Results for “incarceration and forced labor”

Songs

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's version of this traditional folk-blues song reworks a prison-labor lament into swampy rock, keeping the old imagery of…

incarceration and forced labor longing for deliverance folk mythology / superstition

Johnny Cash

A prisoner in California listens to a passing freight train and measures his life against it. Over four short verses he moves…

incarceration freedom and mobility guilt and remorse

The Who

This is the climactic closing statement of Quadrophenia, a plea for emotional deliverance disguised as a weather report. The…

spiritual longing emotional exhaustion love as elemental force

The Rolling Stones

A weary plea for tenderness dressed up as a refusal to keep serving as someone's workhorse. The narrator insists he's given…

exhaustion in relationships emotional labor vs desire masculinity and self-worth

Gladys Knight

A domestic monologue in which a woman catalogs the daily labor she performs for a partner who has grown cold and inattentive,…

emotional labor and domestic care the myth of female self-sufficiency withdrawal and neglect in a relationship

Vashti Bunyan

A short pastoral hymn that treats an ordinary rural day as something precious, using the smallest units of farm life to build…

rural simplicity contentment cyclical time

Jason Isbell

Isbell uses a fading hotel as an extended metaphor for a long marriage at risk of going stale, watching an older couple's silent…

marital complacency the labor of sustaining love aging and decline

Stevie Wonder

A new father's unfiltered, almost breathless reaction to the birth of his daughter, rendered as a series of rhetorical questions…

fatherhood and new birth gratitude love as creative/generative force

Solange

Solange catalogs a long list of failed coping mechanisms for an unnamed sorrow, building an inventory of avoidance that…

avoidance and denial depression/emotional exhaustion consumerism as false comfort

D'Angelo

A prayer-like meditation on trying to hold steady inside collapse, written for a video game about the death of the American…

endurance amid chaos spiritual uncertainty frontier mythology and its end

Radiohead

A petulant office-worker fantasy in which the speaker summons an imaginary cosmic police force to arrest people who irritate him…

petty vindictiveness bureaucratic and corporate servitude dehumanisation