Results for “hustle and survival”

Songs

Nights

Frank Ocean

A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…

isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia

Paid In Full

Eric B.

This is the title track and origin document of hip-hop's most sampled record, a first-person account of a hustler talking…

hustling and survival redemption through legitimate work the music industry as a means of escape

Monkey Suite

Madvillain

A dense, freewheeling verse from MF Doom that piles up internal rhyme and non-sequitur imagery to sketch a self-portrait through…

identity through negation authenticity vs. costume/disguise street survival and hustling

South Side

Moby

This is Moby's spare, half-sung meditation built around a repeating road-trip refrain that cycles through the four points of the…

urban danger friendship and loyalty hope versus fear

Corona

Minutemen

A terse, two-minute political sketch that moves from a stark statement about poverty and inherited injustice to a small, almost…

economic inequality inherited guilt survival

The Cutter

Echo & the Bunnymen

A dense, incantatory piece of post-punk imagery in which the speaker pleads for mercy from some undefined judging or cutting…

self-doubt judgment and punishment survival

Pink + White

Frank Ocean

A soft, wandering meditation on maternal love and mortality, built around the image of a hurricane and the small acts of…

maternal love survival and resilience impermanence

The Unsinkable Fats Domino

Guided By Voices

A cryptic, riddling GBV track that uses Fats Domino's real-life survival of Hurricane Katrina as an emblem of resilience, then…

survival and resilience flood/water imagery as threat and purification fame versus obscurity

The Healer

John Lee Hooker

This is less a song than a testimony delivered over a slow-burning groove: John Lee Hooker declares the blues itself a curative…

the blues as spiritual medicine suffering and survival heartbreak and abandonment

Devil's Pie

D'Angelo

D'Angelo indicts the entire economy of vice, greed, and hustle that people line up for, while implicating himself as complicit…

greed and materialism complicity and self-implication spiritual/moral corruption

Fight the Power (From "Do The Right Thing" Soundtrack)

Public Enemy

A rallying anthem built on funk breaks and blunt sloganeering, the track argues that Black cultural pride and outright refusal…

Black pride and self-determination media and cultural gatekeeping collective action versus passivity

Saturnz Barz

Gorillaz

A collaboration between Gorillaz and Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan, the track fuses a patois-inflected verse about hard-won…

survival and upward mobility fame's emptiness isolation within relationships

C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)

Wu‐Tang Clan

Two verses from Raekwon and Inspectah Deck lay out parallel autobiographies of poverty, hustling, and incarceration in…

economic desperation and survival the school-to-prison pipeline urban poverty in New York

Bring It on Home to Me

B.B. King

This is less a song than a spoken monologue set to guitar, in which B.B. King explains his relationship to his guitar, Lucille,…

companionship and loneliness music as confession survival and near-death experience

Mad

Solange

"Mad" is a meditation on the exhaustion of having to justify one's own anger, built around a call-and-response between a…

the right to anger versus the demand for composure respectability and emotional policing of Black people survival and trauma disguised as success

Maggie M'Gill

The Doors

A loose, blues-based closer that trades narrative coherence for atmosphere, following a barfly heroine into a fictional…

urban decay and escape self-mythology blues lineage and authenticity

The Midnight Special

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's take on this traditional American folk-blues song reworks a prison-camp lament into a swampy rock anthem, keeping its cast…

incarceration and forced labor folk tradition and inheritance longing for deliverance

I'm Still Standing

Elton John

A breakup anthem built entirely around defiant repetition, where the narrator addresses an ex directly to declare emotional…

resilience revenge through self-sufficiency emotional survival

Feel Alright

Steve Earle

A defiant survivor's anthem in which the narrator refuses to be pitied or contained, casting himself as a storyteller-outlaw…

survival and defiance inherited identity addiction and recovery

9th Wonder (Blackitolism)

Digable Planets

A loose, jazz-inflected posse cut in which the Digable Planets crew trade boasts about style, borough pride, and lyrical…

borough/regional pride Afrocentric and cosmic imagery lyrical dexterity as identity

Hold On

Tom Waits

A road-worn ballad about a woman who flees a judgmental small town for California and ends up broke and cold in a motel, with a…

small-town judgment and shame escape and disillusionment poverty and survival

Mannish Boy

Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters restages his own 1955 declaration of manhood as a late-career victory lap, spelling out the word itself to leave no…

masculinity and self-definition aging and vitality racial dignity ('man' vs 'boy')

KILL DEM

Jamie xx

KILL DEM is less a song with a plot than a piece of dancehall-derived sound sculpture, built from a stuttering patois vocal…

violence as ritual/rhythm paranoia and evasion dancehall/soundsystem lineage

London Calling

The Clash

A blitzkrieg of apocalyptic headlines delivered as a radio broadcast, "London Calling" imagines a city besieged by nuclear…

nuclear anxiety urban decay disillusionment with youth culture

Something In The Way

Nirvana

A hushed, almost inert closer to Nevermind that trades the album's loud-quiet-loud dynamics for a single sustained murmur. The…

isolation destitution moral numbness

Dad's Gonna Kill Me

Richard Thompson

A soldier's-eye monologue from the Iraq War, delivered in the blunt, blackly funny voice of an American GI who narrates the…

war and mortality dehumanization of soldiers media spin and propaganda

I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)

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

Gimme Shelter

Patti Smith

This is a cover of the Rolling Stones' 1969 apocalyptic ballad, and Patti Smith treats it less as a rock anthem than as an…

apocalypse and dread the fragility of shelter violence versus tenderness

Beat It

Michael Jackson

A pulsing anti-violence anthem disguised as a street-fight taunt: the title's double meaning lets the song urge retreat from…

peer pressure toxic masculinity violence and its futility

Nas Is Like

Nas

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

When We Get By

D'Angelo

A slow-groove love song built almost entirely from a single circling phrase, promising that romantic devotion is enough to…

romantic devotion as survival domestic intimacy sensuality

Kirby

Aesop Rock

A song built entirely around addressing a cat named Kirby, whose small, absurd domestic behaviors become a lens for talking…

companionship as coping mechanism mental illness and medication domesticity

When It Rain

Danny Brown

A relentless portrait of Detroit street violence set to a hyper-fast, footwork-inspired beat, where the manic tempo and…

urban poverty and survival violence and fatalism addiction as coping mechanism

Dashboard

Modest Mouse

Modest Mouse builds a shaky optimism out of wreckage imagery, insisting that even a broken-down vehicle still gets you…

near-disaster and survival willed optimism emotional evasiveness

That Lonesome Road

James Taylor

A spare, almost proverbial song about walking away from a failed relationship or a bad chapter of life, addressed as much to the…

self-recrimination forward motion as survival regret

Work It

Missy Elliott

Missy Elliott's signature single is a maximalist celebration of sexual confidence and self-invention, built on a literal sonic…

sexual agency self-invention and reinvention female solidarity and hustle

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

Bring Da Ruckus

Wu‐Tang Clan

The opening track of Enter the Wu-Tang stages hip-hop as martial arts combat, with each MC treating the microphone like a weapon…

martial arts mythology as metaphor for lyrical combat collective identity vs individual bravado urban violence and street survival

Carmelita

Warren Zevon

A junkie in a rundown corner of Los Angeles narrates his own decline in a strangely tender, almost comic voice, addressing an…

addiction and withdrawal romantic longing as survival strategy poverty and bureaucracy

We the People....

A Tribe Called Quest

A Tribe Called Quest opens their comeback album with a song that fuses street-level survival talk with a chorus that mimics the…

racism and xenophobia economic precarity media distortion