Song meaning
Brett: "Skyscraper is my version of the story of the tower of Babel."[1]
"[It] is an allegorical treatment of the story of the Tower of Babel. Not only have I never read anything like it in literature, but in music either."[2]
Babel is a city mentioned in The Bible in which the citizens longed so much to know what the afterlife was like, that they attempted to build a tower that could reach heaven ("we'll build a city with a tower for the world"). They never reached heaven and were forced to stop building the tower because of a miscommunication problem with God. What happened was that all the people in the world spoke the same language and some were building this great tower. God saw what was going on and thought that if they were able to do that, that nothing would be impossible for them. The story is really the explaination of why there are different races and languages because God scattered them around and gave them different languages so they didn't understand each other, hence the name Babel... because it was confused and no one made sense of it.
References
^ Roger Vulture interview with Brett (1996)
^ The New Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (1994)