This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- I Forgot That You Existed / This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Eras Tour, Cardiff)
- My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys / This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Eras Tour, Toronto)
Business rage: the settling of accounts with industry betrayers, the party hosted in good faith and the friendship that curdled into betrayal. Fury delivered with a smile and a glass raised: the performance of graciousness as the sharpest possible weapon.
“Friends don't try to trick you, get you on the phone and mind-twist you”
The phone as the betrayer's tool. The line itemises the manoeuvre by which trust gets dismantled, luring someone onto the device, then doing the cognitive work the in-person setting would have made harder. The motif carrying the song's specific charge against former friends.
“I'm shaking my head, I'm locking the gates”
Locking the gates is her shutting people out for good, a flat refusal of access once the trust is broken.
“Everyone swimming in a champagne sea”
Sea standing in for excess. The figure stretches the ocean to luxury proportions, the gathering so large it requires marine scale to describe. The image works the party as both impressive and unsustainable.
“So why'd you have to rain on my parade?”
Rain names the deliberate spoiling of someone's joy. Borrowing the idiom, the speaker accuses the betrayer of choosing to pour on her celebration, the weather turned into an act of sabotage.
“Everyone swimming in a champagne sea”
Champagne staged as a literal sea, the fame-as-debauchery image rendered in pool terms. The collective drink figures the social world the speaker had been admitted to before the song's exclusion arrives, and the swimming converts consumption into immersion. Everyone is in it; only the speaker will be told she is no longer welcome.
Gatsby-class champagne extravagance
“Everyone swimming in a champagne sea”
“Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names” — the last great american dynasty
Picked up by community readers, the champagne-filled pool of "swam with the big names" rhymes with the Gatsby-class excess of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, where the parties run to a champagne sea and the speaker feels "so Gatsby for that whole year". The Fitzgerald register the hosts hear in this song resurfaces a few albums later, turned from biography into self-portrait.
champagne pool
“Jump into the pool from the balcony / Everyone swimmin' in a champagne sea”
“They filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names” — the last great american dynasty
Angela links the champagne-filled pool of the Rebecca story to This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, where the guests leap from the balcony into a champagne sea, the same picture of reckless party wealth.