Results for “community and ritual”

Songs

The Three Bells

Alison Krauss

This is a folk parable that condenses an entire human life—birth, marriage, death—into three ringing-bell scenes tied to the…

cycle of life community and ritual mortality

Frosty The Snowman

Ella Fitzgerald

This is Ella Fitzgerald's swinging take on the beloved children's Christmas novelty song, complete with an extra descriptive…

childhood wonder impermanence and mortality (softened) magic versus rationality

A Roller Skating Jam Named "Saturdays"

De La Soul

A radio-skit framed jam that turns Saturday roller-rink culture into a loose celebration of release after the work week,…

leisure and release community ritual casual romance and its double standards

Spoonman

Soundgarden

A tribute to a real Seattle street performer becomes a compressed meditation on rhythm as communal salvation, with the song's…

music as ritual/salvation street performance and urban folklore community through rhythm

Oh! Sweet Nuthin'

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

Mind Your Own Business (Show 9)

Hank Williams

This is a live radio performance of Hank Williams' comic novelty song, framed by an announcer's folksy introduction before…

privacy versus gossip marital independence rural community friction

Heads Will Roll

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

A dancefloor incantation built on a beheading command, this track turns a nightclub into a site of ecstatic dissolution. Karen O…

ecstatic dissolution surveillance/spectacle of the body ritual and repetition

Night

Bill Callahan

A short, incantatory piece built around a single image—a door that both conceals and contains someone or something unknowable.…

mystery of death or absence the limits of knowledge ritual and repetition

Come All Ye

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

Shadowplay

Joy Division

A tense, dreamlike monologue in which the speaker searches an urban and psychic landscape for someone he seems to have already…

guilt and complicity urban alienation performance of identity

Watch the Stars

Bert Jansch

A late Bert Jansch piece built almost entirely from repetition and simple natural imagery — stars, wind, moon — cycling through…

natural cycles impermanence meditation/ritual

Give Love On Christmas Day

The Temptations

A holiday standard built on a simple, almost sermon-like premise: material gifts are fine, but love is the only present that…

generosity versus materialism universal love seasonal community

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

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

My Babe

Spoon

A song about staying put — emotionally and literally — inside a routine that has worn thin, and choosing devotion anyway. The…

endurance of routine devotion as choice stasis versus escape

Earth Intruders

Björk

A relentless, drum-heavy chant that casts a collective 'we' as an invading army of natural forces, half-tribal ritual and…

collective identity vs. individual doubt militarism and ritual violence nature reclaiming or overwhelming order

Sinnerman

Nina Simone

A traditional African-American spiritual reworked into a nearly ten-minute incantation, tracking a sinner's frantic search for…

judgment and reckoning futility of escape divine justice vs. mercy

The Next Episode

Dr. Dre

A West Coast victory-lap posse cut in which Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg reassert their partnership and their region's dominance,…

regional pride hedonism and ritual (weed, cars, drinking) reunion/partnership

California Sun

Ramones

A cover of a 1960s surf-pop tune, blasted through the Ramones' buzzsaw guitars and deadpan delivery, turning a sunny travelogue…

escapism nostalgia and pastiche repetition as ritual

Surfin' Bird

Ramones

A cover of a novelty doo-wop hit turned into a blunt-force punk exercise, this track strips a already-nonsensical 1963 single…

nonsense as content repetition and ritual pop history as raw material

Lover

Taylor Swift

A wedding-vow of a love song built around domestic imagery and a slow-waltz tenderness, where the small details of shared life…

domestic intimacy commitment and permanence vulnerability through plainness

Spit Your Game

The Notorious B.I.G.

A posthumous posse cut built around a chanted, list-like hook that reduces street life to a sequence of imperatives: talk tough,…

bravado and reputation violence as ritual material excess

Chicken Soup With Rice

Carole King

A children's calendar song that runs through all twelve months, using a single absurd fixation—chicken soup with rice—as the…

the passage of time childhood imagination comfort and ritual

Magic Dance

David Bowie

A propulsive novelty-funk number written for the film Labyrinth, in which a chant-like spell is cast to soothe a crying infant…

childhood fear transformation through play ritual and incantation

The Weight

The Band

A traveler arrives in a town called Nazareth looking for simple lodging and instead gets tangled in a chain of odd requests and…

burden and obligation hospitality and its refusal community entanglement

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

Harder Better Faster Stronger

Daft Punk

A single fragmented phrase is chopped, looped, and reassembled through vocoder into a mantra about relentless productivity and…

labor and productivity machine identity repetition and ritual

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Ella Fitzgerald

A cozy standard about wanting bad weather to keep two people indoors together, sung by Fitzgerald with light swing rather than…

domestic coziness reluctant departure desire disguised as weather talk

Candy Man

Mississippi John Hurt

A rollicking Piedmont blues built entirely on a single, transparent sexual double entendre. Mississippi John Hurt uses the…

sexual innuendo folk humor itinerant male desirability

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

Dance On a Volcano

Genesis

A driving opener built around the image of a lethal dance performed on the lip of an active volcano, where every misstep is…

risk and consequence performance under pressure mortality

FALLINLOVE2NITE

Prince

A one-night invitation dressed up as a love song, built almost entirely around a single seductive refrain. Prince stages a…

seduction romantic urgency escapism

Tour de France 2003

Kraftwerk

This is Kraftwerk's minimalist tribute to the world's most famous bicycle race, built almost entirely from a litany of French…

endurance and the body technology and human effort geography as narrative

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

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

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

Bull In the Heather

Sonic Youth

A slippery, almost mantra-like track built from a numeric countdown and a cycling list of demands, where desire and commerce…

desire vs. commodification repetition and ritual unpredictability/chance

Slippery People

Talking Heads

Talking Heads build a call-and-response gospel workout out of fragmented, almost nonsensical verses and a reassuring chorus that…

religious ecstasy vs. skepticism surrender of rational control community and reassurance

One Big Holiday

My Morning Jacket

A loose, sun-warmed travelogue about escaping a hometown for the promise of somewhere better, built around a phone call and a…

escape and reinvention friendship and collective movement music-making as ritual

Swingin Party

The Replacements

A wallflower's confession dressed up as a party invitation, this song uses the image of a never-ending bash to talk about…

social anxiety self-deprecation isolation within community