Sharon Van Etten
This is Sharon Van Etten at her loosest and most winking, a track built on a single sardonic refrain about self-sabotage rather…
self-sabotage domestic disorder irony and deflection
Billy Joel
Billy Joel builds a mock-heroic Wild West ballad complete with outlaw legend and hanging, then in the final verse reveals it as…
mythmaking self-deprecation Americana pastiche
Nirvana
A grunge anthem built almost entirely out of non-sequiturs and slogans, the song channels teenage apathy and irony rather than…
apathy and irony alienation consumerism and spectacle
MF DOOM
MF DOOM turns a satirical eye on rap's tough-guy posturing, mocking MCs whose lyrics function as confessions that could be used…
hip-hop authenticity and posturing self-incrimination and surveillance street credibility vs. performance
Peter Gabriel
This is a cover of the Magnetic Fields song, and Gabriel's version strips away Stephin Merritt's deadpan irony in favor of a…
romantic convention vs. lived intimacy tedium redeemed by love marriage and commitment
Modest Mouse
A meandering, self-lacerating meditation on complacency and missed opportunity, delivered with Modest Mouse's trademark mix of…
missed opportunity self-deception complacency
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
James Taylor
James Taylor spins a science-fiction folk tale about a 19th-century sailor revived after a century frozen in ice, using the…
mortality and the fear of dying twice technology versus nature alienation and displacement in time
George Jones
A defiant novelty-tinged honky-tonk anthem in which an aging performer refuses the trappings of old age, insisting his body may…
aging and mortality defiance of retirement identity tied to performance
Willie Nelson
A Christmas song that undercuts its own cheer: a street vendor selling gift-wrap and pencils becomes a fixture the holiday crowd…
isolation amid crowds commercialism vs. compassion invisibility of the poor
Tom Waits
A domestic wreck of a song dressed in the sunniest possible title: the narrator is broke, abandoned, and effectively parenting…
irony of optimism poverty and abandonment loneliness
Frank Sinatra
A Cole Porter standard in which a jaded sophisticate catalogs every conventional pleasure that fails to move him, only to admit…
ennui and sophistication unrequited or unequal love irony of excess
Billie Holiday
A standard from the 1930s American songbook, this is a torch song built on a single conceit: the singer offers up her own body,…
romantic surrender self-negation abandonment
Built to Spill
A short, circling meditation on how received wisdom persists even when it no longer fits reality. Built to Spill uses plain,…
conformity vs. change epistemic humility the persistence of habit
Pavement
A wry, deadpan tour through the small humiliations of dating, class anxiety, and suburban aspiration, filtered through Malkmus's…
class and status anxiety suburban aspiration irony and detachment
Randy Newman
Randy Newman puts on the voice of a bigot ranting about short people, using the absurdity of the target to expose how prejudice…
prejudice and bigotry satire of hatred's logic unreliable narration
Randy Newman voices a slave trader luring West Africans onto a ship bound for Charleston with a mock-seductive sales pitch about…
slavery and the slave trade American exceptionalism as propaganda irony and complicity
New Order
A soldier narrates his homecoming from war in earnest, patriotic terms, only for the song to reveal in its final verse that he…
war and its human cost irony of patriotism death and denial
Simon Jäger
Simon adapts Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem into a song about class envy and its blind spot: a factory worker idolizes a…
class envy the emptiness of wealth irony of appearances
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
Wire
Wire recast the nativity story as a satire of digital-age commerce and self-promotion, splicing biblical imagery with the…
technology and faith commodification of belief surveillance and self-branding
Magazine
A short, jagged meditation on the trap of self-consciousness, where the singer's supposed clarity of vision becomes a curse…
self-consciousness detachment perception vs reality
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
Tom Petty
Tom Petty turns a chorus of romantic devotion into a punchline by surrounding it with a comic gallery of failed relationships.…
romantic complacency divorce and dysfunction irony as affection
The Fall
This is The Fall's 1988 cover of the Kinks' 1969 song, a mock-anthem that impersonates Victorian-era patriotic sentiment so…
empire and nationalism class and inequality irony and pastiche
A loose, digressive song built from non-sequiturs and internal rhyme games that only occasionally resolves into something like…
evasion of intimacy irony versus sincerity pop-cultural detritus
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift turns a self-lacerating confessional into a singalong chorus, cataloguing her worst self-perceptions—insomnia,…
self-loathing and self-awareness fame and disproportion fear of abandonment
The Velvet Underground
A breakup song disguised as a sunny pop singalong, where the narrator lists ordinary sources of joy — sun, wind, rain — only to…
heartbreak emotional numbness irony between form and content
The Cure
A jittery funk-pop novelty from The Cure's most eclectic album, built on a repeated image of lightning strikes that destroy…
destruction as pleasure compulsive repetition escape and displacement
Paul Simon
A slippery, satirical cocktail-party exchange dressed up as an Afro-pop groove, in which Paul Simon strings together…
social performance and vanity emptiness of small talk passivity and resignation
Danny Brown
Danny Brown turns his own addiction into dark comedy, stacking dense, cartoonish wordplay over a queasy hook that keeps asking…
addiction and dependency irony and dark humor wealth versus self-destruction
R.E.M.
A bubblegum-bright chorus of togetherness repeated to the point of hollowness, this is R.E.M. at its most deliberately…
manufactured happiness conformity propaganda and slogans
Gang of Four
A first-person portrait of a man who joins the military not out of conviction but as a solution to unemployment, lost…
militarism as consumer choice economic desperation masculinity and self-worth
Big Star
A gratitude anthem that plays like a mock-showbiz thank-you speech, thanking unnamed collaborators in language so formal it…
gratitude and its limits dependency vs. self-sufficiency showbiz artifice
Little Feat
A wry breakup narrative that keeps undercutting its own heartbreak with comic self-interest. The narrator confronts a cheating…
infidelity and betrayal performed heartbreak vs. real indifference serial romance
The Shins
A survivalist's bunker monologue set to an oddly buoyant melody, this song imagines nuclear or environmental apocalypse as a…
apocalypse and isolation denial and coping through routine loss of a loved one
Pixies
A deliberately dumb, bubblegum-pop pastiche sung by drummer David Lovering, this is Pixies parodying the sincerity of teenage…
parody of pop convention adolescent sexuality irony vs sincerity
Jethro Tull
A caustic broadside against the American co-option of Christianity, pairing frontier violence and cowboy mythology with the…
religious hypocrisy American mythology and violence colonialism
Joan Baez
A meditation on romantic disillusionment framed as a story about overhearing someone else's cynical wisdom and slowly coming to…
disillusionment with romantic love loss of innocence cyclical time and memory
XTC
XTC dresses up an anti-militarist satire as a jaunty, whistleable pop song, mocking career soldiers who crave conflict for its…
militarism and glory-seeking satire of authority boredom as a driver of violence