Results for “cruelty of moral authority”

Songs

Bleed The Freak

Alice in Chains

A confrontational early Alice in Chains track that inverts biblical language and moral hierarchies to attack self-righteous…

religious hypocrisy judgment and retribution cruelty of moral authority

Never Stop

Echo & the Bunnymen

A terse, image-dense track that pits mercenary greed and dead ideology against a stubborn, almost defiant insistence on love as…

greed vs. love disillusionment with authority/religion moral ambiguity

Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake

Grandaddy

A loose, dreamlike catalog of small-town wreckage - shut-down factories, joyriding teens, a decrepit limousine, a spray-painted…

small-town decay aimlessness and boredom mechanization versus nature

In the City

The Jam

A debut single that doubles as a manifesto, announcing a generational voice against the backdrop of late-70s urban Britain. It's…

generational conflict youth identity urban alienation

Devil's Gonna Git You

Bessie Smith

A blues warning delivered as a curse: the narrator threatens a philandering partner with damnation, using the devil as a…

infidelity and betrayal moral reckoning female assertiveness

The Cold Hard Truth

George Jones

George Jones builds this song around a striking conceit: the truth itself shows up as a character, confronting a man about the…

personified truth/conscience infidelity and self-deception moral reckoning

On the Turning Away

Pink Floyd

A gentle, hymn-like protest song that addresses complacency toward poverty and suffering directly, using the recurring image of…

social indifference collective responsibility moral awakening

Folk Jam

Pavement

A loose, half-improvised sketch from Pavement's most polished album, built around family lineage, corrupt authority, and a wry…

inherited guilt paranoia and surveillance authority and corruption

Run With the Pack

Bad Company

A defiant kiss-off anthem built around the image of running free from a controlling relationship or authority. The narrator…

escape and freedom distrust of authority independence

Dollar Bill Blues

Townes Van Zandt

A ramshackle blues about a broke, drink-craving gambler whose fantasies of easy money and easy love curdle into a confession of…

poverty and want drink and gambling as fate violence disguised as bravado

Paradise Circus

Massive Attack

A slow-burning meditation on desire as self-inflicted damage, built from a handful of repeated images—storms, sin, flame,…

desire and self-destruction moral ambivalence addiction to feeling

Squonk

Genesis

Genesis take the folkloric Squonk—a creature of Pennsylvania legend so ashamed of its own ugliness that it weeps constantly and…

shame and self-loathing the cruelty of pursuit despair and self-destruction

The Rainbow

Talk Talk

An oblique meditation on justice, guilt, and the gap between legal verdicts and moral truth, built from fragments of courtroom…

justice and its failures guilt and repentance institutional power

Heaven and Hell

Black Sabbath

This is Black Sabbath's title track marking the arrival of Ronnie James Dio, trading the band's earlier horror-movie doom for…

moral ambiguity illusion versus reality corrupted power

Hellacious Acres

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

A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

Laura Marling

This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1963 apocalyptic ballad, structured as a call-and-response between a questioning parent and a…

apocalypse and prophecy witness and testimony social collapse

Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It

Ice Cube

Ice Cube uses the media's stock accusation that gangsta rap 'causes' violence as a satirical device, exaggerating the charge…

media scapegoating and moral panic authenticity vs commercial gatekeeping black masculinity and self-reliance

I Want Your Sex, Pts. 1 & 2

George Michael

George Michael turns a single, blunt demand into a sustained argument about desire, patience, and monogamy, dressing up a simple…

sexual desire and frustration persuasion and rhetoric monogamy versus promiscuity

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

Swamp

Talking Heads

"Swamp" plays like a fever-dream noir, David Byrne narrating a shadowy transaction with the devil and a cast of menacing,…

paranoia moral corruption identity dissolution

Bird On a Wire

Leonard Cohen

A confession and an apology run together as the speaker compares himself to a series of unstable, straining images to explain…

freedom versus commitment guilt and self-forgiveness instability of the self

Pancho and Lefty

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

I Love a Man In a Uniform

Gang of Four

A first-person portrait of a man who joins the military not out of conviction but as a solution to unemployment, lost…

militarism as consumer choice economic desperation masculinity and self-worth

Helplessness Blues

Fleet Foxes

A young narrator wrestles with the individualism he was raised on, wondering whether meaning comes from being special or from…

individualism vs. collectivism disillusionment with authority search for purpose

World On Fire

Dolly Parton

A protest anthem built on a nursery-rhyme taunt, cataloguing political dishonesty, social division and violence while insisting…

political disillusionment social division moral urgency

Something In The Way

Nirvana

A hushed, almost inert closer to Nevermind that trades the album's loud-quiet-loud dynamics for a single sustained murmur. The…

isolation destitution moral numbness

Generals and Majors

XTC

XTC dresses up an anti-militarist satire as a jaunty, whistleable pop song, mocking career soldiers who crave conflict for its…

militarism and glory-seeking satire of authority boredom as a driver of violence

Jokerman

Bob Dylan

Dylan builds a shape-shifting composite figure out of biblical allusion, political imagery, and mythic archetype, then refuses…

moral ambiguity messianic figures and false prophets political violence and complicity

Wandering Star

Portishead

A slow, dread-soaked meditation on despair that borrows apocalyptic language to describe private, unrelenting psychic pain. The…

despair and depression isolation biblical/apocalyptic imagery

Unshaken

D'Angelo

A meditative prayer set against apocalyptic collapse, this song written for a game about the closing of the American frontier…

spiritual endurance moral reckoning memory and forgetting

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

Don't Come Back

Buzzcocks

A brisk breakup song dressed as a pep talk, where the narrator's encouragement to move on curdles into something closer to…

breakup and detachment false encouragement moral relativism

Sex, Drugs and Violence

Public Enemy

Public Enemy uses three loosely connected vignettes of unsolved shootings tied to hip-hop culture to indict the industry and…

media complicity violence in hip-hop culture commercialization of black death

Must Be Santa

Bob Dylan

Dylan's version of the polka novelty song plays it almost entirely straight as a call-and-response Christmas romp, building…

holiday tradition Americana kitsch absurdist humor

All That You Have Is Your Soul

Emmylou Harris

A mother's warning becomes a hard-won personal confession, as the narrator traces her own failures to heed advice about…

inherited wisdom moral compromise self-possession versus loss of self

Wind-Up

Jethro Tull

Wind-Up closes Aqualung's second-side critique of institutional religion with a direct autobiographical account of a schoolboy…

institutional religion vs personal faith education as indoctrination inherited belief

Poncho & Lefty

Townes Van Zandt

A weathered ballad about a Mexican bandit and the friend who may have betrayed him, told with the flat, elliptical tone of a…

betrayal and guilt myth-making and unreliable legend exile and diminishment

Schizophrenia

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" builds a fractured character sketch around a woman whose mental illness is treated with unsettling…

mental illness and stigma unreliable perception family cruelty

ooh la la

Run the Jewels

A high-energy flex built on a chopped vocal hook lifted from an old funk/soul sample, where El-P and Killer Mike trade boastful,…

braggadocio excess and appetite anti-authority posture

Sin City (B Side)

Uncle Tupelo

This is Uncle Tupelo's take on the Flying Burrito Brothers standard, a doom-laden vision of Los Angeles as a modern Babylon…

moral corruption of wealth apocalyptic judgment urban decay