On May 11th the Billie Eilish’s song (what was I made for) won the Oscar as “Best Original Song”, this is the second Oscar that Billie  has won (she also won an Oscar in 2022 as best original song with “No Time To Die” from the homonym film of James Bond).

The meaning of What was I made for? is enclosed in the title. It can represent Barbie’s spiritual journey to discover herself in the real world while she is living it herself, or it can be a hymn to Billie’s personal struggles to clarify what her purpose in life is, linked to his passion for writing and music creation. She initially stated that she had not thought about herself during the song-writing process, but later came to the realization that she had unknowingly included her story.

To Allure Billie explains:

It was as if this song was a tiny creature inside of me for years, scratching the inside of me. As soon as we got that prompt, the creature was like, ‘Okay, I’m out’. We wrote it in a period of time where we couldn’t have been less inspired and less creative. That day we were making stuff, and were like, ‘We’ve lost it. Why are we even doing this?’ And then those first chords happened and I used to float, now I just fall down came out and the song wrote itself.

The “floating” lyric is referred to the film Barbie, where Barbie can’t float anymore so she “fall down”, it also holds a deep meaning for Billie, because it reflecting how she feels about navigating fame from a young age.

While on one level, this lyric could refer to Ken’s inability to understand Barbie in the movie, it’s also about the sadness and loneliness that can arise when people, even loved ones, don’t truly see you and understand your feelings.

“I … remember being like, ‘How is anyone going to know what this means? It doesn’t explain itself. No one’s going to understand it,’ Billie said. “And that was the first lyric that people understood. And I felt so heard, and related to.”

According to some of the comments on the official music video on YouTube, “What Was I Made For?” had a profound impact on fans of all ages and walks of life:

This song asks the question that I have (struggled) with for all of my 68 years,” another person commented. “I thought I had the answer several times, only to realize that it slipped through my fingers yet again. Ms. Eilish, your vocals here are a perfect fit for the emotion of the words and music you’ve written.

In the music video Billie is taking from a dark box some clothes (we can say that they are her old clothes that she has worn in the past), then all is interrupted by the rain, the meaning is: “The world is falling apart while I try to keep all the old versions of myself safe”.

Antonio Cinquegrana

II A Linguistico