Spin Doctors
A jealous suitor's pitch disguised as a riddle, this song stacks literary and religious allusions into a case for why he…
romantic rivalry self-mythologizing religious and literary allusion as deflection
Steely Dan
A hazy, half-lucid appeal to an ambiguous figure called Doctor Wu, who could be a physician, a drug, or a rival, sung by a…
addiction and withdrawal unreliable devotion romantic betrayal
Dr. Dre
A collaborative single built as a plea from Eminem to Dr. Dre, using the frame of medical crisis to dramatize creative and…
mentorship and debt creative block and self-doubt loyalty versus betrayal
Little Feat
This is a good-humored tall tale that dresses up dancing and music as medical treatment, casting a mysterious small-town figure…
music as healing Southern folklore/tall tale communal ritual
Richard Thompson
A soldier's-eye monologue from the Iraq War, delivered in the blunt, blackly funny voice of an American GI who narrates the…
war and mortality dehumanization of soldiers media spin and propaganda
Dusty Springfield
A dizzying catalogue of circular images—wheels, tunnels, ripples, revolving doors—stands in for the way memory spins after a…
memory and obsession time's circularity loss and heartbreak
Black Sabbath
This closing track from Paranoid pairs a lurching instrumental jam with a half-comic, half-paranoid account of drug-induced…
drug paranoia unreliable perception self-deception
Dar Williams
This is Dar Williams's recording of the Pink Floyd standard, a dialogue between a medicating doctor-figure and a patient sliding…
dissociation and numbness loss of childhood wonder medical/professional control over the body
Free
This is a slow, confessional blues about a man reckoning with mortality, sung as a deathbed message to a mother and lover rather…
mortality regret confession
The Cure
A whimsical, slightly unsettled song about fractured self-presentation, built around the conceit of six versions of oneself or…
fragmented identity dishonesty and self-deception romantic multiplicity
Paul Simon
A wry domestic vignette about physical burnout, built from a doctor's warning that Simon repeats first to his wife and then to…
bodily limits self-deception aging
Television
A restless, riddling song built from fragmentary images of heat, motion and spinning objects, addressed to a companion who never…
evasion and unanswered questions restlessness and burnout attraction to chaos
Sting
Sting's rendition of this 1968 standard (written by Michel Legrand with Alan and Marilyn Bergman) is a dizzying catalogue of…
Ladytron
A litany of similes circles an unnamed object of faith without ever naming it, building devotion through accumulation rather…
faith without object technology as sacred language accumulation and excess
Guided By Voices
A cryptic, riddling GBV track that uses Fats Domino's real-life survival of Hurricane Katrina as an emblem of resilience, then…
survival and resilience flood/water imagery as threat and purification fame versus obscurity
John Lee Hooker
This is Hooker's own spin on a blues standard's title and premise, stretched into a loose, half-spoken meditation on a locked…
romantic abandonment displacement/exile from home male bravado as cover for hurt
The Band
A rambling, half-comic narrator addresses a woman named Molly amid some domestic crisis involving a gun, while spinning loose,…
restlessness and departure domestic tension masculine bravado and evasion
LL Cool J
A Timbaland-produced club record built around a single hook-word that fuses sexual boasting with dance-floor physicality. LL…
nightlife excess sexual bravado status and wealth display
Patti Smith
A dance-trance hymn to erotic and spiritual surrender, where a woman's devotion to a man is described in the third person as…
erotic devotion as religion loss of self through ecstasy gender and idealization
John Prine
John Prine spins a shaggy-dog catalog of small humiliations—bad jobs, unnoticed passes at girls, aching ankles—into a wry…
forgiveness and mortality working-class drudgery humility and self-deprecation
James Taylor
James Taylor spins a science-fiction folk tale about a 19th-century sailor revived after a century frozen in ice, using the…
mortality and the fear of dying twice technology versus nature alienation and displacement in time
A loose, dreamlike vignette that drifts between a woman dancing near a mysterious tree, a boastful fisherman, and a sick…
escapism surreal storytelling transience
The Fall
A talking-animal narrator, a rabbit émigré from East Germany living in Britain, stumbles across a newspaper story about a killer…
displacement and immigration institutional trust and betrayal tabloid horror as everyday backdrop
Digable Planets
Digable Planets frame their own arrival on the hip-hop scene as an interstellar landing, spinning a mock-sci-fi mythology in…
Afrofuturism as playful self-mythology hip-hop and jazz lineage group identity and unity
