Results for “dehumanization as rhetorical weapon”

Songs

Pigs

Cypress Hill

A blistering catalog of grievances against police, delivered through the extended metaphor of cops as literal pigs. The song…

police brutality institutional corruption racial profiling

Punks Jump Up to Get the Beat Down

Brand Nubian

A boastful, violence-glorifying posse track built around a call-and-response hook, in which each MC takes a turn narrating…

street violence and retaliation masculine posturing reputation and respect

Not Great Men

Gang of Four

A terse, almost slogan-like song that attacks the 'great man' theory of history, arguing that the version of the past kept on…

historiography and ideology class inequality myth-making

Ruff Ruff

Boogie Down Productions

A straightforward battle-rap posse cut where KRS-One and guest Freddie Foxxx trade verses aimed at soft, fraudulent MCs and…

authenticity vs. posturing lyrical dominance violence as rhetorical weapon

Iron Galaxy

Cannibal Ox

Iron Galaxy fuses two verses from Vordul Mega and Vast Aire into a single portrait of Harlem as both a war zone and a machine…

urban survival dehumanization poverty and violence

Mekon Headman

Wire

A clipped, paranoid vignette that fuses interrogation-room menace with pulp sci-fi imagery, built from disjointed phrases rather…

interrogation and coercion surveillance/security state paranoia

Hell Broke Luce

Tom Waits

A shell-shocked veteran's monologue delivered as a marching cadence gone wrong, this track uses barked call-and-response rhythm…

war trauma institutional betrayal dehumanization

Technologic

Daft Punk

A vocoded voice recites nothing but two-word imperative commands describing consumer-technology actions, looping and…

consumerism technological overload dehumanization

D-7

Wipers

D-7 is a terse punk chant about social exile dressed up as science-fiction escape. Its narrator, branded defective and dull by…

alienation conformity vs deviance escapism

Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

Talking Heads

A polyrhythmic groove built on Afrobeat-inspired repetition, this track dramatizes a speaker who is simultaneously a…

power and bureaucracy bodily panic and breathlessness dehumanization

Bodies

Sex Pistols

A brutal, non-narrative screed about abortion that refuses either a pro-life sermon or a clean feminist statement, instead…

abortion and its aftermath dehumanization class and institutional cruelty

21st Century Schizoid Man (Including "Mirrors")

King Crimson

A blast of distorted vocals and jagged riffing that catalogues the horrors of modern civilization in fragmented, almost…

dehumanization war and violence political corruption

Repeater

Fugazi

Repeater sketches a first-person portrait of someone reduced by drug dependency and social judgment to a statistic, then widens…

addiction and criminalization dehumanization media detachment

Police Truck

Dead Kennedys

A first-person monologue from inside a police cruiser turns state-sanctioned brutality into a joyride, with the officer-narrator…

police brutality abuse of institutional power impunity

Numbers

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk turn a numbing exercise in counting into a protest song, framing the reduction of a person to a numeral as a kind of…

dehumanization by bureaucracy loss of identity surveillance and control

They Don't Care About Us

Michael Jackson

A protest chant built almost entirely from one repeated grievance, this song stacks fragmented images of police violence, media…

police brutality institutional neglect racial injustice

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

Mathematics

Mos Def

Mos Def builds a dense, statistics-driven indictment of American racial and economic injustice around the conceit of numbers,…

mass incarceration systemic racism economic inequality

Poetic Machine Gun

Buzzcocks

A speaker pitches his own verbal outpouring as a weapon of seduction — a "poetic machine gun" that's supposed to get someone…

failed seduction language as weapon/drug male bravado vs. rejection

Raising Hell

Run-DMC

The title track of Run-DMC's landmark album is a boast-battle anthem built almost entirely from self-crowning imagery and…

braggadocio hip-hop supremacy battle rhetoric

Seconds

The Human League

A brooding album closer that reconstructs an assassination in fragmentary, almost clinical language, widely understood to allude…

political violence fame and its dangers the instant of irreversible action

30,000 Pounds of Bananas

Harry Chapin

Harry Chapin turns a real Pennsylvania trucking accident into a grim shaggy-dog story, building tension through a doomed…

fate and mechanical failure working-class labor and mortality the absurdity of tragedy

Into the Void

Black Sabbath

A doom-laden science-fiction parable in which humanity, having ruined the earth through war and pollution, launches a rocket…

ecological collapse war and dehumanization spiritual/political disillusionment

Mongoloid

DEVO

A deadpan, chugging synth-punk vignette about a man with Down syndrome (referred to by the era's clinical-turned-slur term) who…

conformity vs. difference dehumanization through categorization de-evolution / social critique

Four Long Years

Wire

A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…

mental exhaustion alienation failure of language

Viet Nam

Minutemen

A brief, blunt piece of political arithmetic disguised as a song. Minutemen reduce the Vietnam War to numbers, bureaucratic…

war and bureaucracy dehumanization by statistics imperialism

After the Flood

Talk Talk

An eight-minute drift of near-abstract imagery that reads more like liturgy than lyric, built from fragments about crowds,…

collective violence spiritual exhaustion biblical allusion (Cain)

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

Iz - Us

Aphex Twin

Iz - Us reduces language to a single barked command, looping and mangling it until the phrase stops functioning as speech and…

dehumanization of language surveillance and shame childhood discipline

Drone Bomb Me

ANOHNI

ANOHNI adopts the voice of a child in a drone-strike war zone who begs to be killed, framing annihilation as a perverse form of…

war and civilian casualties desire and death conflated complicity and guilt

Dad's Gonna Kill Me

Richard Thompson

A soldier's-eye monologue from the Iraq War, delivered in the blunt, blackly funny voice of an American GI who narrates the…

war and mortality dehumanization of soldiers media spin and propaganda

Machinist

Japanese Breakfast

A love song addressed to an emotionally shut-off partner rendered as a machine, where intimacy is described in the vocabulary of…

emotional unavailability desire versus control dehumanization of a lover

I'm Afraid of Americans

David Bowie

A jittery industrial-rock sketch of a generic American everyman named Johnny, whose consumerist appetites and hollow…

cultural imperialism consumerism paranoia and dread

Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

Public Enemy

This live rendition preserves Public Enemy's 1988 prison-break narrative, a first-person fiction about a Black man who refuses…

mass incarceration militant resistance state coercion and the draft

Electric Funeral

Black Sabbath

A doom-laden vision of nuclear apocalypse rendered as a kind of blackened hymn, cataloguing the literal physical destruction of…

nuclear annihilation dehumanization/mechanization environmental collapse

Wide Awake

Parquet Courts

A funk-punk chant built almost entirely from a single repeated phrase, this track uses relentless repetition and a driving…

vigilance and awareness repetition as rhetorical force political consciousness

The Punishment of Luxury

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

A synth-pop sermon on the moral decay that comes with excess, taking its title from a 19th-century painting to frame consumer…

consumerism and moral decay complacency versus freedom disgust and judgment

Step to My Girl

Souls of Mischief

A posse-cut brag track built around a single scenario: other men hitting on the narrators' girlfriends, and each rapper…

jealousy and possessiveness masculine status competition hypervigilance/insecurity masked as confidence

Uncontrollable Urge

DEVO

A frantic, almost cartoonish anthem about a compulsion so total it strips its narrator down to grunts and shouts. Devo turns the…

compulsion and loss of control dehumanization/mechanization of impulse repetition as content

Radioactivity

Kraftwerk

A minimalist electronic chant that turns the word 'radioactivity' into both subject and sound object, stacking place names…

nuclear power and weapons technology's double edge scientific history