Results for “irony between form and content”

Songs

Generals and Majors

XTC

A jaunty, whistle-inflected pop song that uses upbeat melody as a Trojan horse for a satire of military brass hungry for…

militarism and glorification of war irony between form and content boredom and status anxiety among the powerful

Diamond Day

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

Kool Thing

Sonic Youth

Kim Gordon plays a seductive, sardonic call-and-response with a fetishized male icon, using come-ons and spoken interruptions to…

fetishization of Black masculinity gender and power celebrity worship

La La Love You

Pixies

A deliberately dumb, deadpan pastiche of teen pop-song sincerity, sung by drummer David Lovering rather than the band's usual…

parody of pop romance adolescent sexuality irony through simplicity

Hymn 43

Jethro Tull

This is a sardonic protest against the commercial and violent hijacking of Christian imagery in American culture, pairing…

religious hypocrisy American mythology and violence commercialization of faith

God Only Knows

The Beach Boys

A love song that opens by admitting its own limits "" the singer won't promise permanence "" and then spends the rest of its…

conditional devotion dependence and identity uncertainty as a form of honesty

It's Good to Be King

Tom Petty

Tom Petty builds a wistful daydream around the fantasy of kingship, using royal imagery as a stand-in for escape from ordinary…

escapism fantasy vs. reality longing for control

Jump Into the Fire

Harry Nilsson

A short set of declarative lines about escape and entrapment dissolves into a chant that repeats itself into…

entrapment disguised as freedom codependency compulsion and addiction

Baby, This Love I Have

Minnie Riperton

A love song built around the anxiety of being misunderstood -- the singer insists that her feelings are genuine even if her…

communication and its failure reassurance devotion

Denis

Blondie

"Denis" is a girl-group pastiche dressed up in new wave attitude: a breathless, repetitive crush song built almost entirely…

infatuation teenage devotion nostalgia/pastiche

Stairway to Heaven

Led Zeppelin

A slow-building folk-rock epic that follows a mysterious woman convinced she can purchase spiritual transcendence, using her as…

spiritual materialism vs. authentic enlightenment ambiguity of language and meaning pastoral/mythic imagery as escape

The Midnight Special

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