Common
A party track built around a repeated chant of togetherness and excess, where Common trades his usual introspection for…
celebration and excess loyalty among friends upward mobility
Hank Williams
A breathless invitation to a Cajun celebration, this song strings together food, music, and a woman's name into a single rushing…
celebration regional identity and place romantic anticipation
Daft Punk
A vocoder-processed voice loops a handful of phrases about celebration and dancing until the words stop functioning as narrative…
release through repetition collective celebration dissolution of self via technology (vocoder)
The Flaming Lips
A short, incantatory track that treats luck as a physical force, something that arrives like weather and settles on a person…
luck and chance transformation into manhood weather/nature as metaphor for fate
The Pretenders
A restless, mid-career reckoning song in which Chrissie Hynde's narrator refuses both the comfort of settled domesticity and the…
compromise and aging class and global inequality celebrity exhaustion
Sonic Youth
A satirical dialogue between a rock star's ego and a skeptical female voice, "Kool Thing" stages a flirtation that curdles into…
gender and power celebrity worship racial politics
Nat King Cole
This is Nat King Cole's rendition of "Las Mañanitas," the traditional Mexican birthday and saint's-day serenade, sung not as a…
birth and renewal communal celebration dawn as symbol
Kris Kristofferson
A carnival-barker satire that reimagines hell as a theme park, complete with billboards, ticket lines, and celebrity attractions…
moral corruption as entertainment consumerism and commodified sin celebrity and infamy
Common builds a triumphant victory-lap track around a sampled ELO hook, using the sky as a running metaphor for ascent,…
ambition realized spiritual gratitude celebrity and success
Air
A woozy, vocoder-warped taunt built almost entirely out of one phrase, "Sexy Boy" pokes at masculine vanity and celebrity…
vanity and self-image celebrity and consumerism irony versus seduction
Animal Collective
A song built around a half-real, half-mediated female icon glimpsed through screens and reviews, with the narrator working out…
celebrity and mediated desire gender and sexuality fandom as devotion
Elvis Costello
A deceptively sunny, Beach Boys-styled pop song that uses its bright surf-rock arrangement as a Trojan horse for a scathing…
media and celebrity culture environmental destruction disillusionment with 60s idealism
The Velvet Underground
A closing-track litany that names a small cast of the dispossessed—people with literally nothing left to their name—and turns…
poverty and dispossession resignation found community among outcasts
B.B. King
This is a blues-idiom Christmas song built almost entirely on gratitude and physical warmth rather than religious or sentimental…
romantic gratitude domestic contentment sensual celebration
Taylor Swift
A bright, bubblegum pop track that pivots halfway through from scolding online trolls to a broader plea for LGBTQ acceptance.…
online harassment LGBTQ solidarity celebrity feuds
Mariah Carey
This is Mariah Carey's 1994 cover of the Phil Spector/Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry classic, reworked as a Wall-of-Sound production…
loneliness during celebration longing and absence nostalgia for past happiness
Fairport Convention
An opening invocation that doubles as a band introduction, this track functions as a ceremonial curtain-raiser for Fairport…
communal ritual music as invocation self-referential performance
Weezer
A self-described nobody fantasizes about the glamour of Beverly Hills while admitting, almost in the same breath, that the class…
class envy celebrity worship self-deprecation
Michael Jackson
A buoyant, physically driven declaration of infatuation built almost entirely around a single hook that gets repeated, echoed,…
infatuation desire and pursuit possessiveness
Kraftwerk
A deadpan, synth-driven character sketch of a fashion model, delivered with the same flat affect Kraftwerk applies to machines…
commodification of beauty surveillance and consumption media and celebrity
Howlin’ Wolf
A raucous invitation to an all-night party is delivered as a roll call of colorful characters, each summoned by nickname to a…
communal celebration working-class nightlife chaos as pleasure
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
Paul Simon
Written with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, this track from Graceland fuses Zulu isicathamiya vocal tradition with a spare…
homelessness and displacement cross-cultural collaboration communal grief and endurance
Steely Dan
A neighborhood gang works itself into a fever pitch preparing for the homecoming of a woman named Josie, whose arrival promises…
homecoming as ritual collective male desire violence disguised as celebration
Madvillain
A dense, freewheeling verse from MF Doom that piles up internal rhyme and non-sequitur imagery to sketch a self-portrait through…
identity through negation authenticity vs. costume/disguise street survival and hustling
T. Rex
A glam-rock strut built almost entirely on swagger and sound rather than narrative, the song is a self-mythologizing come-on in…
performed masculinity desire and conquest celebrity self-mythologizing
Stevie Wonder
A deceptively simple birthday singalong that Stevie Wonder uses as a political vehicle, campaigning for a U.S. national holiday…
civil rights memory collective celebration as protest racial justice and equality
Donny Hathaway
This is less a lyric than a groove built around a single word, repeated until it becomes a chant, a claim, and an invitation.…
community and belonging reclamation of a stigmatized word celebration amid hardship
XTC
XTC's Andy Partridge stages a mock-confession, casting himself as an assassin who has killed off the very idea of romantic love…
disillusionment with romance performance of confession cynicism as self-defense
Talib Kweli
Talib Kweli uses the physical sensation of depth—gravity, fire, ice, the ocean floor—as a metaphor for both emotional lows and…
authenticity vs. celebrity struggle and resilience artistic integrity
Vampire Weekend
A frantic, pitch-shifted pop song about young mortality dressed up as car-crash Americana. Beneath its manic energy and title…
dying young recklessness fatalism
Waylon Jennings
This is a theme song that doubles as a character sketch and a wink at its own singer, framing rural outlaws as harmless folk…
rural outlaw mythology folk-hero framing of crime Southern identity and pride
Lorde
A teenager from an unglamorous town catalogs the luxury clichés of contemporary pop and mass media, then refuses them, proposing…
class and aspiration media saturation and celebrity excess authenticity versus performance
St. Vincent
A war-correspondent's letter home collides with a chant that watches a city burn while its people dance in the ashes. The song…
war and its aftermath seduction of false comfort collective denial
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
Frank Sinatra
A holiday standard that consoles rather than celebrates, urging cheer in the present tense while openly admitting that reunion…
separation and longing deferred hope resilience
A new father's unguarded celebration of his infant daughter's birth, structured as a series of rhetorical questions that answer…
fatherhood and new life gratitude love as creative force
Deep Purple
This is Deep Purple's cover of the Neil Diamond original, a straightforward blues-rock love song built around a repeated title…
idealized love devotion simplicity/contentment
Van Morrison
A rhapsodic, almost plotless celebration of communal joy, music, and firelight, built around a rolling gypsy caravan as an image…
communal belonging music as transcendence romantic longing
The Clash
A ska-inflected celebration of a London rude boy who refuses to reform, structured as a call-and-response between disapproving…
youth rebellion respectability politics working-class identity