Vince Staples
Vince Staples opens FM! with a track that titles itself irony: verses recite violence and gang life in flat, matter-of-fact…
normalized violence irony and denial materialism as armor
Ben Folds Five
A wry, affectionate portrait of a slacker-poseur culture, narrated by someone half-mocking and half-seduced by a friend's…
performative apathy 1990s slacker culture irony as armor
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
Minutemen
A song so short it barely qualifies as one, this Minutemen miniature parodies the mechanics of the top-40 love song by stringing…
parody of pop convention commercialism in music brevity as critique
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
X
A quietly devastating portrait of a relationship in its last stages, set against the irony of a national holiday that's supposed…
domestic estrangement failed communication irony of celebration
Mick Jenkins
Mick Jenkins sketches a beach hangout with friends and a lover as a fragile idyll, then keeps interrupting it with reminders…
racial surveillance the impossibility of leisure friendship and loyalty
Lily Allen
Lily Allen adopts the voice of a vapid celebrity-obsessed narrator to satirize consumerism, fame culture, and body image anxiety…
celebrity culture materialism body image
A Rodgers and Hart standard in which every socially disreputable trait ascribed to the title character turns out, on inspection,…
class satire nonconformity irony of reputation
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
Simon & Garfunkel
Paul Simon's adaptation of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem sets a factory worker's envious refrain against the public glamour of…
class envy the gap between appearance and inner life alienation of labor
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
The Divine Comedy
A brisk, sardonic pop song that uses the stock British phrase for avoiding awkward history with Germans to comment on a country…
historical amnesia national identity and Europe cyclical repetition
Fall Out Boy
A jilted or rejected narrator fixates on an ex's current boyfriend, oscillating between self-deprecating irony and barely…
jealousy and rivalry self-sabotage wounded masculinity
Blind Willie Johnson
A talking-blues recollection of World War One's home front, built almost entirely from the repeated claim that everyone pitched…
wartime sacrifice racial exclusion civic duty vs. hypocrisy
Dire Straits
A terse, cynical survey of late-1970s Western malaise, delivered with the detached irony Knopfler favored on Dire Straits' early…
violence and complacency social decay false innocence
Rickie Lee Jones
A song about romantic self-betrayal, sung from the vantage of someone who has just watched an admission of love get met with…
unrequited love self-protection through irony loneliness
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
Company Flow
A found-sound public-service warning about inappropriate touching bookends two dense battle-rap verses from Bigg Jus and El-P,…
lyrical dominance as violation irony and shock juxtaposition body horror imagery
A dense, aphoristic protest fragment from the Minutemen's live-and-studio patchwork album, this piece takes its title's irony…
militarism and indoctrination the inadequacy of language against violence pop culture versus political urgency
Cannibal Ox
"Pigeon" uses the image of the street pigeon—scrappy, scavenging, overlooked but resilient—as an extended metaphor for ghetto…
urban survival poverty and scarcity transformation/flight as escape
Ani DiFranco
This is a cover of the 1964 Dusty Springfield/Burt Bacharach-Hal David pop standard, recorded for a romantic-comedy soundtrack.…
gender roles and courtship performance versus authorship irony through casting
The Teardrop Explodes
A short, agitated post-punk song built around a lover's evasive non-answer: pressed repeatedly to say whether he loves her, the…
evasion and emotional withholding power dynamics in intimacy defensiveness as self-protection
Danny Brown
A three-verse posse cut where Danny Brown, Run the Jewels' El-P and Killer Mike (implied by the guest verses) trade dense,…
nihilism as armor drug-trade nostalgia gallows humor around death
A playful, slightly starstruck pop sketch of the eighteenth-century Russian empress, delivered with Neil Hannon's trademark mix…
hero worship power and intellect historical pastiche
A Long Beach street-rap track that uses the image of fresh sneakers and funeral flowers to collapse consumer desire and…
gang violence and survival materialism as coping mechanism mortality and fatalism
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
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
A Stephen Sondheim standard, originally written for the musical A Little Night Music, reimagined here through Sinatra's…
missed timing regret self-deception
Lana Del Rey
A torch song written for a film about doomed excess, this track poses one anxious question over and over: does love survive once…
impermanence of beauty conditional love nostalgia for lost youth
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
Randy Newman
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
Leonard Cohen
Cohen catalogs a series of overlapping conflicts—class, gender, ideology, race—then collapses them into a single, inescapable…
conflict as universal condition complicity and denial domestic strife as political struggle
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
Dinah Washington
A standard-era torch song built on a single conceit: the smoke of a dying fire as a figure for both the blindness of infatuation…
romantic self-deception public performance of composure loss and heartbreak
Marty Robbins
A cowboy narrator recounts the death of his trail partner, who sacrifices himself to save a rancher's daughter from a cattle…
sacrifice frontier masculinity and duty fate and irony
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
Angel Olsen
A darkly comic take on loneliness, this song frames connection as a transactional consolation prize between two isolated people…
loneliness irony of connection emotional guardedness
Graham Parker
Graham Parker strings together three iconic women -- an invented sister to the Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan of Arc -- and…
female suffering under myth and celebrity destruction as both punishment and release historical pastiche and anachronism
Mott the Hoople
A chaotic, near-apocalyptic rocker built almost entirely on a single interrogative refrain, this song uses repetition and…
disillusionment defiance instability/transformation