Television
A downtown-New York nocturne about a night walk that tips into a heightened, almost hallucinatory perception of the city,…
urban nightlife altered perception desire and detachment
The Doors
A short, propulsive rock song built almost entirely around a single command repeated until it becomes a mantra. It uses images…
transcendence limits of perception desire and entrapment
Boards of Canada
An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's third album that trades on the gap between its title's cheerful theatrical…
nostalgia childhood media artifice versus memory
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" builds a fractured character sketch around a woman whose mental illness is treated with unsettling…
mental illness and stigma unreliable perception family cruelty
Cassandra Wilson
This is a meditative, almost devotional song built around a simple ritual: each day's mundane and sensory acts are catalogued by…
impermanence ritual and routine art as anchor
Built to Spill
Built to Spill open their 2006 album with a long, guitar-driven meditation on doubt and self-contradiction, built from a handful…
self-doubt masculinity and its expectations religious skepticism
Pearl Jam
A song about the aftermath of a devastating breakup, built on the image of a world drained of color and identity once a lover is…
heartbreak and loss loss of identity grief's distortion of perception
Joni Mitchell
A three-part meditation that uses clouds, love, and life as parallel case studies in disillusionment, each verse moving from…
disillusionment the limits of experience loss of innocence
Madvillain
A pure showcase of technical rap virtuosity built almost entirely on internal rhyme chains and boastful non-sequiturs, "All…
braggadocio persona/mythmaking criminal alter-ego
Orbital
Halcyon and On and On is an instrumental electronic piece built almost entirely from a small set of looping synth phrases and a…
repetition and cyclicality altered states / drug culture euphoria and calm
Steely Dan
A slack, aging drifter moves onto his aunt's couch and develops an unseemly fixation on his young cousin, pitching her a…
arrested development delusional self-image taboo desire played for laughs
Solange
"Mad" is a meditation on the exhaustion of having to justify one's own anger, built around a call-and-response between a…
the right to anger versus the demand for composure respectability and emotional policing of Black people survival and trauma disguised as success
The National
A quiet, waltz-time song that uses childlike, storybook imagery to describe willful escapism, both personal and political. Its…
escapism denial numbness
Jimi Hendrix
A hallucinatory vision of social collapse filtered through a drinker's blurred perception, where reaching hands never quite…
social unrest spiritual longing alienation