Results for “displacement vs. home”

Songs

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

Roxy Music

A deadpan monologue delivered by a wealthy consumer who has replaced human intimacy with a mail-order inflatable doll, framed as…

consumerism alienation artificiality vs authenticity

Long Way Home

Tom Waits

A wandering man confesses to a lover that he's constitutionally unable to take the straight path home, in love or in life. Waits…

restlessness and wanderlust romantic unreliability the tension between domesticity and freedom

Rock & Roll Stew

Traffic

This is a road-worn touring song, a loose, groove-driven complaint and celebration about the grind of life on the move. It…

touring exhaustion displacement vs. home alienation from ordinary life

Paradise

John Prine

Prine elegizes a real Kentucky town erased by strip mining, using a child's plea to his father as the frame for a broader story…

environmental destruction loss of home/place industrial 'progress' vs. nature

Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend

Thin Lizzy

This is Thin Lizzy's suite-like tribute to Irish identity, stitching together folk balladry, mythic invocation, and a rapid-fire…

Irish cultural inheritance myth and storytelling exile and longing for home

Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay

Otis Redding

A man who has moved across the country sits by the water in San Francisco, watching ships come and go, admitting he is doing…

idleness and drift migration and displacement loneliness

Christmas In the Room

Sufjan Stevens

A quiet domestic love song that strips Christmas of all its commercial and social trappings and relocates the holiday's meaning…

intimacy vs. commercialism presence over spectacle domestic love as sanctuary

It's Good to Be King

Tom Petty

Tom Petty builds a wistful daydream around the fantasy of kingship, using royal imagery as a stand-in for escape from ordinary…

escapism fantasy vs. reality longing for control

Heaven and Hell

Black Sabbath

This is Black Sabbath's Dio-era title track, a slow-building anthem that treats existence as a rigged carousel between opposing…

moral duality illusion vs. reality exploitation of belief

Boogie Street

Leonard Cohen

A meditation on the pull between transcendence and the grinding routine of ordinary commerce and appetite, imagined as a street…

sacred vs. profane mortality and impermanence spiritual longing amid worldly routine

Cranes in the Sky

Solange

Solange catalogs a long list of failed coping mechanisms for an unnamed sorrow, building an inventory of avoidance that…

avoidance and denial depression/emotional exhaustion consumerism as false comfort

Changes

David Bowie

A song about self-reinvention that treats identity as something perpetually in motion rather than a fixed achievement. Bowie…

self-reinvention generational conflict identity instability

What's Going On

Marvin Gaye

A returning-soldier's-eye plea addressed to family members in turn — mother, brother, father — asking why grief and violence…

war and its cost at home generational misunderstanding police brutality and protest

Pink + White

Frank Ocean

A hazy, sun-warmed meditation on being shaped and protected by someone else's love, set against a backdrop of natural disaster…

maternal or protective love survival and disaster memory and childhood

Gloria

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

A quiet meditation on walking alone toward some unnamed threshold, framed as a kind of secular hymn. The repeated invocation of…

solitude and pilgrimage devotion without doctrine mortality and departure

Superheroes

Ethan Whitney

This is a straightforward pop declaration of devotion that borrows superhero mythology to dress up a fairly conventional promise…

devotion and support escapism fantasy of destiny

Unknown Legend

Neil Young

A domestic sketch collides with a highway fantasy: the narrator remembers a diner waitress and imagines her alternate, freer…

restlessness and rootlessness domestic confinement vs. freedom idealization/myth-making

Beast Of Burden

The Rolling Stones

A weary plea for tenderness dressed up as a refusal to keep serving as someone's workhorse. The narrator insists he's given…

exhaustion in relationships emotional labor vs desire masculinity and self-worth

Changes

Yes

A breakup narrated in the language of instability rather than closure, where the title word does double duty as both diagnosis…

breakup and disillusionment emotional numbness self-reflection vs blame

All the Young Dudes (David Bowie & Ian Hunter Vocal)

Mott the Hoople

A glam-rock anthem that assembles a cast of disaffected, gender-bending teenagers and hands them a vague, urgent 'news' to…

generational rupture glam identity and androgyny disaffection with 60s idealism

Look At Miss Ohio

Gillian Welch

A short, circling ballad about a young woman fleeing domestic expectation for a taste of freedom before she settles into the…

deferred responsibility female autonomy vs. convention escape and fantasy

Hush

Deep Purple

This is a cover of Joe South's garage-pop original, reworked by Deep Purple into a driving rock jam built around a simple…

obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love desire vs. self-control

Stairway to Heaven

Led Zeppelin

A slow-building folk-rock epic that follows a mysterious woman convinced she can purchase spiritual transcendence, using her as…

spiritual materialism vs. authentic enlightenment ambiguity of language and meaning pastoral/mythic imagery as escape

The Weekend

SZA

SZA narrates an affair with candor rather than shame, positioning herself as the intermittent, exciting alternative to a primary…

infidelity and complicity self-worth vs. self-sabotage possessiveness and jealousy

Freeway of Love

Aretha Franklin

This is a driving-metaphor party song: sex and romance recast as a joyride down an open highway in a pink Cadillac. It's…

romantic/sexual liberation escape and momentum playfulness and flirtation