Six different interpretations: 1. An affection for someone that has gone too far. 2. A song about God, saying how he isn't even listening to what people are saying i.e. in their prayers. 3. Another leader who is destroying the world, such as in Take a Bow. 4. About a person who, despite his hard work to the world around him (trying to be #1), he is not acknowledged. Now he is in a rage. He now blames the world for his failure and has plots to create havoc and destroy the world around him to set things right. 5. About talking to the mirror, talking to yourself. Blaming yourself for all the bad things that have happened to you. Looking at the thing you've become-old, broken, cold; and this person is made by the world around you. 6. A rejection of the fashion of environmentalism ("sick of trying to please you"), personifying the Earth as being cold and uncaring; it kills people with earthquakes it cannot even feel so "why should I?" (engage in environmentalism). That the world has gone so wrong, Nature itself is a disaster.

This song is about Matthew Bellamy's one time flat mate who dealt hard drugs, heroin in particular. The song was recorded first as a demo towards the end of 1996, then entitled "Crazy Days". Bellamy's own paraphrased recollections have him moving from Teignmouth to Exeter when he was 18, which he became in July of the same year. Thus, we can deduce that the song was composed sometime during the latter half of 1996. The flat which Bellamy and this flatmate shared was situated above an erotic literature store. He described it as having looked like "a scene from 'Trainspotting'".

Bellamy was quoted as saying, "The song Showbiz is about how we all have an inside personality that we sort of hide from the outside." The lyrics are possibly a reference to the difficulty of hiding your inner persona, or perhaps they are about the impact performing has on your life.

Matt said that the song it's about "Wanting to destroy a person you've loved" He also said in another interview: "This one really rocks out, it's really full-on but the lyrics are just plain negative, just pure anger and disregard for affection, the opposite of "Bliss". It's actually linked to a book I read called "Hyper Space", which is about how all the laws of nature and physics combine in the 10th Dimension in pure mathematics to form one main theme" Could be about the same person as in "Hate This and I'll Love You" and "Uno". Someone who was associated with the band before they made it, who Matt had reason to dislike.Other readings of the song's lyrics have developed a hypothesis that this song is of an anti-religious nature. The lyrics could be a narrative from a messianic figure such as Jesus Christ. "Golden lies" could be those of priests, rabbis, etc. who "feed [God's] role" in the world. The lies not being that God/Jesus exists, after all he says "Who's returned from the dead? Who remains?" (somewhat rhetorical questions); the lies are more likely to be that he was here to save mankind, "I don't love you and I never did". The second verse deals with his reason for not wanting us, "You wanted more than I was worth" - a superhuman messiah that has evidently not saved us from our sins; "And you think I was scared" being a reference to Jesus' apparent fear of his upcoming crucifixion, in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14, Luke 22: 43-44); "And you needed proof", something which our modern secular and scientific age begs for and which there is very little in any religion's defence. "Who really cares any more?" - it is over, God does not love us, he does not care, he has forsaken us and hence the suffering we see across the world.

This song was inspired by a wine fueled hallucination Bellamy had after watching a documentary on the subject of mind control. The dream contained an alien desert where giant triangular blades swung from the sky and pierced his brain in search of information. Bellamy says "I was having these strange hallucinations of this triangular blade, really silver metallic, razor sharp. I was in this landscape, arid, grey, dead with an endless horizon and I was trying to dodge these blades that were flying about everywhere. They'd go into my head and I could feel them cutting into my brain... Then I went to the doctor and he told me to drink more water and that was that. Micro cuts are cuts into your being that you can't see or avoid".