Results for “legal/moral peril”

Songs

Barely Legal

The Strokes

A slack, half-confessional monologue about a lopsided romance where guilt, desire, and self-sabotage tangle together without…

failed responsibility desire and control guilt and self-justification

Resurrection

Common

An early showcase of Common's dense, freestyle-adjacent wordplay, this track is less about narrative than about verbal…

wordplay as identity self-improvement and discipline legal/moral peril

Walking in My Shoes

Depeche Mode

A confessional plea from someone who has been publicly judged for private sins, refusing to apologize while insisting his…

moral judgment and hypocrisy temptation and guilt empathy versus condemnation

The Rainbow

Talk Talk

An oblique meditation on justice, guilt, and the gap between legal verdicts and moral truth, built from fragments of courtroom…

justice and its failures guilt and repentance institutional power

Devil's Gonna Git You

Bessie Smith

A blues warning delivered as a curse: the narrator threatens a philandering partner with damnation, using the devil as a…

infidelity and betrayal moral reckoning female assertiveness

The Cold Hard Truth

George Jones

George Jones builds this song around a striking conceit: the truth itself shows up as a character, confronting a man about the…

personified truth/conscience infidelity and self-deception moral reckoning

Sinner or Saint

Sarah Vaughan

This is a devotional address built almost entirely on paired opposites, culminating in a refrain of unconditional love. The…

unconditional love moral duality forgiveness

On the Turning Away

Pink Floyd

A gentle, hymn-like protest song that addresses complacency toward poverty and suffering directly, using the recurring image of…

social indifference collective responsibility moral awakening

Dollar Bill Blues

Townes Van Zandt

A ramshackle blues about a broke, drink-craving gambler whose fantasies of easy money and easy love curdle into a confession of…

poverty and want drink and gambling as fate violence disguised as bravado

Paradise Circus

Massive Attack

A slow-burning meditation on desire as self-inflicted damage, built from a handful of repeated images—storms, sin, flame,…

desire and self-destruction moral ambivalence addiction to feeling

Heaven and Hell

Black Sabbath

This is Black Sabbath's title track marking the arrival of Ronnie James Dio, trading the band's earlier horror-movie doom for…

moral ambiguity illusion versus reality corrupted power

Tearz

Wu‐Tang Clan

A grim, cautionary storytelling track built around two narrated tragedies -- a child's death from a street robbery and a…

mortality street violence consequence of recklessness

Are You Ready?

Wire

Wire builds this track almost entirely from a single interrogative structure, hammering out a litany of yes/no questions that…

complicity and complacency consumerism/branding as identity moral and existential reckoning

Bleed The Freak

Alice in Chains

A confrontational early Alice in Chains track that inverts biblical language and moral hierarchies to attack self-righteous…

religious hypocrisy judgment and retribution cruelty of moral authority

Hellacious Acres

Kris Kristofferson

A carnival-barker satire that reimagines hell as a theme park, complete with billboards, ticket lines, and celebrity attractions…

moral corruption as entertainment consumerism and commodified sin celebrity and infamy

A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

Laura Marling

This is a cover of Bob Dylan's 1963 apocalyptic ballad, structured as a call-and-response between a questioning parent and a…

apocalypse and prophecy witness and testimony social collapse

Sorry Somehow

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

Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It

Ice Cube

Ice Cube uses the media's stock accusation that gangsta rap 'causes' violence as a satirical device, exaggerating the charge…

media scapegoating and moral panic authenticity vs commercial gatekeeping black masculinity and self-reliance

Get Down

Nas

Nas narrates a series of street-life anecdotes and near-death encounters spanning decades of New York and West Coast gang…

cycles of violence street mythology and legacy fatalism vs. moral awakening

I Want Your Sex, Pts. 1 & 2

George Michael

George Michael turns a single, blunt demand into a sustained argument about desire, patience, and monogamy, dressing up a simple…

sexual desire and frustration persuasion and rhetoric monogamy versus promiscuity

X Offender

Blondie

Blondie's debut single reframes a streetwalker's infatuation with a police officer as a giddy crime narrative, blurring the…

desire as transgression policing and power irony of legal language repurposed as romance

Gimme Shelter

Patti Smith

This is a cover of the Rolling Stones' 1969 apocalyptic ballad, and Patti Smith treats it less as a rock anthem than as an…

apocalypse and dread the fragility of shelter violence versus tenderness

Something In The Way

Nirvana

A hushed, almost inert closer to Nevermind that trades the album's loud-quiet-loud dynamics for a single sustained murmur. The…

isolation destitution moral numbness

Never Stop

Echo & the Bunnymen

A terse, image-dense track that pits mercenary greed and dead ideology against a stubborn, almost defiant insistence on love as…

greed vs. love disillusionment with authority/religion moral ambiguity

Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town

Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey's 1994 reading of the 1934 novelty standard turns a simple children's warning song into a full-scale gospel-pop…

surveillance and reward childhood obedience holiday anticipation

Sex, Drugs and Violence

Public Enemy

Public Enemy uses three loosely connected vignettes of unsolved shootings tied to hip-hop culture to indict the industry and…

media complicity violence in hip-hop culture commercialization of black death

Jokerman

Bob Dylan

Dylan builds a shape-shifting composite figure out of biblical allusion, political imagery, and mythic archetype, then refuses…

moral ambiguity messianic figures and false prophets political violence and complicity

Unshaken

D'Angelo

A meditative prayer set against apocalyptic collapse, this song written for a game about the closing of the American frontier…

spiritual endurance moral reckoning memory and forgetting

Jesus Walks

Kanye West Tribute Band

Kanye West stages a war between street survival and spiritual longing, using a marching-drum gospel choir to frame hustling,…

faith under duress racial profiling and criminalization survivor's guilt

Pancho and Lefty

Townes Van Zandt

A ballad about a legendary Mexican bandit and the friend widely suspected of betraying him, told with the flattened affect of a…

betrayal and complicity myth-making versus truth exile and displacement

The Wreckers

Rush

A narrator recounts a shipwreck deliberately caused by shore-dwellers who lure vessels onto rocks with false lights, then loot…

betrayal false hope/illusion predation and greed

World On Fire

Dolly Parton

A protest anthem built on a nursery-rhyme taunt, cataloguing political dishonesty, social division and violence while insisting…

political disillusionment social division moral urgency

Shoot High, Aim Low

Yes

A hazy, image-driven track that reads like a fragmented travelogue through some unnamed conflict zone, mixing romantic escape…

disorientation moral ambiguity escape and pursuit

Swamp

Talking Heads

"Swamp" plays like a fever-dream noir, David Byrne narrating a shadowy transaction with the devil and a cast of menacing,…

paranoia moral corruption identity dissolution

Bird On a Wire

Leonard Cohen

A confession and an apology run together as the speaker compares himself to a series of unstable, straining images to explain…

freedom versus commitment guilt and self-forgiveness instability of the self

Don't Come Back

Buzzcocks

A brisk breakup song dressed as a pep talk, where the narrator's encouragement to move on curdles into something closer to…

breakup and detachment false encouragement moral relativism

Hands on the Wheel

Willie Nelson

A wandering, self-destructive narrator arrives at a moment of grounding, finding stability not in ideology or vice but in…

disillusionment redemption through love moral ambiguity

All That You Have Is Your Soul

Emmylou Harris

A mother's warning becomes a hard-won personal confession, as the narrator traces her own failures to heed advice about…

inherited wisdom moral compromise self-possession versus loss of self

I'm Amazed

My Morning Jacket

A falsetto-driven meditation built entirely from the phrase 'I'm amazed,' the song lists private tenderness alongside public…

media distrust personal devotion vs. public decay spiritual/moral drift

Folsom Prison Blues

Johnny Cash

A first-person prison lament in which the narrator, confined and hopeless, is tormented by the sound of a train he cannot board.…

confinement and freedom guilt and moral consequence class resentment