Results for “isolation and alienation”

Songs

Bring On the Dancing Horses

Echo & the Bunnymen

A moody, image-driven post-punk lyric that trades narrative clarity for atmosphere, cycling through fragmented character…

emotional self-protection turning to cruelty isolation and alienation artifice versus authenticity

Love, Reign O'er Me

The Who

This is the climactic closing statement of Quadrophenia, a plea for emotional deliverance disguised as a weather report. The…

spiritual longing emotional exhaustion love as elemental force

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

Disorder

Joy Division

Disorder opens Unknown Pleasures with a portrait of dissociation, a speaker who registers the world's speed and violence but…

emotional numbness dissociation longing for normalcy

Little Johnny Jewel, Pts. 1 & 2

Television

This is Television's earliest single, a hypnotic character sketch built more on texture and repetition than narrative logic. The…

outsider mythology alienation the cost of vision

That's When I Reach For My Revolver

Mission of Burma

A litany of disillusionment — with inherited heroes, parental teaching, and a friend's hollow ambition — builds toward a chorus…

disillusionment loss of faith/idealism generational inheritance

Creep

Radiohead

"Creep" is a confession of self-loathing disguised as a love song, built around the gap between an idealized other and the…

self-loathing unrequited desire alienation

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

Roxy Music

A deadpan monologue delivered by a wealthy consumer who has replaced human intimacy with a mail-order inflatable doll, framed as…

consumerism alienation artificiality vs authenticity

Space Oddity

David Bowie

A radio drama in miniature: a space agency counts an astronaut into orbit, celebrates him as a media sensation, then loses him.…

alienation celebrity and spectacle technological failure

21st Century Schizoid Man (Including "Mirrors")

King Crimson

This opening track sets a nightmarish, distorted portrait of modern civilization against a savage instrumental attack, using the…

dehumanization war and atrocity technological/medical horror

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

The Smiths

A speaker without a home begs to be driven anywhere, anywhere at all, and finds in the prospect of a fatal car crash not tragedy…

homelessness and displacement unrequited or unspoken love romanticized death

Another Brick In the Wall, Pt. 1

Pink Floyd

This short piece establishes the loss of Pink's father as the first foundational trauma in the album's central metaphor, framing…

absence and abandonment childhood trauma war's domestic aftermath

Boredom

Buzzcocks

An early punk anthem that turns tedium itself into the subject and the method, with a narrator who insists on his own flatness…

boredom and nihilism alienation from self and culture anti-ambition as rebellion

Damaged Goods

Gang of Four

Gang of Four fuse a breakup song with the language of consumer transaction, treating a relationship as a defective purchase to…

commodification of relationships desire versus love alienation under capitalism

Rock & Roll

The Velvet Underground

A simple origin myth for a solitary listener, Jenny, whose bored suburban childhood is transformed the moment she finds a radio…

salvation through music suburban alienation adolescence

In the City

The Jam

A brisk punk-era manifesto that frames the city as both battleground and stage for youthful self-assertion. The narrator speaks…

generational conflict youthful defiance urban alienation

Crossroads

Cream

This is Cream's electrified rework of Robert Johnson's Delta blues standard, compressing the original's verses into a lean live…

isolation and abandonment desperation and pleading the crossroads as fate/damnation myth

Rock & Roll Stew

Traffic

This is a road-worn touring song, a loose, groove-driven complaint and celebration about the grind of life on the move. It…

touring exhaustion displacement vs. home alienation from ordinary life

Shot By Both Sides

Magazine

A song about ideological homelessness, built around a narrator who has infiltrated a crowd or movement only to find himself…

ideological disillusionment alienation from crowds and movements cynicism about political certainty