Songfacts®:

• Babylon was founded in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) in the 23rd century BC. It grew to become a major metropolis and later the center of the great Babylonian Empire, when it was arguably the largest city in the world. During this jubilant track Gaga envisions the ancient locality as a place where people had fun.
  
  We only have the weekend
  You can serve it to me, ancient-city style
  We can party like it's BC
  With a pretty 16th-century smile
• Babylon is symbolic of evil in the Bible; the book of Genesis recounts how the citizens of the ancient city started to build a tower that would reach to Heaven. God spoiled their plan by making them unable to understand each other, creating chaos and miscommunication, and they never completed the Tower of Babel.
  
  Body's moving like a sculpture
  On the top of Tower of Babel tonight
  We are climbing up to Heaven
  Speaking languages in a BloodPop moonlight
  
  Throughout her career, Gaga has battled gossip about her love life, gender identity and much more. Here, she is drawing a parallel between the meaningless way people "babble on" about her and the incoherent communication between the Babylonians as they tried in vain to build the Tower of Babel.
  
  Talk it out, babble on
  Battle for your life, Babylon
  That's gossip, what you on?
  
  Speaking to Apple Music's Zane Lowe, Gaga explained that "Babylon" is "a song about gossip, something that had dominated my life that made me feel so small and chained. Now I wear chains and I wear them with pride. I feel free."
• Other artists that have used the ancient city of Babylon as a metaphor for evil include David Gray, The Ruts, Sheryl Crow, and Steely Dan.
  
  And we mustn't forget the more literal "Rivers Of Babylon," based on Psalm 137 in the Bible.
• Gaga wrote the track with Burns and BloodPop. It pulls influence from disco, 1980s drag house-ballroom culture and '90s house, and has drawn comparisons to Madonna's 1990 hit "Vogue."