What Was I Made For?: lyrics and meaning of the lyrics of Billie Eilish’s song in ‘Barbie’

Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?,” featured in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, was one of the iconic songs of 2023. It received five nominations at the 2024 Grammy Awards, winning both Song of the Year and Best Song Written for Visual Media, and was commercially successful around the world, peaking at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. Yet the track didn’t initially seem destined for greatness.

In an interview with Allure last September, Eilish revealed she and brother Finneas O’Connell, who co-wrote the song, “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.”

What Was I Made For?: the lyrics

Barbie’s existential crisis

That very first line is, in many ways, a summary of the plot of the film, which follow Barbie and Ken (actually, various Barbies and Kens) as they make their way from the safe haven of Barbie Land, a colourful and perfect space, into the real world.

At a choreographed dance party, Stereotypical Barbie stops mid-dance and, completely out of the blue, asks surrounding Barbies, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”. And so her existential crisis begins, which - spoiler alert - leads to her having bad breath and cellulite, losing her signature lifted feet, being groped and getting arrested, among other “real world” experiences.

“What Was I Made For?”, Barbie’s signature song, contains a number of lines in which the main character questions everything going on around her and all she has know in her “life” up until that point.

Does anything scream existential crisis more than the lyrics above?

Eilish: “I’m writing for myself and I don’t even know it”

Eilish initially wrote the ballad according to the way she thought Barbie would feel but later realised the words resonated with her more than she had realised at the time.

Speaking to Zane Lowe of Apple Music, the 22-year-old revealed, “I’m writing for myself and I don’t even know it. This is exactly how I feel and I didn’t even mean to be saying it. I absolutely was writing about myself and I was thinking about myself from a third person and I was thinking about myself objectively, which also made me feel really connected to her and me…Every single lyric is exactly how I feel. It’s about my life.”

Barbie has been nominated in eight categories at the 2024 Oscars, including Best Picture, while both “What Was I Made For?” and “I’m Just Ken,” which also features in the movie, are up for Best Original Song.