Billie Eilish, who was stuck in the mental quagmire of a songwriting slump, received a lucky assignment from Hollywood last year, but instead of submitting something pink enough, she finally established direct communication with God. I decided to do it.
That might be the easiest way to understand “What Was I Made For?,” an existential piano ballad that won Best Original Song at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night. Eilish's job was to write the song for Greta Gerwig's “Barbie.” And with the help of her brother and her collaborator Phineas, she sings from the perspective of a plastic doll with her disarming perceptive powers and supreme grace, creating the lullaby's It sounds like this, but I created something that feels like it. It's more like a prayer. Eilish, who had already given a breathtaking performance of the song earlier in the ceremony, could be heard gasping for breath while accepting her award. She is “so grateful for this song and this movie and the feelings it gave me.”
Even in the context of an IP comedy that is galacticly praised for being better than it needs to be, “What Was I Made For?” is doubly better than it needs to be. It is a plea to the universe that we all cry out in our loneliest moments. What is life and why am I in it? — Eilish asks the song's titular question in an ASMR whisper that treads the chasm between extinction and hope. “I think she forgot how to be happy,” she sings, gently lifting herself from the abyss. “Something that I am not, but something that I can be, something that I am waiting for.”
This is clearly the work of an overachiever at his finest, but it is now unfortunately at risk of being overrated. This is Eilish's second Oscar win in this category, with her jazzy James Bond theme song “No Time to Die” winning the trophy in 2022. It swept the top four categories in 2020 and also won for “What Was I Made for?” Just last month, it won the Grammy Award for Best Song of the Year. The 22-year-old said in an interview that being asked to write about Barbie freed her from the paralyzing pressure of writing lyrics about herself. It was an accidental mental somersault that enabled me to do just that. So who is she now? Certainly more than a homeworker or a trophy collector. We will have to wait for the answer.
