Results for “inherited identity/family”

Songs

Family Affair

Sly & The Family Stone

A weary, groove-heavy meditation on the bonds and betrayals inside a family, sung with a flattened, almost exhausted affect that…

family loyalty and dysfunction contradiction and ambivalence emotional exhaustion

Identity

X‐Ray Spex

A short, hammering punk track that treats the idea of self-image as a literal wound. Poly Styrene repeats the word "identity"…

media saturation self-image and alienation consumer culture

Inheritance

Talk Talk

A short, largely instrumental hymn from Talk Talk's most spacious record, "Inheritance" uses fragmentary pastoral imagery and a…

ecological loss denial and complacency spiritual longing

The Real Me

The Who

An opening track that functions as a diagnostic scream: a young man cycles through the authority figures meant to know him —…

identity and authenticity institutional failure (medicine, family, religion) alienation

Andromeda

Weyes Blood

Weyes Blood turns cosmic distance into a metaphor for romantic avoidance, using the vastness of a galaxy to describe an…

emotional avoidance romantic risk self-protection vs. vulnerability

DNA.

Kendrick Lamar

DNA. is Kendrick Lamar's opening salvo on DAMN., a hyper-aggressive inventory of inherited traits that refuses to separate the…

inherited identity Black masculinity and violence fame and paranoia

500 Miles

Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash's version of this traditional folk song turns a simple hitchhiker's lament into a meditation on permanent distance…

distance and displacement homesickness regret

Still Woman Enough

Loretta Lynn

A late-career declaration of resilience, this song has Lynn taking stock of a long, hard-won life and refusing to concede any…

resilience aging and identity working-class pride

Alive

Pearl Jam

A mother's confession about a son's true parentage collides with an unsettling second revelation, and the phrase that should…

inherited trauma identity and paternity survivor's guilt

Cousins

Vampire Weekend

A frenetic, sub-two-minute blast that skewers cultural capital and inherited privilege through fragmented, almost cryptic…

class and inherited privilege cultural capital vs. authenticity family lineage

Breakadawn

De La Soul

A loose, free-associative posse-cut style track from De La Soul's most abstract album, built on stream-of-consciousness wordplay…

identity and origin hip-hop lineage and Native Tongues affiliation industry skepticism

I Walk the Line

Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell builds a memory song around a childhood car ride and the moment he first heard Johnny Cash's classic, using the…

nostalgia musical inheritance family and rural childhood

Blackbird

Nina Simone

Nina Simone's "Blackbird" is a bleak lullaby-like address to a bird who is repeatedly told it cannot fly. Beneath the simple,…

racial identity and constraint internalized despair isolation and abandonment

Killer / Papa Was a Rollin' Stone

George Michael

This medley pairs George Michael's own song of addiction and yearning for release with a cover of the Temptations' classic about…

addiction and self-destruction longing for freedom absent fatherhood

Don't Touch My Hair

Solange

Solange turns a simple bodily boundary into a statement about Black identity, autonomy, and the exhaustion of having one's body…

bodily autonomy Black identity and hair politics boundary-setting

F.U.N.K.

Betty Davis

This is less a song than a spoken-and-sung roll call, a lineage claimed rather than argued for. Betty Davis treats funk as a…

musical lineage and inheritance Black artistic community funk as identity/blood

September When It Comes

Rosanne Cash

A meditation on mortality and inherited fate, written in the voice of someone reckoning with the end of life while looking back…

mortality inheritance/family legacy acceptance

Snakeskin

Deerhunter

A funk-inflected litany of self-definition, "Snakeskin" strings together a series of blunt "I was born" and "I was" declarations…

disability and bodily difference fatalism versus resilience identity as inherited condition

Starburster

Fontaines D.C.

Starburster runs on the syntax of a panic attack: gasped, run-on desire that never resolves into a clean feeling. It stacks a…

anxiety and panic desire versus revulsion self-destruction

My Little Town (with Art Garfunkel)

Paul Simon

A bitter recollection of a suffocating hometown, stripped of color and possibility, sung as a reunion piece by Simon and…

small-town claustrophobia loss of faith inherited identity

My Little Town

Paul Simon

A reunion song in the loosest sense — Simon and Garfunkel singing together again about the deadening sameness of a childhood…

small-town suffocation inherited identity disillusionment with faith and patriotism

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

Flume

Bon Iver

The opening track of For Emma, Forever Ago is a fragmented, image-driven overture more than a narrative song, built from cryptic…

maternal inheritance identity and self-definition bodily/natural imagery as emotional code

Jimmi Diggin' Cats

Digable Planets

This is Digable Planets riffing on the idea of retro nostalgia as a kind of alternate history, imagining sixties and seventies…

retro-futurism and nostalgia Black cultural lineage funk/jazz as inheritance

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

Living in Pain

The Notorious B.I.G.

This is a claustrophobic account of a life defined by violence, told through the recurring image of a 'house of pain' that the…

cyclical violence inherited trauma fame as trap

When Doves Cry

Patti Smith

This is Patti Smith's cover of Prince's 1984 hit, stripped of its synth-funk architecture and rebuilt as a spoken-sung…

inherited conflict desire and abandonment vulnerability versus pride

Where I'm From

Digable Planets

This posse-cut catalog builds a portrait of a hip-hop upbringing not through a single narrator but through overlapping voices…

cultural identity and community Afrocentric consciousness hip-hop as inheritance

Wild Fire

Laura Marling

Laura Marling narrates from the outside of a relationship, watching a woman she's fascinated by perform for others while…

watching versus being seen inherited family damage artistic self-consciousness

Madame George

Van Morrison

An impressionistic, nearly nine-minute elegy built around a single scene: a gathering in a Belfast back room presided over by a…

loss of innocence ambiguous identity and gender nostalgia for place

Third of May / Ōdaigahara

Fleet Foxes

A sprawling, suite-like meditation on friendship, fracture, and reconciliation within Fleet Foxes, built around the real-life…

reconciliation after estrangement time and memory collective identity vs. individual selfhood

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

Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend

Thin Lizzy

This is Thin Lizzy's most explicitly Irish statement, a medley that stitches together fragments of traditional ballads with a…

Irish identity and heritage oral tradition and storytelling myth and heroism

Africa

D'Angelo

A meditation on fatherhood framed as a lineage running back through Africa, presented less as narrative and more as blessing or…

diasporic identity fatherhood and legacy spiritual protection

All That I Got Is You

Ghostface Killah

A dense, unadorned autobiographical narrative about growing up poor in a fractured Black family in Staten Island, told through…

poverty single motherhood childhood trauma

I Still Miss Someone

Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash's cover of her father's classic reframes a spare heartbreak ballad through the lens of family inheritance -- a…

romantic loss longing and memory inherited songs and legacy

Completeness

Minnie Riperton

A soft, incantatory love song built almost entirely from direct address and imperative pleading, in which the singer asks a…

romantic surrender identity through the other sensuality

Painted on Canvas

Gregory Porter

Gregory Porter builds an extended metaphor comparing human identity to a painted canvas, where upbringing, community, and chance…

identity formation agency vs. determinism artistic lineage

Sycamore

Bill Callahan

A meditative address built around inherited wisdom about growth and endurance, using the sycamore tree as its central emblem.…

inheritance and fatherhood growth versus impatience resilience

The Kids Don't Stand a Chance

Vampire Weekend

This closing track from Vampire Weekend's debut is a compressed, elliptical portrait of inherited privilege and the institutions…

class and inheritance institutional power loss of innocence