On Eilish’s award-winning “What Was I Made For?” and what a career shaped by the internet can do to a person.
I have a new piece in WORLD Magazine on Billie Eilish, her Grammy- and Oscar-winning song “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie movie, and how Eilish serves as a canary in the online coal mines in which we’ve dug ourselves. I use the phrase “zeitgeist bingo card.” I reference Flannery O’Connor. I make fun of Taylor Swift. Yes—deal with it, Swifties! I am so grateful to Tim at World for bringing this to life. You can read it online here, and the printed version should be arriving this week or next. (If you want to support a news publication doing unique work in the American media landscape, I highly encourage you to subscribe.) Here’s an excerpt:
Eilish’s young career is remarkable. She’s only 22 and has nine Grammys. And there’s depth and edge to her dreamy, synth-heavy pop that’s missing from Swift’s repertoire. For instance, take the following lines from Eilish’s single “TV,” off her 2022 EP Guitar Songs:
“I put on Survivor just to watch somebody suffer / Maybe I should get some sleep / Sinking in the sofa while they all betray each other / What’s the point of anything?”
Such lines capture Eilish’s voice, a singularly apocalyptic one among today’s pop superstars. Her music reveals dark truths about life in the internet age in large and startling ways, as Flannery O’Connor might have put it.
Eilish is a canary in the online coal mine. The quieter she gets, you might say, the worse the cultural air quality. It’s not that Eilish is all that loud to begin with. Her voice is a contradiction in terms, at once powerful and ethereal, and she wields the power selectively. Still, when she’s breathlessly quiet, as she is on the somber, piano-forward “What Was I Made For?,” it means everything is not alright.
“What Was I Made For?” builds on the themes Eilish has developed in much of her previous work. Namely, that the internet is a terrible place to search for existential certainty around questions of fame, identity, purpose, and love. That maybe this experiment in rootless, distracted ways of inhabiting the world is leaving entire generations wondering why they’re here at all.
On my Substack (subscribe here!), I put together a lengthy syllabus that fills in a lot of contextual details on Eilish and her music. I also offer resources on internet, technology, internet technology and how the web is messing with us. My piece on Eilish is as much about the oppressiveness of Too Much Internet as it is her music. Click here to for the full, immersive experience.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
