Roxie

"Roxie" is a song about the architecture of delusion — the precise, cheerful construction of a fantasy self. The orchestration is bright and vaudevillian, all jaunty brass and a rhythm section that practically winks at the audience, mirroring the way Roxie Hart has repackaged her own mediocrity as destiny. The vocal performance requires a very specific kind of irony: played too knowing, the character collapses; played too sincere, it loses its comedy. The ideal interpretation sits exactly between — Roxie genuinely believes what she's singing, and the song's real joke is that her delusion is more aspirational than pathetic. The tempo has a skip to it, a lightness that contrasts with the subject matter (a woman in prison, awaiting trial for murder) in a way that is the musical's central formal argument: in show business, presentation overrides substance. Kander and Ebb constructed something that simultaneously celebrates and satirizes celebrity hunger, written in 1975 but with a cultural resonance that has only sharpened since. The song belongs to anyone who has ever watched someone construct a public persona from raw need — this is the sound of image-making in real time, peppy and hollow and weirdly moving.