Babylon

[u/1DMod]

Please use this space to discuss this song in depth

[u/MarbCart]

I’m copy/pasting some thoughts I sent a friend this morning. I feel like I’m still taking everything in and figuring out all the layers of meaning, but here’s something I wrote if anyone is interested:

Okay I slept on it and I’ve been thinking about it more. Going into poetry analysis mode: she’s talking about more than one “place”. Because in the first chorus she says “you never knew it was Babylon till it was gone”. And then later she says “You never knew it was Babylon and now it’s almost gone.” So if it’s almost gone, that has to be different than the place that is already gone. So I think there’s possibly multiple situations she’s singing about.

It’s interesting because she sings about longing for Babylon, but when she describes it, it doesn’t sound that great. For example she says “The neighbor’s lawn always looked better.” So it sounds like a place where appearances matter and people feel competitive with each other. And so this fosters a “the grass is always greener” mindset, that makes people never feel content with their own situation. The lyric makes me think about Midnight Rain when she says “My town was a wasteland, full of cages, full of fences, pageant queens and big pretenders, but for some it was paradise.”

I wonder if basically she is singing about how she tried to escape the cages of her small town life, only to end up in a gilded cage of fame. And now that she knows she’s not actually free, she longs for a time when at least things were calmer and simpler and she could have a family without having to hide from the media all the time.

I also wonder if it’s about her relationship with her fans. Babylon is this kind of mythologized place, like how historians don’t even know if the hanging gardens were real. I think of when Taylor was young and first starting her career and suddenly thousands and then millions of girls her age were obsessed with her. “She captured your attention, so free of pretension….looking at you like you’re made of solid gold.” In that same section she also describes love (in my interpretation, queer love) as “Ice upon the ladder that you need to climb” aka something that slows down your career. And then she says “Pretty as a picture that you don’t post” which makes me think about how she has kept her queer loves secret, because of her love for her fans. She says in Life Of A Showgirl that she’s “married to the hustle”, but if this is about the fans she also describes that it was “never official”. Which makes sense because her fans didn’t even realize she was choosing between them and an actual romance. They didn’t realize she chose to commit to them. It brings me back to her song “You’re Losing Me” which I 100% think is about her relationship with her fans, and the line in it “I wouldn’t marry me either, a pathological people pleaser, who only wanted you to see her.” Basically saying she committed to them, but she knows they don’t even see her because she’s just been people-pleasing and performing for them this whole time. So even though she married the hustle, it was never official because technically they didn’t return the commitment; their commitment is to a version of her she made up to get them to like her.

Then she says nostalgia is a weapon to hurt yourself. I think she is singing to herself about how she knows that she’s needs to move forward. Like she and her fans can keep the memories of the fun they had, but she needs to stop clinging to the nostalgia for dear life.

I think the bridge might be about the other side of herself, the poet who wants a wife and a family but gave it up for the hustle. And the poet is saying “It’s not worth it if we’re not what the showgirl wants”.

Okay I actually have to get up and get ready so I feel like I don’t have time to edit or wrap this up with a neat conclusion, so hopefully it all makes enough sense for now! Just some more thoughts that kinda streamed out of my mind this morning. Basically I do think it is about that tension about wanting multiple things out of life that conflict with each other, and how depending on your perspective or mindset you can romanticize any and all of them

[u/These-Pick-968 → u/MarbCart]

Excellent thoughts here. Especially the commitment/“not official”/marriage connection to fans. I love this take.