Cabaret

Where the first song retreats inward, this one throws the doors open with a kind of furious, defiant glamour. The brass section announces itself like a dare — brassy, slightly overripe, designed to make you feel the heat of the Kit Kat Klub, its stale perfume and desperate gaiety. The tempo is a cabaret two-step, propulsive but with a slight lurch underneath, the musical equivalent of dancing on a tilting floor. The vocalist here must perform performance itself — there's no fourth wall, no pretense of naturalism; the singer is selling you something, and part of what makes the song so unsettling is how seductive the sell is. It's a song about escapism as ideology, the willful choosing of the spotlight over the encroaching dark. Set in Weimar-era Berlin as fascism tightens its grip, the number functions as a kind of gorgeous lie — come hear the music play, life is a cabaret, old chum — and the lie is so well-dressed you might almost believe it. The irony is structural, baked into the arrangement, which sounds triumphant even as the lyrics quietly surrender. It belongs to the late 1960s American musical theater moment when the form began interrogating its own pleasures. You'd put this on at the end of a party, when the room is half-empty and someone has turned the lights low, and the evening feels like it's trying to outrun something.