Results for “mass incarceration”

Songs

Ice Cube

Ice Cube builds a blunt structural argument: the chorus states a thesis about systemic setup, and the verses supply case studies…

systemic entrapment mass incarceration survival and violence

Lead Belly

A prison work-song built around the recurring image of a train's headlight sweeping across a cell, used as both literal detail…

incarceration longing for freedom surveillance and policing

Madvillain

A dense, freewheeling verse from MF Doom that piles up internal rhyme and non-sequitur imagery to sketch a self-portrait through…

identity through negation authenticity vs. costume/disguise street survival and hustling

The Velvet Underground

A simple origin myth about the redemptive power of rock and roll, told through a suburban girl named Jenny whose bleak home life…

salvation through music suburban alienation radio and mass culture

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

Minutemen

A brief, blunt piece of political arithmetic disguised as a song. Minutemen reduce the Vietnam War to numbers, bureaucratic…

war and bureaucracy dehumanization by statistics imperialism

Lorde

A teenager from an unglamorous town catalogs the luxury clichés of contemporary pop and mass media, then refuses them, proposing…

class and aspiration media saturation and celebrity excess authenticity versus performance

Paul Simon

Written with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, this track from Graceland fuses Zulu isicathamiya vocal tradition with a spare…

homelessness and displacement cross-cultural collaboration communal grief and endurance

Solange

"Mad" is a meditation on the exhaustion of having to justify one's own anger, built around a call-and-response between a…

the right to anger versus the demand for composure respectability and emotional policing of Black people survival and trauma disguised as success

Kanye West Tribute Band

A maximalist anthem that fuses celebration with confession, using the image of light in all its forms—stage lights, police…

fame and surveillance guilt and self-justification fatherhood and estrangement

Wu‐Tang Clan

Two verses from Raekwon and Inspectah Deck lay out parallel autobiographies of poverty, hustling, and incarceration in…

economic desperation and survival the school-to-prison pipeline urban poverty in New York