Billie Eilish
What Was I Made For? (From The Motion Picture "Barbie")

In 2018 and in 2019, the music critic Pop Topoi included two Billie Eilish songs in his esteemed year-end lists, respectively You Should See Me in a Crown and Bury a Friend. Despite my respect for his taste and expertise, at the time I found those choices incomprehensible because I considered the songs themselves incomprehensible, more like experiments by a post-emo child playing with sound effects than real songs (if there ever is a definition of “real song,” that is). However, on February 13, 2020, No Time to Die was released, which Pop Topoi commented on Twitter with a single word: “perfect.” And this time I agreed with him: as a fan of 007 and the theme songs of 007, the song was immediately understandable to me, immediately loved, and thus immediately recognized as the key to finally understanding and appreciating the literary and musical language of the songwriter (or rather the songwriters, since "Billie Eilish" is the collective name with which siblings Billie and Finneas O’Connell sign themselves, representing the typical female & male musical duo where generally she writes and sings and he composes and arranges, like Capsule, Carpenters, Coma_Cose, Goldfrapp, Pizzicato Five, etc.). Billie Eilish and I met on common ground and understood each other. Then, a few months later My Future was released, with an animated video clip à la Studio Ghibli, the understanding became complete and the devotion too: the communicated message is wonderful, the line “I know supposedly I’m lonely now, / know I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone / but aren’t I someone?” is brilliant, the music is delightful, both content and form are adorable. The album Happier than Ever from 2021 confirmed everything, the EP Guitar Songs from 2022 is a gem: okay, this is love.

This year 2023, Billie Eilish has produced only one song: What Was I Made For?, theme of the movie Barbie directed by Greta Gerwig. As far as I'm concerned, it's a masterpiece.

According to Billie's statements, the song belongs to two narrow circles, the one of tracks written in a few minutes and the one, even narrower, of melodies found immediately just by trying an instrument, like Caruso by Dalla or Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes. According to Finneas' statements, the simplicity of that instinctual first pianistic gesture has been maintained and enhanced through a soundscape as complex and refined as it is underground and discreet: in the musician's words, What Was I Made For? is like a painting with 190 shades, but where the viewer only sees a sunset without noticing the technical details; it's a common practice of the O’Connell siblings, who usually write and arrange on the spot and reserve post-production for the sole role of perfecting the details, maintaining the initial freshness in the final product.

And the final product, in this case, is extraordinary. In less than four minutes, Billie and Finneas bring together such a quantity of ideas, suggestions, dormant memories, chromatic sensations, existential questions that it makes one's pulse tremble and heart leap with every listen, with every new discovery of a whisper or sound not heard in previous listens.

In practice, the track is extremely sober, almost bare, little more than a piano and voice duet, but brilliantly and apparently contradictorily composed to obtain even greater emotional tension. While the piano plays in 4/4 time in adagio in C major key, with the simplicity of a children's song, the voice utters words that sound like the most intimate and painful confessions of an adult:

I used to float, now I sink; I used to know, now I’m not sure what I’m for. What am I for?
Going for a ride. I used to be a myth, I felt so alive, and instead I’m not real, just something for sale. What am I for?
...because I don’t know how to feel, but I want to try. I don’t know how to feel, but one day I might.
When did I stop having fun? I’m sad again, but don’t tell my boyfriend, that’s not what he’s for. What am I for?
...because I don’t know how to feel, but I want to try. I don’t know how to feel, but one day I might.
Seems I forgot how to be happy, something I’m not, but might be. Something I wait for... something I’m for... something I’m for...

Although these words were written at Gerwig's request to describe the feelings and viewpoint of the doll protagonist of the film, it requires no effort of imagination to apply them to human beings as well. And it required no effort of imagination from Billie Eilish's fans, who immediately recognized What Was I Made For? as a generational anthem: already in the first concerts right after the release of the track, the entire audience was singing it from memory in tears. The rhetorical question “what am I for?” (more precisely “for what was I made?”) was already resonating in the hearts of many people without them knowing it, liquid and fluid and shapeless and therefore incommunicable, but the moment they heard it expressed in a synthetic and understandable way, solidified into five writable and pronounceable words, they realized it was exactly what they felt and wanted to communicate for so long. It’s not “I’m sad,” it’s not “I’m missing something,” it’s not “I want to die”: it’s exactly, precisely “what am I for?” Having defined the question, it is possible to seek an answer.

The music accompanies this aquatic movement by concretizing it in a barcarolle rhythm, welcoming on a persistent F chord the wonderful B-C-E-G phrase on which the first words of each verse are sung, starting from that initial “I used to float” (float like Barbie down the Dreamhouse, float like a plastic piece on water, float like a carefree person over problems) that, conjugating the verb in the past, acquires a strongly dramatic value, like something now lost (love, health, happiness...), which truly has a manifesto value: definite enough to be understandable, vague enough to be applicable to many situations. Infinite tiny sounds of percussion, distortions, objects, choirs, strings, and much more support piano and voice, composing a vaguely nostalgic, vaguely ambient, vaguely orchestral, clearly emotional arrangement. The madrigalesque relationship between music and text, where the high melody collapses into the low register like the mood of the singing I, makes the form totally coherent with the content.

A few words also about the music video, directed by Billie Eilish and also—like the song—only apparently very simple. On a table in a neutral field, Billie arrives with her doll suitcase setting up their outfits, but wind and rain prevent her from playing. But here is Billie dressed as Barbie and the outfits are mignon versions of the real ones worn by Billie in the past years, so it’s not the person playing with the doll, but the opposite, in other words: we are ourselves the architects of our life, our body is the doll we move and to which we make live a thousand adventures choosing for it; unfortunately, there is a difference between what we would like to make it do and what we can really make it do because of the many adverse events that happen to us and undeniably exist and make us lose hope. It’s up to us to strive to overcome them or even just to withstand them and hope to (re)find happiness sooner or later.

It is not said that What Was I Made For? works on every listener with the same communicative strength, but those who can at least partly identify with the words of Billie’s lyrics or the mood of Finneas’s music will find it hard to escape that sweetly depressing melancholic state, and anyway the text ends with a glimmer of hope and the music with a tone ascent: there is always and still a possibility for happiness, but you have to want it, and that is the difficult part.

Certainly a pop song, but not an easy song, not a song for TikTok, not a song for algorithms: a song that speaks from the heart, speaks to the heart.