Ancient City Style

Lady Gaga “Babylon”

I’ve read that one of the reasons songs get stuck in your head is because something about them – the structure, the lyrics – breaks a pattern your brain recognizes from other music, so it’s left unresolved in your mind. This makes sense for how “Babylon” stays with me, it being this song that’s both totally familiar in its Shep Pettibone early ’90s house moves but totally alien in the way Lady Gaga sings a set of phrases that sound fabulous but don’t really add up to anything logical. “Babylon” is a song of inspired idiocy; absolutely glorious in its dumb genius.

Gaga has always been a creature of kitsch, but this song pushes her aesthetic to an extreme – a song ostensibly about gossip that’s somehow serving it “ancient city style” with a “pretty 16th century smile.” It’s like some bizarre cross-breeding of Madonna’s “Vogue” and Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” but with a vague nod towards the general concept of social justice. I am certain that if you talked to Lady Gaga about this song she could give you some sort of outline of the ideas that were on her mind as she wrote this, as it’s clear enough she was inspired by a few different things. But the magic here is in the goofy nonsense of it all, and in the how this is jumbled up in a fun retro dance song. It’s not easy to deliberately create something campy, but that’s exactly what she’s done with this song. She’s been immersed in camp so long, this is just what happens for her naturally.

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