Songfacts®:

• Flobots' emcee Jonny 5 compares their 2017 single "Carousel" to their hit single "Handlebars," released a decade earlier. It has an uplifting pop sound, Jonny told Songfacts, with something deeper underneath, a sound he also compared to Nena's 1984 hit "99 Luftballons."
  
  "'Carousel' on the one hand is about this feeling of exhilaration - spinning around and feeling the world spinning around you - but it's especially about the bizarre digital world that's so ever-present for all of us. We're thinking about how before you get involved in anything, you have this weird set of like algorithms that are presenting things to you. It's a very fixed and stagnant way that they present things to you, that's tailor made to you, and so the world becomes all about you and what the computer thinks that you want to see, what the algorithms say you want to see.
  
  It's a really bizarre way to live, but it can be really satisfying on the surface, to be like, 'Oh, all my enemies have been presented as caricatures and all the things I want to see are being spoon-fed to me.' It's both bizarre and dangerous, but also really satisfying, and the song is about all those paradoxes."