Cat Power
Cat Power turns a single word into a chant of self-definition, using repetition rather than narrative to insist on a selfhood…
self-definition independence from judgment recovery and transformation
Sonic Youth
A satirical dialogue between a rock star's ego and a skeptical female voice, "Kool Thing" stages a flirtation that curdles into…
gender and power celebrity worship racial politics
The Replacements
A quietly tender ballad from a famously loud punk band, this song imagines two gender-nonconforming lovers with a gentleness…
gender nonconformity acceptance and tolerance love as constancy
Animal Collective
A song built around a half-real, half-mediated female icon glimpsed through screens and reviews, with the narrator working out…
celebrity and mediated desire gender and sexuality fandom as devotion
The Kinks
A wide-eyed young narrator recounts a night at a Soho club where he meets a striking, ambiguous figure named Lola, and the song…
gender ambiguity sexual awakening urban nightlife
Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill delivers a two-part sermon on sex, self-respect, and modern relationship dysfunction, addressing women in the first…
sexual double standards nostalgia for a simpler past personal responsibility
Talib Kweli
A loose-limbed party track built around braggadocio and seduction, where Talib Kweli shifts between flirtatious come-ons, boasts…
seduction and courtship artistic superiority authenticity vs. performance
Robyn
A teenage-pop relationship anthem from Robyn's mid-90s debut era that frames romantic worth as a transaction of effort and…
respect in relationships gender expectations conditional love
Ella Fitzgerald
A duet built entirely on a woman making excuses to leave and a man supplying reasons to keep her there, all while a blizzard…
seduction and resistance social propriety vs desire persuasion and pressure
Cream
This is Cream's electrified cover of a pre-war country blues (originally by Blind Joe Reynolds), turned into a slow-burning…
sexual jealousy infidelity folk wisdom/proverb
Brandi Carlile
Brandi Carlile addresses two vulnerable young people—a boy who doesn't fit masculine norms and a girl navigating a world still…
marginalization and difference gender expectations resilience
Vashti Bunyan
A brief, riddling song built entirely on a hypothetical separation, weighing two possible reactions to loss against each other:…
conditional love fear of abandonment self-protection through detachment
Fugazi
Fugazi's early anthem against street harassment is delivered from a shifting first-person voice, moving between a woman's direct…
street harassment gender and power complicity and bystander silence
Cat Power strips the Rolling Stones' garage-rock anthem of its swagger and turns it into something hushed, sad, and almost…
alienation commercial saturation exhaustion
Kanye West Tribute Band
A Ray Charles sample and a party-ready hook frame a much darker set of verses about money, sex, race, and resentment between men…
gender and money distrust and betrayal black masculinity and provider anxiety
Richard Thompson
Richard Thompson's version strips a bubblegum pop hit down to voice and guitar, exposing lyrics about romantic manipulation that…
manipulation dressed as innocence performance versus sincerity gender and blame
Patti Smith
A dance-trance hymn to erotic and spiritual surrender, where a woman's devotion to a man is described in the third person as…
erotic devotion as religion loss of self through ecstasy gender and idealization
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
Nina Simone
Nina Simone's reading of this traditional ballad restores the older female-narrator version of the song, in which a woman looks…
ruin and regret intergenerational warning fatalism
Margo Price
Margo Price surveys the transactional culture of Nashville's music industry from the vantage of a newcomer who has already been…
music industry exploitation gender and power authenticity vs. commerce
Kraftwerk
A deadpan, synth-driven character sketch of a fashion model, delivered with the same flat affect Kraftwerk applies to machines…
commodification of beauty surveillance and consumption media and celebrity
Lead Belly
An old Southern folk ballad, filtered through Lead Belly's version, that turns a simple question about infidelity into something…
betrayal and suspicion death and unexplained violence isolation/exile
Nat King Cole
This is Nat King Cole's rendition of "La Adelita," one of the best-known corridos of the Mexican Revolution, sung from the…
devotion and possessiveness war and mortality folk heroism
David Bowie
A voyeuristic narrator watches a street-corner seduction unfold from a hotel window, alternately mocking and envying the…
voyeurism and surveillance queer desire and rivalry gender performance and camp
A slippery, almost mantra-like track built from a numeric countdown and a cycling list of demands, where desire and commerce…
desire vs. commodification repetition and ritual unpredictability/chance
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith delivers an ultimatum blues to a freeloading lover, dressing up a blunt economic demand in barnyard comedy and…
economic independence sexual and domestic reciprocity female autonomy
A club-and-nightlife narrative that follows the mating rituals of a night out, mapping the performance, pretense, and…
casual sex and disposability performance and masquerade gender dynamics and predation
Etta James
Etta James takes a Willie Dixon blues lyric written for a male singer and, sung from a woman's voice, turns a checklist of…
desire and domesticity gender role reversal possessiveness dressed as devotion
Betty Davis
A slow, confessional ballad in which Betty Davis strips away the funk-rock swagger of her usual persona to admit vulnerability…
emotional vulnerability the gap between maturity and desire dependency versus independence
The Temptations
A mid-80s Temptations single that reworks old-fashioned courtship etiquette into a slick, upbeat pitch. The narrator presents…
chivalry and gender roles nostalgia for traditional courtship masculine self-presentation
Eurythmics
A propulsive, largely nonsensical dance-pop chant built around the fetishized repetition of a single composer's name,…
obsessive repetition performance and artifice gendered desire and control
Gram Parsons
A countrypolitan narrative song told by a man who uproots his life to satisfy his wife's craving for city glamour, only to watch…
rural-to-urban displacement the limits of sacrifice gendered domestic roles
The Supremes
An early Supremes single that plays out a small courtship drama in miniature: a woman rebuffs a suitor's advances, only to be…
courtship and resistance non-verbal communication gendered power in romance
Sarah Vaughan
A torch song built entirely around one confined domestic scene: a woman drinking coffee alone through the small hours, waiting…
romantic waiting and vigilance gendered domestic roles insomnia and time distortion
A smooth soul plea in which a narrator tries to talk a wounded woman out of her cynicism about love, positioning himself as…
persuasion and courtship healing after heartbreak idealization of love
Kate Bush
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as a problem that could be solved by literally trading…
empathy and its limits gender and relational miscommunication bargaining with fate
Patti Smith opens her debut album by rewriting Van Morrison's garage-rock standard as a declaration of self-authored sin and…
blasphemy and self-determination desire and conquest gender and voice inversion
A song about the gulf of misunderstanding between two lovers, imagined as something so vast it could only be closed by a…
miscommunication in intimacy empathy and its limits bargaining with fate
A classic country kiss-off built on a simple ledger metaphor: four years of a failing marriage tallied down to the exact number…
infidelity and neglect domestic labor and its imbalance vindication after heartbreak
Gladys Knight
Gladys Knight catalogs the domestic labor of a woman keeping a household running while her partner grows cold and indifferent,…
emotional labor and domestic care withheld affection self-respect and pride