Results for “judgment and punishment”

Songs

Echo & the Bunnymen

A dense, incantatory piece of post-punk imagery in which the speaker pleads for mercy from some undefined judging or cutting…

self-doubt judgment and punishment survival

Nina Simone

A traditional African-American spiritual reworked into a nearly ten-minute incantation, tracking a sinner's frantic search for…

judgment and reckoning futility of escape divine justice vs. mercy

Radiohead

A speaker invokes a childhood fantasy of cosmic justice to punish people who irritate him, then realizes partway through that…

petty vindictiveness corporate/institutional conformity self-recognition and guilt

Interpol

A murky, incantatory song built around two women's names -- Rosemary and Sandy -- that Interpol never fully reconciles into a…

complicity and denial seduction as manipulation guilt and judgment

Al Green

Al Green frames a romantic relationship as a sacred event, thanking a higher power for a love that feels chosen rather than…

sacred love gratitude devotion

Television

This is Television's first single, a hazy character sketch built on a shuffling, unresolved guitar figure rather than a…

outsider mystique visionary madness voyeurism and judgment

Steve Earle

A defiant survivor's anthem in which the narrator refuses to be pitied or contained, casting himself as a storyteller-outlaw…

survival and defiance inherited identity addiction and recovery

Gillian Welch

A short, circling song about a young woman stalling against the pressure to settle down—marriage, respectability, the expected…

deferred adulthood female autonomy vs. domestic expectation escape and mobility

PJ Harvey

A murder ballad told in fragments, where a narrator confesses to drowning a girl referred to alternately as lover and daughter,…

guilt and confession incest/taboo desire folk horror and Southern gothic

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's take on this traditional American folk-blues song reworks a prison-camp lament into a swampy rock anthem, keeping its cast…

incarceration and forced labor folk tradition and inheritance longing for deliverance