Dirty Projectors
A love song that keeps slipping into philosophical rumination, pairing plainspoken devotion with lines borrowed from Wim…
romantic commitment paradox of action and stillness existential questioning
Danny Brown
Danny Brown turns a mundane household chore into a running double entendre for sexual and criminal grime, stacking…
sexual degradation as comedy poverty and hustling shame versus exposure
Sonic Youth
A hazy, half-narrated scene of teenage nightlife and adolescent desire, rendered in fragments rather than a coherent story.…
adolescent restlessness sexual awakening ritual and superstition
Gorillaz
Warren Zevon
This is Zevon's wry farewell song, opening the album he recorded while dying of mesothelioma, dressed as an outlaw's confession…
mortality and reckoning outlaw persona romantic failure
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith delivers a twelve-bar blues indictment of a charming, cruel lover, moving from a general question about bad men to…
romantic betrayal cynicism about men's constancy emotional endurance
Betty Davis
Betty Davis turns dirty talk into a call-and-response ritual, offering total sexual and emotional surrender in exchange for…
sexual liberation dominance and submission performance of desire
B.B. King
A blues novelty song that hijacks Christmas imagery to tell an extended dirty joke about a man who sleeps with other men's wives…
infidelity as comedy seasonal parody masculine boasting
Robert Johnson
Robert Johnson builds an entire song out of a single dirty joke, using a 1930s automobile as an extended stand-in for a woman's…
sexual jealousy infidelity and possession mechanical/automotive metaphor
Wu‐Tang Clan
This is a loose, howling freestyle built around Ol' Dirty Bastard's signature persona of gleeful vulgarity, using a literal…
Betty Davis takes the insults an ex has thrown at her -- witch, alley cat, dirty dog -- and turns them into a badge of honor,…
sexual autonomy reclaiming slurs female desire vs. respectability
