Nine Inch Nails
"Closer" fuses explicit sexual aggression with a desperate spiritual plea, treating carnal degradation as the only available…
self-loathing sexual degradation as transcendence loss of faith
MF DOOM
Coffin Nails is an instrumental beat from MF DOOM's Special Herbs series, the long-running set of production-only tracks he…
mortality vice and self-destruction underground hip-hop craft
Todd Rundgren
Rundgren takes an old proverb about a chain of small failures leading to catastrophe and grafts it onto a personal confession…
loneliness cause and effect personal responsibility
Panic! at the Disco
A deliberately slight, sunny pop song built around a nonsensical time-of-day image that stands in for a euphoric, slightly hazy…
nostalgia altered perception of time young romance
Lorde
A meditation on aging out of youthful restlessness, sung from inside a comfortable domestic life that still itches with doubt.…
aging and impermanence domestic contentment vs. restlessness nostalgia for youth
John Martyn
A wronged man broods by a riverbank over a betrayal, moving from grief and insomnia into a bitter, half-joking threat of…
betrayal and heartbreak isolation misogyny as folk convention
Open Mike Eagle
A day-job rapper narrates the grind of holding a nine-to-five while chasing his real vocation on stages across Los Angeles's…
day-job vs. artistic calling exhaustion and burnout underground hip-hop community
Mel Tormé
Mel Tormé's 1962 reading of Irving Berlin's standard turns a Jazz Age fashion parade into a swinging exercise in vocal…
class aspiration and pretense fashion as performance urban spectacle
The Louvin Brothers
This is a brisk, comic talking-blues about a drifter who keeps running into the same wall: nobody will extend him an inch of…
poverty and transience distrust and suspicion of outsiders institutional indifference
Fairport Convention
A first-person narrator learns a friend has been sentenced to ninety-nine years for a fatal car crash and travels to plead his…
injustice and arbitrary punishment powerlessness before institutions loyalty and friendship
Van Morrison
An impressionistic, nearly nine-minute elegy built around a single scene: a gathering in a Belfast back room presided over by a…
loss of innocence ambiguous identity and gender nostalgia for place
Patti Smith
Land is a nine-minute fever-dream that fuses a violent locker-room assault narrative with the deliriously banal patter of 1960s…
violence and vulnerability transformation through imagination adolescent sexuality
Soft Cell
This is the extended dub/instrumental version of Soft Cell's signature hit "Tainted Love," spliced with a nod to the Motown…
obsession and repetition technology versus emotion dance floor as emotional release
