Results for “infinity versus finitude”

Songs

Infinity Fill Goose Down

Aesop Rock

Aesop Rock builds a dense allegory around farm-animal escape and surveillance-state paranoia, using the imagery of Animal Farm…

surveillance and control anxiety and hypervigilance complicity versus escape

Spud Infinity

Big Thief

A playful, riddling meditation on scale and self-acceptance, using cosmic imagery and homespun humor to ask what it would take…

cosmic perspective self-acceptance interconnectedness

93' Till Infinity

Souls of Mischief

This is a live-recording rendition of the Oakland classic that built its reputation on effortless, unhurried braggadocio. The…

hip-hop regionalism crew loyalty hedonism and leisure

No Omega

Eric B. & Rakim

Rakim builds a boast track around a single conceit: he is the beginning of an infinite alphabet with no closing letter, meaning…

linguistic self-mythologizing battle-rap supremacy infinity versus finitude

Everybody's Weird Except Me

Stereolab

A short, almost mantra-like piece that treats a dream or ideal as something that must travel from intellect to feeling before it…

mind versus feeling ideal versus lived experience language's limits

Outdoor Miner

Wire

A deceptively sweet pop song from a band known for angular art-punk, built around the tiny natural phenomenon of a leaf-mining…

nature observation hiddenness and exposure innocence versus threat

Sexy Boy

Air

A woozy, vocoder-warped taunt built almost entirely out of one phrase, "Sexy Boy" pokes at masculine vanity and celebrity…

vanity and self-image celebrity and consumerism irony versus seduction

100%

Sonic Youth

A tribute song built from fragments of grief, aggression, and dark humor, written in memory of a scene figure lost to violence.…

violent death and its aftermath rock scene mythology and idolization gender and predation within a music subculture

Spike Island

Pulp

A comeback statement dressed as a meditation on vocation, in which the singer reflects on a past crisis of purpose and reaffirms…

vocation and calling self-doubt versus instinct reunion/comeback

Only This Moment

Röyksopp

A minimalist electro-pop meditation on love as a present-tense gamble, oscillating between dread that a relationship is doomed…

uncertainty in love presentism versus fear of the future doubt and surrender

All That You Have Is Your Soul

Emmylou Harris

A mother's warning becomes a hard-won personal confession, as the narrator traces her own failures to heed advice about…

inherited wisdom moral compromise self-possession versus loss of self

Foolish Heart

Alison Krauss

A young narrator rehearses her own exit from a doomed relationship, arguing herself into leaving before she can be hurt again.…

self-protection versus vulnerability romantic disillusionment pride as armor

tonite

LCD Soundsystem

An older musician surveys the disposable pop landscape—every hit song reduced to a single word repeated like a mantra—and uses…

mortality and finitude aging out of cultural relevance pop music as mass ritual

Day Is Done

Nick Drake

This is a quiet accounting song, built from a string of

mortality and finitude disappointment and unfulfilled ambition isolation

Big Yellow Taxi (Original A Cappella with Guitar)

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell's early environmental protest song works as a series of loosely connected complaints -- about development,…

environmental loss commodification of nature nostalgia and regret

Ms. Fat Booty

Mos Def

A narrative rap unfolding like a short film in three scenes, tracking a pursuit-and-fallout romance with a woman the narrator…

desire versus discernment the performance of masculinity and vulnerability cynicism eroded by intimacy

This Mess We're In

PJ Harvey

A duet-style meditation on a fleeting New York encounter, sung against a backdrop of helicopters, sunsets and skyscrapers that…

transience of connection urban alienation desire versus impermanence

Oh My God

Adele

A woman recently out of a long relationship narrates the giddy, guilty rush of falling into a new attraction she knows is…

post-divorce self-reinvention guilt versus desire loss of control

Forever Young

The Band

This is a benediction set to music, a parent's or elder's string of blessings addressed to someone young, wishing them…

blessing and benediction innocence versus experience moral instruction

Almost Thanksgiving Day

Graham Parker

A quiet, almost diary-like song about the exhaustion of ordinary domestic life set against the approach of a holiday built on…

domestic endurance aging and marriage rural isolation

Always This Way

Laura Marling

A quiet meditation on loss and self-accounting, where the narrator processes the departure of someone close by returning…

heartbreak and abandonment self-reliance as coping mechanism fate versus choice

Jesus Christ

Big Star

A Christmas carol built from borrowed and paraphrased hymn imagery, recorded by a band whose songwriter was in visible crisis at…

rebirth and renewal faith versus despair tradition and inheritance

Favourite

Fontaines D.C.

A hazy love song that keeps slipping into memory and unease, as the singer addresses someone who has been a constant presence…

nostalgia and endurance class and place disorientation/return

Sorry Somehow

Hüsker Dü

A breakup song built entirely on protest and denial, where the narrator insists he's fine while the sheer repetition of the word…

denial and self-deception emotional armor breakup as legal dispute

Holding On

Gregory Porter

A meditation on a love the narrator can't will himself out of, even when guilt, fatigue, and a bruised past argue for release.…

involuntary devotion emotional exhaustion guilt and self-reproach

Call Your Girlfriend

Robyn

Robyn scripts a breakup for a man on behalf of the woman he's about to leave someone for, coaching him line by line on how to…

infidelity and self-justification emotional labor the ethics of kindness

Fragile

Cassandra Wilson

This is a cover of a song originally written by Sting, reframed here through Cassandra Wilson's smoky, unhurried phrasing on her…

violence and its aftermath fragility of human life memory versus forgetting

Supercut

Lorde

Lorde uses the language of video editing to describe how memory sands a failed relationship down into its highlight reel. The…

selective memory idealization of a lost relationship self-deception

The Woman with the Tattooed Hands

Atmosphere

Slug narrates a surreal, almost hallucinatory encounter with a solitary older woman whose hand tattoos come to embody the…

duality of good and evil sexual autonomy and self-pleasure voyeurism versus empathy

One More Red Nightmare

King Crimson

A jittery account of a nightmare about a plane crash, told with a wink of dark comedy, that turns out to be a dream had on a…

fear of flying dream versus reality mortality played for laughs

Heaven and Hell

Black Sabbath

This is Black Sabbath's title track marking the arrival of Ronnie James Dio, trading the band's earlier horror-movie doom for…

moral ambiguity illusion versus reality corrupted power

Comeback Kid

Sharon Van Etten

A pulsing, synth-driven track that turns the phrase "comeback kid" into a mantra of self-address, tracking the tension between a…

identity and self-address escape versus commitment recovery

Seal Eyeing

Animal Collective

A short, quietly unsettling piece that starts as a simple pastoral scene of watching a seal in a half-frozen lake and slides…

environmental collapse tourism and spectacle of nature impermanence

Over the Hills and Far Away

Led Zeppelin

A restless folk-rock meditation on wanting and wandering, built around the word "many" as a kind of incantation. The song moves…

wanderlust romantic ambivalence experience versus wisdom

Choice of Colors

Gladys Knight

A cover of the Impressions' 1969 civil-rights standard, this version turns a direct address to a Black community into a plea for…

racial reconciliation hypocrisy and self-examination education as social remedy

Windows

Angel Olsen

A short, incantatory song built almost entirely from repeated questions, pressing someone to let light and movement back into a…

emotional withdrawal depression or shutdown persistence and pleading

The Punishment of Luxury

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

A synth-pop sermon on the moral decay that comes with excess, taking its title from a 19th-century painting to frame consumer…

consumerism and moral decay complacency versus freedom disgust and judgment

Trust

Prince

Written for the Batman soundtrack, this track uses seduction as camouflage for a darker interrogation of manipulation and…

seduction as manipulation power and control faith versus flattery

Chromakey Dreamcoat

Boards of Canada

An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's third album that trades on the gap between its title's cheerful theatrical…

nostalgia childhood media artifice versus memory

Sandusky

Uncle Tupelo

A grim, working-class dirge about exhaustion and dead ends, delivered in the voice of someone addressing a person on the verge…

industrial despair class fatigue futility versus endurance