Results for “art-rock experimentation”

Songs

Rock and Roll Queen

Mott the Hoople

An early Mott the Hoople track built on a swaggering put-down dressed up as rock bravado, with a narrator addressing a woman he…

misogyny/double standards rock star posturing public image vs private reality

Art School

The Jam

A blast of punk-era sloganeering that treats the art school as a metaphor for total creative and social permission. The Jam…

youthful self-assertion anti-authoritarianism media distrust

Rock Steady

Bad Company

A loose, groove-driven invitation to physical and emotional surrender, built almost entirely on repetition rather than…

surrender to sensation comfort and reassurance physical intimacy

Crocodile Rock

Elton John

A pastiche of early rock and roll nostalgia, built around an invented dance craze and a lost teenage romance. The song uses…

nostalgia lost youth first love

Rock the Casbah

The Clash

A cartoonish fable about a ruler banning music and a population that defies him anyway, set to a bouncy synth-and-rock groove…

authoritarianism vs. popular culture religious/political censorship satire of Western intervention

Rock & Roll

The Velvet Underground

A simple origin myth about the redemptive power of rock and roll, told through a suburban girl named Jenny whose bleak home life…

salvation through music suburban alienation radio and mass culture

Lovers Rock

Sade

Sade builds an entire song out of a single sustained image: a lover as bedrock stability amid emotional chaos. The lyric barely…

emotional refuge isolation vs connection stability in love

My Angel Rocks Back and Forth

Four Tet

An instrumental piece built from a warm, looping folktronica pulse, this track uses its title as its only verbal cue, suggesting…

domesticity and intimacy repetition as comfort organic rhythm

Rock & Roll Stew

Traffic

A road-worn account of touring life, set to a loose groove that mirrors its subject's fatigue and drift. The song moves from…

touring exhaustion rootlessness alienation from ordinary life

Rock and Roll Doctor

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

The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll

Muddy Waters

A late-career Muddy Waters track that functions as a genealogical claim and a roll call, tracing rock and roll's parentage…

musical lineage authorship and ownership of a genre community and testimony

By the River

Aesop Rock

A meandering, list-like meditation on rivers that uses the image as a container for memory, mortality, and imagination. Aesop…

mortality and grief memory and nostalgia escapism/fantasy

Mindful Solutionism

Aesop Rock

Aesop Rock delivers a rapid-fire history of human technology, tracing tools from prehistoric stone implements through…

technological progress human ingenuity moral ambivalence of innovation

None Shall Pass

Aesop Rock

A dense, image-saturated indictment of predatory social hierarchy, war profiteering, and phony authority, delivered in Aesop…

corruption and hypocrisy violence disguised as order class and survival

Infinity Fill Goose Down

Aesop Rock

Aesop Rock builds a dense allegory around farm-animal escape and surveillance-state paranoia, using the imagery of Animal Farm…

surveillance and control anxiety and hypervigilance complicity versus escape

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

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

Long Legged Larry

Aesop Rock

A children's-book superhero story about a heroic frog who rescues people (and a poodle) from peril, delivered with a straight…

heroism as ritual childlike wonder absurdism

The Gates

Aesop Rock

A dense, image-flooded piece from a concept album about visions and threshold spaces, in which the speaker positions himself at…

liminality and thresholds exhaustion/burnout distrust of moral binaries

I Zimbra

Talking Heads

I Zimbra sets a 1916 Hugo Ball sound poem to a dense Afrobeat-influenced groove, turning nonsense syllables into pure rhythmic…

language as sound rather than meaning primitivism and appropriation of African rhythm Dada and avant-garde inheritance

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

Toad

Cream

"Toad" is Cream's showcase for drummer Ginger Baker, an instrumental built around a lengthy drum solo bookended by a terse…

virtuosity showmanship rhythm as narrative

Thunder and Lightning

Thin Lizzy

This is Thin Lizzy in full riff-driven bravado mode, a Saturday-night anthem that fuses schoolyard aggression, romantic…

masculine bravado violence as ritual working-class nightlife

Revolution

Grandaddy

This is a cover of the Beatles' 1968 track, not a Grandaddy original, recorded for the I Am Sam soundtrack, which reimagined…

political skepticism individual vs collective change distrust of ideology

Drop Dead Legs

Van Halen

A strutting party-rock throwaway built entirely around physical fixation, delivered with the band's trademark bravado and…

physical attraction sexual bravado hedonism

Welcome to the Machine

Pink Floyd

A synthetic, industrial voice greets a young rock aspirant with false warmth, revealing that his entire trajectory—rebellion,…

commodification of art loss of individuality the music industry as machine

Hello Mary Lou

Creedence Clearwater Revival

A cover of the Gene Pitney-penned, Ricky Nelson-popularized 1961 pop-rock standard, this Mardi Gras rendition is CCR playing it…

love at first sight teenage infatuation nostalgia for early rock and roll

We Want the Airwaves

Ramones

A blunt manifesto-as-anthem in which the Ramones demand radio play for rock 'n' roll, framing corporate gatekeeping as an enemy…

media gatekeeping artistic frustration working-class impatience

I'm a Cadillac / El Camino Dolo Roso

Mott the Hoople

A car-as-lover conceit built on classic Mick Ralphs blues-rock riffing, where the singer casts himself as a Cadillac cruising…

romantic ambivalence masculine bravado cars as bodies/desire

Gloria (Backstage & Dangerous: The Private Rehearsal)

The Doors

This is a live rehearsal-tape performance of the Van Morrison/Them garage-rock standard, stretched by Jim Morrison into a loose,…

adolescent sexual awakening performance and improvisation desire and impatience

Be the Hook

Pavement

A loose, semi-improvised jam that pokes fun at the mechanics of rock performance itself, name-checking bandmates and mocking the…

self-referential performance parody of rock cliché band camaraderie

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

Do You Wanna Dance

Ramones

A three-minute cover of a 1958 rock and roll standard, stripped down and sped up until the invitation to dance becomes an…

teenage romance dance as ritual nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll

Rockin' Daddy

Howlin’ Wolf

A boastful, sexually charged blues in which the singer claims mastery over both the physical act of "rocking" a partner and the…

sexual bravado transactional relationships masculine reputation

Maybellene

Mos Def

This is Mos Def's rendition of Chuck Berry's rock-and-roll foundational text, recorded for the Chess Records biopic soundtrack.…

infidelity and suspicion pursuit and competition American car culture

Drive

R.E.M.

Drive opens Automatic for the People as a stark, semi-acoustic address to an unnamed younger generation, built almost entirely…

generational drift autonomy and its risks rock and roll as inheritance and myth

History Lesson, Pt. 2

Minutemen

A punk band's origin story told without irony or distance, this song insists that ordinary friendship and local geography are as…

friendship and collaboration punk rock lineage and influence self-mythologizing vs. humility

Land

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

Ballad of Mott the Hoople

Mott the Hoople

This is Mott the Hoople's own epitaph and origin story rolled into one, a self-mythologizing autobiography written at the exact…

rock stardom as self-destruction nostalgia and regret band identity and mythology