Results for “body image and shame”

Songs

Bodys

Car Seat Headrest

A song about the failure of language to carry romantic and sexual desire, so the narrator retreats into the physical -- dancing,…

failure of language desire and physical intimacy mortality and fragility of the body

My Body Is a Cage

Peter Gabriel

This is a cover of the Arcade Fire song, but Gabriel's version strips it down to piano, strings and voice, turning a…

entrapment vs. freedom mind-body split fear and self-doubt

Bodies

Sex Pistols

A brutal, non-narrative screed about abortion that refuses either a pro-life sermon or a clean feminist statement, instead…

abortion and its aftermath dehumanization class and institutional cruelty

Soul Meets Body

Death Cab for Cutie

A gentle, folk-inflected love song built around a fantasy of full integration - body and spirit, self and other - as the…

union of body and soul romantic devotion mortality and shared fate

Body Movin'

Beastie Boys

A pure party track built on the Beastie Boys' trademark trick of layering absurdist boasting over a fitness-instructor cadence,…

dance and physical release collective euphoria playful self-mythologizing

Run That Body Down

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

Forest Whitiker

Brother Ali

Brother Ali, an albino rapper with a visible disability, turns physical self-description into an act of defiance, cataloguing…

body image and self-acceptance defiance of conventional beauty standards disability and physical difference

new body rhumba (from the film White Noise)

LCD Soundsystem

A jittery dance-punk track built for a film about consumer dread and mortality, this song fuses supermarket-checkout imagery…

consumerism and self-commodification bodily alienation mortality and letting go

Good Clothes

Little Brother

Little Brother turns a nostalgic riff on teenage clothes-hustling into a sharp, self-aware satire of consumerism and status…

class and scarcity status anxiety consumerism

Digging In the Dirt

Peter Gabriel

A song about excavating buried psychic damage, staged as a confrontation between a wounded self and an internal accuser. Peter…

psychological excavation self-recrimination control and coercion

Video

India.Arie

India.Arie sets her own image against the airbrushed, materialistic archetype of turn-of-the-millennium music videos, using…

self-acceptance body image anti-materialism

Creature Comfort

Arcade Fire

A synth-driven anthem that turns confessional details about body image, self-harm, and suicidal ideation into a critique of a…

self-loathing and body image fame as false salvation numbness and dissociation

Lover Lover Lover

Leonard Cohen

A prayer disguised as a love song, built from a dialogue between a son and a father-God about shame, embodiment, and the…

shame and self-loathing faith and divine dialogue the body as trial

Sheela-Na-Gig

PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey turns the offer of a woman's body into a confrontation, borrowing the name of a medieval carved figure to skewer male…

female sexuality and shame rejection and humiliation the body as spectacle

This Is Love

PJ Harvey

A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…

desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion

Gossip Folks

Missy Elliott

Missy Elliott turns tabloid gossip about her weight loss and love life into raw material for a defiant, genre-blurring track…

celebrity gossip and rumor body image scrutiny female confidence and swagger

Creep

Radiohead

A song of self-loathing built around a single obsessive comparison: the speaker idolizes someone he sees as flawless while…

self-loathing unrequited desire alienation

Hunger

Florence + the Machine

An opening confession about adolescent anorexia expands into a wider meditation on addiction, performance, and the human need to…

eating disorders and body control addiction and substitution performance versus intimacy

Nobody

Mitski

A disco groove wraps around one of Mitski's bleakest lyrics, turning isolation into something you can dance to. The song tracks…

loneliness self-erasure longing for touch over love

Heart-Shaped Box

Nirvana

A grinding, image-drunk portrait of romantic dependency, framed as a body trapped inside someone else's body. Cobain piles up…

codependency and entrapment illness and the body sarcasm as self-defense

Chase the Tear

Portishead

A brief, incantatory piece built from fragmentary phrases rather than a clear narrative, tracking a speaker moving between…

shame and self-reckoning emotional withdrawal cyclical time / seasons as feeling

Cut Your Hair

Pavement

A satire of the early-90s alt-rock signing frenzy dressed up as a shaggy-dog non-sequitur song. Pavement mocks the music…

music industry cynicism image vs substance selling out

This Is Not a Photograph

Mission of Burma

A song built almost entirely on negation, listing what an unnamed 'this' is not rather than what it is. The effect is a kind of…

negation and absence representation vs. reality escape from confinement

Jennifer

Eurythmics

A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…

absence obsession dissolution of identity

Don't Stop Me Now (…revisited)

Queen

A pure momentum song: the speaker declares himself an unstoppable force of pleasure and energy, piling up cosmic and mechanical…

hedonism and release self-mythologizing speed and momentum

E-Pro

Beck

E-Pro rides a fuzzed-out riff and a nagging na-na hook while the lyric itself trades in disjointed, image-heavy fragments about…

defiance toxicity/poison self-destruction vs survival

Miles from Nowhere

Cat Stevens

A solitary traveler narrates a spiritual and physical journey toward an undefined destination, treating isolation as liberation…

spiritual seeking freedom through solitude mortality and the body

Werewolf

Cat Power

Cat Power turns the werewolf myth into a spare, almost hymn-like meditation on shame, desire, and the parts of ourselves that…

shame and secrecy duality of self compulsion and desire

I Grieve

Peter Gabriel

A meditation on sudden bereavement that moves from numb disbelief through raw protest to a hard-won, unsentimental acceptance…

grief and loss the body as vessel denial and acceptance

Selah

Lauryn Hill

A confessional prayer set to a slow, mournful groove, tracing a narrator's spiral of self-deception and shame before a religious…

self-deception shame and guilt addiction to illusion

Taphead

Talk Talk

"Taphead" is less a lyric than a liturgical fragment, a string of near-aphorisms about death, rebirth, and the wearing-down of…

mortality spiritual rebirth doubt versus faith

Bedouin Dress

Fleet Foxes

A song about borrowed time and borrowed identity, framed as a wistful reckoning with youth and a fleeting image of someone…

nostalgia transience memory and image

Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)

Arcade Fire

A parental address structured as a series of blessings — trust your heart, mind, body, soul — that builds toward an unqualified…

unconditional love parental guidance imperfection and acceptance

Freedom! '90

George Michael

George Michael renounces the manufactured pop-idol persona that made him famous, addressing an unnamed 'you' that stands in for…

celebrity and image authenticity vs. performance self-reinvention

Oceania

Björk

Björk voices the ocean itself as a primordial mother addressing humanity, tracing evolution from sea to land in tender, cosmic…

origin and evolution maternal address deep time versus human time

Candy Says

The Velvet Underground

A quiet, first-person portrait of alienation from one's own body and self, sung through the voice of a character named Candy,…

body dysphoria alienation from self longing for escape

No. 13 Baby

Pixies

A fragmented, image-driven portrait of a woman rendered through physical detail and refrain rather than narrative, built around…

obsessive desire fragmented portraiture exoticization/otherness

It's a Sin

Pet Shop Boys

A confessional pop song built on the grinding logic of Catholic guilt, where every desire and action the narrator has ever had…

religious guilt internalized shame repression

Get Started, Start a Fire

Graham Parker

Graham Parker strings together three iconic women -- an invented sister to the Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan of Arc -- and…

female suffering under myth and celebrity destruction as both punishment and release historical pastiche and anachronism

All Mirrors

Angel Olsen

A brief, incantatory meditation on self-recognition slipping away, built almost entirely on repetition rather than narrative…

aging and loss of self-image memory and repetition identity dissolution