Results for “gendered caretaking labor”

Songs

Fruits of My Labor

Lucinda Williams

A hushed, sensuous meditation on hard-won ease, sung to an absent lover whose memory the singer keeps circling back to even as…

earned solitude memory and longing domestic sensuality

Fast Car

Tracy Chapman

Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" tracks a working-class narrator's attempt to escape poverty and caretaking through a relationship,…

economic precarity escape and mobility cyclical dependency and addiction

Workin' Day and Night

Michael Jackson

A frantic, groove-driven complaint disguised as a love song: the narrator is exhausted not by manual labor but by the endless…

overwork as metaphor for unreciprocated effort suspicion and jealousy exhaustion

Superwoman

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

How Strong Is a Woman

Ann Peebles

Ann Peebles takes up a question circulating in early-70s soul and pop culture — who's stronger, men or women — and answers it in…

gender roles and power romantic devotion vs independence strength redefined through love

Save Me

Nina Simone

A woman in the grip of a bad romance turns her plea into a comic-desperate cry for rescue, invoking cartoon superheroes…

romantic entrapment self-sacrifice in love desperation and helplessness

Four Years of Chances

Margo Price

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

This Woman's Work

Maxwell

Maxwell's Unplugged reading of Kate Bush's ballad turns a song about a man helplessly watching his wife through a dangerous…

helplessness in the face of mortality regret over words and gestures withheld gendered division of labor and pain

Four Strong Winds

Neil Young

A drifting laborer weighs a move west for work while quietly accepting that the relationship he's leaving behind won't survive…

itinerant labor resignation fading love

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

Strike Blues

John Lee Hooker

A first-person lament from the depths of an auto industry strike, where the speaker's survival hinges on a labor dispute he has…

economic precarity labor and industry dependency on institutions

Scorn

Portishead

A weary meditation on gender roles and the exhaustion of performing femininity as a game, "Scorn" pleads for authentic…

gender roles emotional exhaustion authenticity vs performance

Something More Than Free

Jason Isbell

A working-class narrator describes his days through the rhythm of manual labor, framing exhaustion and diminished expectation as…

labor and class faith as consolation resignation vs. dignity

Kool Thing

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

Androgynous

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

Golden Gal

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

Lola

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

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

The Beatles

A bouncy, deliberately artificial ska-pop tale of a market-stall trader and a band singer who fall in love, marry, and settle…

everyday romance domesticity gender roles

This Ain't No Picnic

Minutemen

A short, blunt punk song about wage labor as a form of daily indignity. The narrator describes clocking in and out for a boss he…

wage labor and exploitation class resentment dignity versus survival

At Home He's a Tourist

Gang of Four

A clipped, funk-inflected post-punk track that treats leisure, culture-consumption, and sexual routine as forms of alienated…

alienation under capitalism commodification of leisure and sex self-improvement as anxiety

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

Sleater‐Kinney

Sleater-Kinney takes the fan-idolatry that surrounds male rock stars and flips the gender of the fantasy, imagining a female…

gender and rock stardom fandom and desire female agency

Diamond Day

Vashti Bunyan

A short pastoral hymn that treats an ordinary day of rural labor as something precious, using plain agricultural imagery to…

rural simplicity contentment the sacred ordinary

Doo Wop (That Thing)

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

In the Mood

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

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

Rosanne Cash

This is a traditional 19th-century Christmas hymn, written by Edmund Sears in 1849, performed here by a young Rosanne Cash on a…

longing for peace weariness and labor spiritual hope

Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Black Girl)

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

Woman

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

Matty Groves

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

Suggestion

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

Dancing Barefoot

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

Harder Better Faster Stronger

Daft Punk

A single fragmented phrase is chopped, looped, and reassembled through vocoder into a mantra about relentless productivity and…

labor and productivity machine identity repetition and ritual

The House of the Rising Sun

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

The Joke

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

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

Cat Power

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

Gold Digger

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

Cheerleader

St. Vincent

A quietly furious refusal set to a lurching, theatrical arrangement: the narrator catalogs her own compromises and…

self-erasure in relationships complicity and compromise refusal/resistance

The Model

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

If I Were

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

Oops! I Did It Again

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

Shayla

Blondie

Blondie sketches a factory worker's escape fantasy that curdles into something stranger and sadder — a wish to dissolve into…

alienation from labor longing for escape the illusory nature of freedom