Paris
- Begin Again / Paris (Eras Tour, Paris)
“Privacy sign on the door and on my page”
“I'm so in love that I might stop breathing, drew a map on your bedroom ceiling”
“Stumble down pretend alleyways, cheap wine, make believe it's champagne / We were somewhere else, in an alleyway, drinking champagne”
“Stumbled through pretend alleyways”
cheap stand-in mistaken for the real thing
“Cheap wine, make-believe it's champagne”
“Your roommate's cheap-ass screw-top rosé, that's how” — Maroon
Community readers connect Maroon's pattern of cheap things standing in for real ones — the screw-top rosé, the vinyl masquerading as something finer, the carnations mistaken for roses — to the same move elsewhere in the catalogue. Paris makes the substitution explicit ("cheap wine, make-believe it's champagne"), and False God sanctifies it ("even if it's a false god, we'd still worship this love"). In each, an inferior thing is knowingly dressed up as the genuine article, which is exactly the retrospective verdict Maroon delivers on its own relationship.