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
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
Frank Sinatra
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
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 Kinks
A biting sketch of a music-industry exploiter, cast in mock-heroic terms as a bloodless conqueror who defeats people with…
exploitation in the music business money versus integrity powerlessness under corporate control
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
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
The Velvet Underground
A closing-track litany that names a small cast of the dispossessed—people with literally nothing left to their name—and turns…
poverty and dispossession resignation found community among outcasts
Gang of Four
A clipped, funk-inflected critique of consumer leisure culture, where a narrator recites the empty slogans of 'having fun' while…
consumerism alienation competition as ideology
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A Stephen Sondheim standard, originally written for the musical A Little Night Music, reimagined here through Sinatra's…
missed timing regret self-deception
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
King Crimson
A terse portrait of a mismatched couple whose incompatibilities are catalogued like clinical symptoms rather than felt emotions.…
incompatibility psychological fragmentation irony and detachment
Annie Lennox
Annie Lennox reworks a Motown-era declaration of romantic helplessness into a stark, brooding torch song, stripping away The…
romantic longing powerlessness disguised as power emotional isolation
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
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
The Smiths
A litany of English town names becomes a springboard for a much smaller, pettier grievance: pop radio's refusal to speak to the…
cultural alienation pop music vs lived experience mob mentality/chanting
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
The Chemical Brothers
This track is essentially a functional dancefloor chant rather than a lyric-driven song: a single sampled vocal hook repeated…
club culture and DJ worship repetition as pleasure minimalism/anti-narrative
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
Kraftwerk
A deadpan, synth-driven character sketch of a fashion model, delivered with the same flat affect Kraftwerk applies to machines…
commodification of beauty surveillance and consumption media and celebrity
Soundgarden
A song about radical live-and-let-live individualism that curdles into territorial aggression by its final third. The narrator…
personal autonomy boundary-setting irony of tolerance
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
Steely Dan
A supermarket-style PA announcement becomes the herald of an apocalypse, as Steely Dan stages consumer culture's final…
consumerism as religion apocalypse/end times American decline