Results for “complicity of the witness”

Songs

Laura Marling

This is Laura Marling's recording of Neil Young's 1972 song about heroin addiction, written after Young watched a bandmate…

addiction loss complicity of the witness

Billie Holiday

A protest song built on a single sustained metaphor, comparing lynched Black bodies hanging from Southern trees to fruit ready…

racial violence and lynching complicity of the pastoral South witness and testimony

Interpol

A murky, incantatory song built around two women's names -- Rosemary and Sandy -- that Interpol never fully reconciles into a…

complicity and denial seduction as manipulation guilt and judgment

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

Bill Callahan

A closing statement for an album called Apocalypse, this song imagines departure as both a literal ride into open country and a…

mortality departure and retirement personal apocalypse

SZA

SZA casts herself as the mistress in a triangle and refuses the shame the role usually carries, framing her position as a…

infidelity and complicity self-worth versus desire possession and comparison

Curtis Mayfield

A eulogy and a warning delivered in the same breath, this song uses the death of a minor drug-trade casualty from the Superfly…

addiction and exploitation systemic racism/economic entrapment urban despair

Aretha Franklin

A joyous, motorized courtship song built around a single sustained conceit: romance as a drive on an open highway. Aretha…

romance as motion/escape freedom and self-determination playful flirtation

Magazine

A song about ideological homelessness, built around a narrator who has infiltrated a crowd or movement only to find himself…

ideological disillusionment alienation from crowds and movements cynicism about political certainty

Brandi Carlile

Brandi Carlile's title track builds a life's worth of scars and travels into a single argument: experience is meaningless…

intimacy as validation hidden suffering behind a public self devotion and destiny

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