The man in Taylor Swift's Babylon spends most of the song wanting something else.
His small town feels like a cage. The neighbour's lawn looks better. A hand-me-down sweater should have come from the mall. He eventually leaves, makes money, collects expensive watches and advances professionally, only to find himself emotionally spent.
Swift uses Babylon to describe both the life her protagonist has built and his state of mind, where fulfilment always seems just out of reach. “You never knew that it was Babylon / 'Til it was gone,” she sings.
Released on Friday as part of the expanded edition of The Life of a Showgirl, the song adds another interpretation to a name that has carried several meanings through western music.
If you are still not entirely sure what Swift means by Babylon, that is kind of the point.
For centuries, the ancient Mesopotamian city has been used by composers, songwriters and lyricists as a remarkably loose metaphor for imperial arrogance, exile, oppression, decadence, ambition and collapse.
In music, film and literature, other ancient cities tend to arrive with more familiar associations. Rome still suggests empire and political power, while Athens is closely tied to classical civilisation, philosophy and democracy. Babylon has proved more nebulous. It can conjure mystery and mysticism, or become a lyrical placeholder for writers looking for brevity in expressing danger or longing.
Lying about 85km south of Baghdad in modern Iraq, Babylon became one of the great centres of ancient Mesopotamia, known for its august temples and monumental building projects.
Greek writers latched on to that grandeur and helped establish its reputation for extraordinary size and wealth, while biblical accounts cast Babylon in a darker light, helping inspire artists from the Renaissance through the 19th century to repeatedly return to the city as a symbol of decadence, ruin and divine punishment.
The Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis became one of the West's most enduring metaphors for human ambition and overreach.
German-born British composer George Frideric Handel drew on that vein in his 1745 oratorio Belshazzar, about the final days of Babylon's ruler, with grand choruses and ceremonial music capturing a city at the height of its power and on the cusp of ruin.
That biblical imagery inspired Jamaican reggae group The Melodians more than two centuries later. The loping chorus of their 1970 hit Rivers of Babylon turns the city into a place of exile where people long for home: “By the rivers of Babylon / There we sat down / Yeah, we wept.”
Reggae giant Bob Marley recast Babylon in more political terms in the 1979 track Babylon System, in which Babylon becomes a byword for the oppression of colonialism and economic exploitation: “Babylon system is the vampire … Sucking the children day by day.”
The Babylon soundtrack, however, is not all doom and gloom. Lady Gaga closes her back-to-form 2020 party album Chromatica with Babylon, a play on words with “babble on” in reference to gossip and chatter surrounding her public life: “Talk it out, babble on / Battle for your life, Babylon.”
British singer-songwriter David Gray's biggest hit, Babylon, views the ancient Iraqi city through a typical Saturday night in modern-day London. The song sets the scene with the couplet, “Saturday I'm running wild / And all the lights are changing red to green”, before taking us through crowds, loneliness and romantic regret, all summed up in the refrain: “Babylon”.
Swift's song shares some of Gray's emotional cues, with its imagery of blingy casinos, expensive watches and professional ambition, where even love becomes “ice upon the ladder” her character wants to climb.
But Swift's character never seems sure about what a fulfilled life should look like, a state she describes as “the self-harm of never being where you are”.
Perhaps the Babylonians had their own answer to what makes a place worth staying in. Reconstructed from cuneiform manuscripts linked to the library of Sippar and published in 2025, the ancient Hymn to Babylon celebrates its creature comforts and inhabitants: “Its fields burgeon with herbs and flowers”, while “herds and flocks lie on verdant pastures”.
Or, to borrow another enduring songwriting metaphor, home is where the heart is.
