Results for “defiance of conventional beauty standards”

Songs

Beautiful

Moby

A stripped-down electro-pop track built almost entirely from repeated phrases, this song stages a couple's declaration of…

romantic solidarity us-versus-them defiance surface vs. concealment

Beautiful

Carole King

A gentle self-help anthem disguised as a pop song, in which the narrator talks herself (and the listener) into projecting warmth…

self-affirmation urban alienation emotional resilience

So Beautiful

Musiq Soulchild

A neo-soul love song built almost entirely around a single declaration of devotion, sung directly to a partner the narrator…

devotion reassurance longing

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

Young and Beautiful

Lana Del Rey

A torch song written for a film about doomed excess, this track poses one anxious question over and over: does love survive once…

impermanence of beauty conditional love nostalgia for lost youth

Beautiful Love

Anita O’Day

A jazz standard from the American Songbook, this is a meditation on love as both blessing and disorienting force, addressed…

love as mystery surrender longing

Conventional Wisdom

Built to Spill

A short, circling meditation on how received wisdom persists even when it no longer fits reality. Built to Spill uses plain,…

conformity vs. change epistemic humility the persistence of habit

America the Beautiful

Frank Sinatra

This is Katharine Lee Bates's 1893 hymn to the American landscape, set to Samuel A. Ward's melody and delivered here as a…

national pride natural landscape as moral symbol idealism and unity

The Beauty of the Rain

Dar Williams

A quiet meditation on a long-term relationship at a low, uncertain point, where the speaker uses weather as a way of accepting…

emotional ambivalence in long relationships acceptance versus control vulnerability and withheld support

Everything Beautiful Is Far Away

Grandaddy

A stranded astronaut, long resigned to isolation on some barren world, walks toward a mirage of swans on a lake he's never seen…

isolation longing mortality and acceptance

In a Beautiful Place Out In the Country

Boards of Canada

An instrumental track built almost entirely from a looped, warped vocal sample inviting the listener to join a religious…

pastoral idealism turned sinister indoctrination and persuasion nostalgia for institutional innocence

Si Tu Dois Partir

Fairport Convention

This is a French-language cover of Bob Dylan's "If You Gotta Go, Go Now," translated and rendered by Fairport Convention as a…

romantic ambivalence control disguised as freedom nighttime intimacy

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

She Moves Through the Fair

Fairport Convention

An old Irish ballad, arranged by Fairport Convention with Sandy Denny's vocal at its centre, in which a young woman's parting…

death and mourning premonition lost love

I'll Keep It With Mine

Fairport Convention

A Bob Dylan composition (famously covered rather than written by Fairport Convention) built around a gently insistent offer of…

seeking versus settling unspoken devotion time and transience

Matty Groves

Fairport Convention

This is the Fairport Convention electric-folk arrangement of the ancient English/Scottish ballad about adultery, betrayal, and…

class inequality adultery and its consequences honor and vengeance

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Fairport Convention

A meditation on mortality and constancy, written by Sandy Denny and here performed by Fairport Convention (who backed her on the…

mortality and impermanence the passage of time constancy in love

Percy's Song

Fairport Convention

A first-person narrator learns a friend has been sentenced to ninety-nine years for a fatal car crash and travels to plead his…

injustice and arbitrary punishment powerlessness before institutions loyalty and friendship

Slip Jigs and Reels

Fairport Convention

A ballad-style narrative that follows an Irish emigrant from the boat to New York through a life of gambling, violence, and…

emigration and displacement the making of an outlaw loss of innocence

Reynardine

Fairport Convention

A young woman walking in the woods meets a strange, magnetic man who half-admits to being an outlaw or something worse, and ends…

seduction and danger the fox as trickster/shapeshifter female agency and vulnerability

Closing Time

Fairport Convention

This is a bar-room parable about the last hour before closing, where drink, desire, and religious longing all blur into one…

desire and its exhaustion time running out sacred and profane collapsing together

Meet On the Ledge

Fairport Convention

A young band's meditation on mortality and friendship disguised as a simple folk-rock singalong, written by a teenage Richard…

mortality and remembrance friendship and community loss of youthful idealism

My Funny Valentine

Ella Fitzgerald

A love song built almost entirely out of teasing insults, this Rodgers and Hart standard argues that real affection survives —…

imperfect love affection through teasing authenticity versus conventional beauty

HUMBLE.

Kendrick Lamar

HUMBLE. is a swaggering, almost gleeful takedown of fakery in the industry and in culture at large, delivered by a narrator who…

authenticity vs. artifice wealth and status misogynoir/beauty standards critique

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

All Under One Roof Raving

Jamie xx

A dance-floor chant built from a handful of vocal samples looped and rearranged rather than a lyric in any conventional sense.…

collective identity cultural pride/nationalism (subcultural) defiance

Death May Be Your Santa Claus

Mott the Hoople

A chaotic, near-apocalyptic rocker built almost entirely on a single interrogative refrain, this song uses repetition and…

disillusionment defiance instability/transformation

Dedicated To the Press

Betty Davis

Betty Davis turns tabloid language into a defiant first-person address, staging her own scandal coverage as a call-and-response…

public shaming of female sexuality media scrutiny self-possession vs. respectability politics

Back In Black

AC/DC

A swaggering, riff-driven declaration of return that turns absence into triumph through sheer bravado and repetition. The lyric…

defiance rebirth/return outlaw bravado

The Book of Love

Peter Gabriel

This is a cover of the Magnetic Fields song, and Gabriel's version strips away Stephin Merritt's deadpan irony in favor of a…

romantic convention vs. lived intimacy tedium redeemed by love marriage and commitment

I'm Gonna Live Till I Die

Sarah Vaughan

A brassy carpe-diem anthem in which the singer declares total commitment to pleasure and defiance of sorrow before death…

carpe diem defiance of sorrow mortality as motivation

What'll I Do

Harry Nilsson

This is Nilsson's reading of Irving Berlin's 1924 standard, delivered as part of his second collection of pre-rock pop songs.…

heartbreak loneliness memory and photographs

Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise

Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln takes a standard from the 1928 operetta "New Moon" and turns its sunrise imagery into a meditation on love's…

impermanence of love cyclical time desire and destruction

Fearless

Pink Floyd

A meditation on stubborn self-reliance framed as a hill climb, where the singer answers doubters not with argument but with…

self-determination defiance of doubters folly and wisdom reversed

Jolene

Dolly Parton

A direct plea from one woman to another, sung by a narrator who feels powerless against a rival's beauty and her partner's…

romantic insecurity female rivalry and solidarity powerlessness

Fairytale In the Supermarket

The Raincoats

A fragmented, deliberately awkward meditation on the impossibility of really knowing another person, staged against the banal…

alienation within intimacy the banality of daily life identity and projection

The Lady Is a Tramp

Frank Sinatra

A Rodgers and Hart standard in which every socially disreputable trait ascribed to the title character turns out, on inspection,…

class satire nonconformity irony of reputation

Love Like Anthrax

Gang of Four

Gang of Four turn a love song inside out, treating romantic feeling as a disease vector rather than an emotion. The track is…

anti-romanticism alienation self-disgust

The Girl from Ipanema

Amy Winehouse

This is a bossa nova standard sung from the vantage of the unseen admirer rather than the girl herself, and Winehouse leans into…

unrequited longing invisibility to the object of desire idealization from a distance

I Got You Babe

Etta James

Etta James's Muscle Shoals reading of Sonny Bono's duet standard strips away the original's novelty-pop shuffle and pop-culture…

devotion despite hardship defiance of outside judgment poverty and love as counterweights