar, combined with audio recorded from her GoPro camera during an expedition to a Cornish holiday resort where her curiosity as to how her vocal cords would mingle with the chlorine waters of her J'accuzzi peaked.

Despite having such names as Pavement, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and The Cure specified in her meticulously listed "Index of Inspiration", critics have widely agreed that Beabadoobee's genre of music lacks any more apt description than a form of experimental audio exploration, where the goal appears to be mass-producing sound without necessarily aiming for clarity or emotional connection. Although her compositions aim to evoke feelings of relaxation and introspection, statistics from December 2023 reveal that 54% of Spotify users who listened to "The Way Things Go" abandoned it within the span of 30 seconds maximum in favour of searching "What is the circumference of a moose?" on Google.

Discography

Studio albums

• Plastic Tulips (2020)
• Tinky-Winky-Dipsy-Laa-Laa-Po-Land (2022)
• My Bed Doesn't Move, But I Do (2024)

Extended plays

• Headlice (2018)
• Broke But Still Here (2018)
• Tapeworm (2019)
• Space Under the Sheets (2019)
• Our Extended Car Warranty (2021)

See also

• Onomatopoeia
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