Results for “gendered expectations”

Songs

Do You Really Want Me (Show Respect)

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

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

Little Mascara

The Replacements

A song about a woman stuck in a stalled, disappointing marriage, told by an outside voice that's half sympathetic and half…

domestic disappointment emotional repression gendered expectations

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

This Town Gets Around

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

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

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

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

Levon

Elton John

A cryptic character sketch of a wealthy, oddly rigid family man named Levon and his son Jesus, whose longing to escape the…

inherited expectation generational conflict escapism

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

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

Look At Miss Ohio

Gillian Welch

A short, circling song about a young woman stalling against the pressure to settle down—marriage, respectability, the expected…

deferred adulthood female autonomy vs. domestic expectation escape and mobility

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

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

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

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

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

Outside Woman Blues

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

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

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

Baby It's Cold Outside

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

Candy Says

The Velvet Underground

A quiet, first-person portrait of alienation from one's own body and self, sung through the voice of a character named Candy,…

body dysphoria alienation from self longing for escape

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

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

(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

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

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

Head Over Heels / Broken

Tears for Fears

A love song that keeps interrupting itself, veering between romantic infatuation and anxious social commentary before dissolving…

infatuation and vulnerability fear of loss social conscience amid personal desire

Goin' Against Your Mind

Built to Spill

Built to Spill open their 2006 album with a long, guitar-driven meditation on doubt and self-contradiction, built from a handful…

self-doubt masculinity and its expectations religious skepticism

Streets of Baltimore

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

Running Up That Hill

Kate Bush

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

Queen Bitch

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

Black Coffee

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

Beethoven (I Love To Listen)

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

Treat Her Like a Lady

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

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

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

Are You Alive?

Orbital

A fragmented, mantra-like track that circles a question about whether emotional or authentic life survives inside systems of…

alienation under capitalism authenticity vs. performance emotional numbness