Results for “art and myth as coping mechanisms”

Songs

My Ride's Here

Warren Zevon

A dying man's fever-dream inventory of Hollywood Westerns, biblical epics, and Romantic poets, all jumbled together as he waits…

mortality and impending death faith and skepticism entangled art and myth as coping mechanisms

My Little Town (with Art Garfunkel)

Paul Simon

A bitter recollection of a suffocating hometown, stripped of color and possibility, sung as a reunion piece by Simon and…

small-town claustrophobia loss of faith inherited identity

Underneath the Radar

Underworld

This early, pre-techno Underworld track is a nervy pop-funk song about living small and invisible under the threat of…

Cold War anxiety surveillance and invisibility smallness/powerlessness

Kirby

Aesop Rock

A song built entirely around addressing a cat named Kirby, whose small, absurd domestic behaviors become a lens for talking…

companionship as coping mechanism mental illness and medication domesticity

When It Rain

Danny Brown

A relentless portrait of Detroit street violence set to a hyper-fast, footwork-inspired beat, where the manic tempo and…

urban poverty and survival violence and fatalism addiction as coping mechanism

Cranes in the Sky

Solange

Solange catalogs every failed strategy for numbing an unnamed grief or unease, building a list of avoidance tactics before…

avoidance and denial emotional exhaustion consumerism as coping mechanism

Blues Run the Game

Laura Marling

This is Laura Marling's rendition of a 1965 folk standard originally written by Jackson C. Frank, a song about restless flight…

itinerancy and escape addiction as coping mechanism inescapability of sorrow

KOD

J. Cole

The title track of KOD uses a hypnotic, hook-driven trap structure to embody the very drugs of ego, materialism, and violence it…

addiction and self-medication fame and defensiveness cyclical violence

Things I Miss the Most

Steely Dan

A recently divorced narrator insists he's fine with solitude, then keeps undercutting himself by cataloguing everything lost —…

divorce and its aftermath denial versus admission materialism as emotional substitute

Nights

Frank Ocean

A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…

isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia

The Devil Is in the Beats

The Chemical Brothers

This is less a song than a spoken definition looped over a menacing electronic pulse, taken from the Chemical Brothers' score…

self-reference artifice vs feeling mechanization

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

Waylon Jennings

A meditation on the gap between the mythic cowboy and the man who tried to live inside that myth. The song traces how a…

disillusionment with myth loneliness and rootlessness masculinity and emotional detachment

Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend

Thin Lizzy

This is Thin Lizzy's most explicitly Irish statement, a medley that stitches together fragments of traditional ballads with a…

Irish identity and heritage oral tradition and storytelling myth and heroism

Immigrant Song

Led Zeppelin

A short, blunt battle-cry sung from the perspective of Viking raiders sailing west, framed less as narrative than as invocation.…

conquest and invasion myth and legend masculine bravado

Don't Swallow the Cap

The National

A woozy, fragmented meditation on emotional exhaustion and self-medication, delivered from inside a mind that can't quite trust…

emotional numbness self-deception and coping isolation vs. reassurance

Mr. Grieves

Pixies

A hallucinatory apocalyptic chant built from disconnected images and a mysterious title figure, 'Mr. Grieves' plays like a…

apocalypse/deluge faith and belief without content death and mortality

I Am a Scientist

Guided by Voices

A short, deceptively simple lo-fi anthem in which the narrator cycles through professional identities—scientist, journalist,…

self-examination addiction and escape art as self-medication

Pacifics (From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack “N.Y. Is Red Hot")

Digable Planets

Digable Planets turn a Sunday in New York into an extended meditation on rest, community, and creative replenishment, moving…

urban leisure and rest Black cultural inheritance (jazz, literature, hip-hop lineage) community and belonging

Bring Da Ruckus

Wu‐Tang Clan

The opening track of Enter the Wu-Tang stages hip-hop as martial arts combat, with each MC treating the microphone like a weapon…

martial arts mythology as metaphor for lyrical combat collective identity vs individual bravado urban violence and street survival

Red

King Crimson

Red is King Crimson's instrumental title track, a riff-driven power trio piece built around a menacing, angular guitar figure…

dread and menace mechanized aggression cyclical structure

Four Long Years

Wire

A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…

mental exhaustion alienation failure of language

Red Guitar

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

You Are My Sunshine

Johnny Cash

This is Johnny Cash's stripped-down take on the standard "You Are My Sunshine," but the version on Unearthed leaves the tape…

heartbreak and loss irony of the title versus the lyric the mechanics of recording

Me Myself and I

De La Soul

De La Soul use a mirror-gazing conceit to push back against critics and industry types who wanted to pigeonhole them as hippies…

individuality vs. conformity authenticity in art resistance to stereotyping

Satellite Anthem Icarus

Boards of Canada

Satellite Anthem Icarus is an instrumental piece built from warm, slightly detuned guitar figures laid over a slow, hypnotic…

flight and falling distance/isolation nostalgia for analog technology

Summertime Sadness

Lana Del Rey

A woman narrates one glowing, precarious night with a lover she suspects she's about to lose, fusing sensory euphoria with an…

doomed romance hedonism as coping beauty and self-fashioning

Computer Love

Kraftwerk

A minimal, deliberately flat lyric sets domestic isolation against the promise of a technological fix for loneliness. The song…

isolation technology mediating intimacy modern alienation

Flower

Moby

This track isn't really a Moby lyric at all but a looped field-recording-style sample of an African American work/children's…

labor and repetition folk memory loss

Hard-Core Troubadour

Steve Earle

A wry character sketch of an unrepentant romantic drifter told from the outside, by a narrator warning a woman about the man's…

romantic recidivism performance vs. sincerity the myth of the outlaw lover

Anti-Hero

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift turns a self-lacerating confessional into a singalong chorus, cataloguing her worst self-perceptions—insomnia,…

self-loathing and self-awareness fame and disproportion fear of abandonment

Ooh Las Vegas

Gram Parsons

A honky-tonk lament about a gambler caught in the loop of losing, drinking, and going back for more, with Las Vegas cast as a…

addiction and compulsion poverty vs. glamour self-destruction

Blind Willie McTell

The Band

A traveler moves through a haunted, mythic American South, stacking images of slavery, exile, and vice into a single vision of…

historical memory of slavery the blues as witness/testimony original sin and corruption

Affirmative Action

Nas

This is a mafioso-rap posse cut in which Nas, alongside his Firm collaborators, trades the political/street-prophet voice he's…

organized crime as fantasy/roleplay materialism and status display loyalty and betrayal within a crew

We Will Become Silhouettes

The Shins

A survivalist's bunker monologue set to an oddly buoyant melody, this song imagines nuclear or environmental apocalypse as a…

apocalypse and isolation denial and coping through routine loss of a loved one

Red Eyes

The War on Drugs

Red Eyes is a rush of ecstatic, half-legible sentiment stitched to a driving, anthemic rock arrangement, where the lyric's…

devotion under strain spiritual/emotional darkness self-doubt

Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake

Grandaddy

A loose, dreamlike catalog of small-town wreckage - shut-down factories, joyriding teens, a decrepit limousine, a spray-painted…

small-town decay aimlessness and boredom mechanization versus nature

I Walk the Line

Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell builds a memory song around a childhood car ride and the moment he first heard Johnny Cash's classic, using the…

nostalgia musical inheritance family and rural childhood

Bees

Caribou

"Bees" is an instrumental piece from Dan Snaith's early Caribou period, built from layered percussion, warped samples, and…

natural imagery repetition and accumulation psychedelia

Pancho and Lefty

Townes Van Zandt

A ballad about a legendary Mexican bandit and the friend widely suspected of betraying him, told with the flattened affect of a…

betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and displacement

Poncho & Lefty

Townes Van Zandt

A weathered ballad about a Mexican bandit and the friend who may have betrayed him, told with the flat, elliptical tone of a…

betrayal and guilt myth-making and unreliable legend exile and diminishment