Beastie Boys
An opening track built entirely on cartoon-pirate bravado, splicing swashbuckler movie tropes with hip-hop boast rhetoric to…
outlaw bravado juvenile provocation pop-culture pastiche
Van Halen
A travelogue-as-party-anthem, this song sells Cabo San Lucas as an escape hatch from the ordinary world, built on sun, tequila,…
escapism hedonism travel and paradise
Common
A party track built around a repeated chant of togetherness and excess, where Common trades his usual introspection for…
celebration and excess loyalty among friends upward mobility
The Notorious B.I.G.
A posthumous Bad Boy track (from the 1999 'Born Again' album) built as a victory-lap anthem, stitching together a Biggie verse…
posthumous myth-making excess and materialism hyper-masculine bravado
Danny Brown
Pneumonia is a hard, boastful posse-cut-style track from Atrocity Exhibition that trades in rapid-fire flexing about money,…
excess and indulgence hustler bravado sexual conquest
Lorde
A teenager from an unglamorous town catalogs the luxury clichés of contemporary pop and mass media, then refuses them, proposing…
class and aspiration media saturation and celebrity excess authenticity versus performance
James Blake
A luxury-draped love song built on a Metro Boomin/Travis Scott feature that trades Blake's usual confessional ache for a more…
possessive intimacy material excess as emotional language fear of solitude
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
A dancefloor incantation built on a beheading command, this track turns a nightclub into a site of ecstatic dissolution. Karen O…
ecstatic dissolution surveillance/spectacle of the body ritual and repetition
Blondie
Blondie's debut single reframes a streetwalker's infatuation with a police officer as a giddy crime narrative, blurring the…
desire as transgression policing and power irony of legal language repurposed as romance
Jamie xx
This Jamie xx track builds a euphoric, sample-driven dance anthem around a simple mantra of anticipated joy, then hands the mic…
anticipation and collective release hedonism and excess class and hustle
Snoop Dogg
A lighthearted stoner anthem built on a single extended pun: rolling so much weed becomes a kind of workout, a "kush up." Snoop…
marijuana culture excess and abundance leisure as status
Wu‐Tang Clan
This is a posse-cut style Wu-Tang track where multiple MCs trade dense, boastful verses about street history, criminal résumé,…
street survival and generational crime materialism and excess lyrical supremacy/battle rap bravado
A strutting party-rock throwaway built entirely around physical fixation, delivered with the band's trademark bravado and…
physical attraction sexual bravado hedonism
The Cure
A jittery funk-pop novelty from The Cure's most eclectic album, built on a repeated image of lightning strikes that destroy…
destruction as pleasure compulsive repetition escape and displacement
Florence + the Machine
A song about the void left by someone's silence, and the scale of belief or need required to fill it. Florence Welch turns…
romantic obsession spiritual emptiness unrequited longing
Frank Sinatra
A Cole Porter standard in which a jaded sophisticate catalogs every conventional pleasure that fails to move him, only to admit…
ennui and sophistication unrequited or unequal love irony of excess
Prince
A slow-burn seduction track built almost entirely around anticipation, in which the narrator promises total sexual surrender to…
erotic surrender impatience and urgency fantasy fulfillment
OutKast
A hurricane of a rap record built on breakneck triplet flows, gospel-choir-meets-drum-and-bass production, and a title that…
consequence and commitment excess and velocity fame and reinvention
A posthumous posse cut built around a chanted, list-like hook that reduces street life to a sequence of imperatives: talk tough,…
bravado and reputation violence as ritual material excess
Aphex Twin
Aisatsana [102] is the hushed closing track of Syro, a solo piano piece built from a simple repeating figure that unspools with…
quietude after excess domesticity memory or nostalgia
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
Bruce Springsteen
A minimal, hushed blues built on obsessive desire, where the narrator's want curdles into something closer to torment than…
obsessive desire sleeplessness and mental anguish transgressive attraction
Nas
Nas stitches together two dense verses of violent, luxury-drenched bravado and a grim first-person shooting narrative, unified…
vigilance and mortality street violence and retaliation loyalty and betrayal
The Stooges
A two-minute blast of proto-punk swagger built almost entirely on a single boast repeated until it becomes incantation. The song…
sexual bravado loss of inhibition bodily sensation over meaning
Tom Petty
This is Tom Petty in full blues-rock costume, cranking up a swaggering come-on riff with lyrics so absurd they tip into parody.…
parody of blues machismo sexual bravado as performance absurdist humor
Kendrick Lamar
A high-velocity West Coast flex track that turns a slang term for confrontation into a chant, stacking boasts about money, sex…
street credibility and violence wealth and material excess authenticity vs. performance in rap
A boastful, mythmaking duo track in which El-P and Killer Mike cast themselves as outlaw legends -- part supervillain, part folk…
self-mythologizing violence as performance drug use and excess
Queen
Queen's debut single is a wry survival manifesto disguised as a rock anthem, tracking a narrator who has chased every…
disillusionment with self-improvement excess and hollow experience survival versus success
The Fall
A brief, collage-like sketch of Los Angeles built from disconnected images rather than a story -- cinema marquees, heat-stressed…
cultural alienation artifice versus nature American excess viewed from outside
A survival narrative dressed as a celebration anthem, where the hook's carefree repetition masks a hard-won philosophy forged in…
survivor's guilt and gratitude carpe diem under duress poverty and the drug trade
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
Built on a DJ Premier loop and a simile-driven hook, this track is Nas's attempt to define his own mythology by analogy,…
self-mythology survival amid violence fame and mortality
J. Cole
The title track of KOD uses a hypnotic, hook-driven trap structure to embody the very drugs of ego, materialism, and violence it…
addiction and self-medication fame and defensiveness cyclical violence
Guided by Voices
A short, deceptively simple lo-fi anthem in which the narrator cycles through professional identities—scientist, journalist,…
self-examination addiction and escape art as self-medication