Results for “disgust with conformity”

Songs

Fresh-Garbage

Spirit

A short, chant-like song built around a single grotesque image: humanity's leftover, half-digested experience as literal trash,…

consumerism waste and excess psychedelic-era social critique

Run Like Hell

Pink Floyd

A pounding, paranoid rocker from the second half of The Wall, built almost entirely on a chanted command to flee. It stages the…

paranoia and surveillance fascism and mob violence guilt and self-disgust

Mistaken for Strangers

The National

A song about the numbing conformity of adult professional life, addressed in second person to someone (and by extension…

conformity self-alienation loss of innocence

Everything's Got 'Em

Harry Nilsson

A short, incantatory nursery-rhyme of a song from Nilsson's children's fable The Point!, establishing the conformist village…

conformity belonging vs. exclusion social conditioning

Bombsite Boy

The Adverts

A first-person portrait of a young man scraping by amid post-war urban wreckage, who insists his poverty of circumstance is…

urban decay class and conformity authenticity vs compromise

A Well Respected Man (Kwyet Kinks EP)

The Kinks

A satirical character sketch of an English middle-class conformist, delivered with mock admiration that curdles into contempt.…

class satire hypocrisy conformity

Shiny Happy People

R.E.M.

A bubblegum-bright chorus of togetherness repeated to the point of hollowness, this is R.E.M. at its most deliberately…

manufactured happiness conformity propaganda and slogans

Breathe (In the Air)

Pink Floyd

An opening address that sounds like gentle life-advice slowly reveals itself as a warning about the trap of compulsive labor and…

existential dread conformity and labor the passage of time

Burn the Witch

Radiohead

A tightly wound miniature about mob justice and social conformity, built on the imagery of witch-hunts and plague-era paranoia.…

mob mentality scapegoating surveillance and conformity

Model Worker

Magazine

A deadpan monologue delivered in the voice of someone confessing bourgeois failings to an unseen authority and pledging reform…

ideological conformity self-criticism and confession consumerism vs. asceticism

Rebellion (Lies)

Arcade Fire

A pulsing, chant-like anthem built around childhood warnings about sleep, this song turns a nursery-rhyme fear into a metaphor…

childhood fear versus adult truth sleep and dreaming as refuge conformity and control

Living In the U.S.A.

Steve Miller Band

A loose, groove-driven protest song that trades argument for attitude, using a repeated defensive gesture and a nonsense scat…

personal freedom anti-authoritarianism consumerism and conformity

Academy Fight Song

Mission of Burma

A defiant refusal-of-conformity anthem that curdles into self-doubt by its final lines. The song sets up an adversarial…

conformity vs individuality institutional control self-doubt

The Hardest Cut

Spoon

A driving garage-rock riff underpins a song about leaving under duress and the psychic toll of resisting outside pressure to…

escape and departure conformity vs. independence paranoia and surveillance

Ghosts

The Jam

A terse, sermon-like address to an unnamed listener, urging them to stop hiding behind conformity and fear. Weller frames social…

self-alienation conformity vs authenticity emotional repression

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

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

Sickman

Alice in Chains

A first-person spiral through self-loathing and addiction, where the speaker names himself diseased and watches control slip…

addiction self-disgust loss of control

Dead Skunk

Loudon Wainwright III

A novelty song built entirely around roadkill, this track finds Loudon Wainwright III turning a squashed skunk into an extended…

mortality played for laughs sensory disgust rural/highway Americana

No Surprises

Radiohead

A lullaby-shaped song about a person suffocating quietly inside a comfortable, orderly life, where the wish for peace curdles…

quiet desperation suburban conformity emotional numbness

Say You Love Me

Rodney Crowell

A road-worn narrator, hungover and rattled by a bar-room bigot, turns to his partner and demands verbal reassurance rather than…

insecurity and reassurance aging and mortality bigotry and disgust

Rudie Can't Fail

The Clash

A ska-inflected celebration of a London rude boy who refuses to reform, structured as a call-and-response between disapproving…

youth rebellion respectability politics working-class identity

Never Could Toe the Mark

Waylon Jennings

A plainspoken defense of romantic independence, delivered in Waylon Jennings' outlaw drawl. The narrator explains, without…

romantic independence resistance to conformity outlaw self-mythology

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl

Broken Social Scene

A brief, mantra-like lament for someone who has traded rebellious authenticity for polish and distance, sung by a narrator who…

nostalgia for authenticity loss of innocence desire and longing

Australia

The Shins

A deceptively upbeat, jangly pop song that uses escapism and evolutionary/existential language to talk about…

existential doubt escapism entrapment vs. freedom

Cruel

St. Vincent

A short, hymn-like song about being conscripted into a role you didn't choose — motherhood, domesticity, or simply someone…

coercion disguised as care loss of self domestic conformity

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

The Working Hour

Tears for Fears

A meditation on institutional life and creative anxiety disguised as a workplace anthem, built around a long, brooding…

surveillance and judgment fear and self-doubt institutional conformity

Over the Edge

Wipers

A terse punk confession of exhaustion with betrayal and manipulation, delivered as a series of clipped accusations rather than a…

alienation psychological breakdown refusal of conformity

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

Please Take

Wire

A blunt, almost domestic-scale confrontation song built around one sustained image of betrayal-as-stabbing, delivered with a…

betrayal complicity disgust with manipulation

I Get Out

Lauryn Hill

This is Lauryn Hill's most confrontational Unplugged track, a spoken-sung indictment of institutional control framed as a…

spiritual liberation institutional control autonomy vs. conformity

Follow Your Arrow

Kacey Musgraves

A catalog of no-win social judgments builds into a plainspoken anthem for living by one's own compass rather than trying to…

double standards sexual and social freedom religious hypocrisy

Heart-Shaped Box

Nirvana

A grinding, image-drunk portrait of romantic dependency, framed as a body trapped inside someone else's body. Cobain piles up…

codependency and entrapment illness and the body sarcasm as self-defense

Merry Go 'Round

Kacey Musgraves

A small-town portrait built on nursery-rhyme wordplay, this song surveys the quiet addictions, forced marriages, and inherited…

small-town stagnation inherited expectation quiet addiction

Damaged Goods

Gang of Four

Gang of Four fuse the language of romantic breakup with the language of consumer transactions, treating a relationship like a…

commodification of relationships alienation desire vs. disgust

Naomi

Neutral Milk Hotel

A distorted, obsessive love song that swings between tenderness and revulsion, built around the fixation of a narrator who both…

obsessive desire idealization vs. disgust possession and control

Typical Girls

The Slits

The Slits catalogue a set of sexist clichés about femininity by reciting them in a flat, deadpan list, letting the accumulation…

gender stereotyping commodification of femininity conformity vs rebellion

Gimmie Gimmie Shock Treatment

Ramones

A two-minute blast built on a single joke: a narrator who's fallen apart cheerfully begs for electroconvulsive therapy the way…

mental illness and institutionalization irony of enforced happiness conformity vs. breakdown

Me Myself and I

De La Soul

De La Soul use a mirror-gazing conceit to push back against critics and industry types who wanted to pigeonhole them as hippies…

individuality vs. conformity authenticity in art resistance to stereotyping