Annie Lennox
A gospel-tinged anthem built on a simple negation—money, sex, and drugs can't purchase what actually matters—before pivoting…
materialism vs. spiritual fulfillment the emptiness of wealth love as redemptive force
J. Cole
ATM stages the voice of money addiction itself, with Cole rapping in the boastful cadence of a hustler consumed by accumulation…
materialism and addiction spiritual emptiness self-destruction disguised as success
A satire dressed as a flex track: Cole raps a checklist of materialist and misogynist clichés straight from mainstream trap…
performative masculinity addiction as coping mechanism materialism and its emptiness
Talking Heads
A song about waking up inside a life you don't remember choosing, stitched together from the trappings of suburban success and a…
suburban alienation loss of agency time and repetition
Elton John
A cryptic character sketch of a wealthy, oddly rigid family man named Levon and his son Jesus, whose longing to escape the…
inherited expectation generational conflict escapism
The Clash
A first-person portrait of a suburban-raised, media-saturated narrator who tries to buy a sense of self off the shelf and finds…
consumerism and identity isolation within domesticity alienation in urban/suburban life
Mission of Burma
A post-punk anthem about disillusionment and the impulse toward violent or drastic rupture as a response to betrayed idealism.…
disillusionment loss of innocence generational inheritance
Led Zeppelin
An eight-minute ballad that starts as a gentle folk critique of spiritual materialism and gradually swells into a mystical,…
spiritual materialism doubt and ambiguity nature as mystic guide
Beck
This is Beck's contribution to a kids'-movie soundtrack, and it plays as a gleeful parody of hype-song conventions: an avalanche…
parody of hype culture empty superlatives absurdist humor
Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill delivers a two-part sermon on sex, self-respect, and modern relationship dysfunction, addressing women in the first…
sexual double standards nostalgia for a simpler past personal responsibility
Steely Dan
A recently divorced narrator insists he's fine with solitude, then keeps undercutting himself by cataloguing everything lost —…
divorce and its aftermath denial versus admission materialism as emotional substitute
Wu‐Tang Clan
This Raekwon and Ghostface Killah cut turns Nas's soul-sample nostalgia formula inside out, using a hazy "remember when" hook to…
street violence and its costs nostalgia versus reality material aspiration and escape
Paul Simon
A slippery, satirical cocktail-party exchange dressed up as an Afro-pop groove, in which Paul Simon strings together…
social performance and vanity emptiness of small talk passivity and resignation
The Temptations
A holiday standard built on a simple, almost sermon-like premise: material gifts are fine, but love is the only present that…
generosity versus materialism universal love seasonal community
The title track of KOD uses a hypnotic, hook-driven trap structure to embody the very drugs of ego, materialism, and violence it…
addiction and self-medication fame and defensiveness cyclical violence
De La Soul
A weary state-of-hip-hop address from De La Soul, cataloguing everything the group has grown sick of in mid-90s rap culture…
disillusionment with commercial rap materialism and misplaced love urban survival and violence
Solange
A hypnotic catalog of Black Southern materiality and culture, built almost entirely from repeated color-coded nouns rather than…
Black Southern identity materialism as cultural survival spiritual resilience
Chris Stapleton
A plainspoken love song built on a single conceit: material poverty offset entirely by romantic abundance. Stapleton uses the…
love versus material wealth contentment in poverty devotion
James Blake
A luxury-draped love song built on a Metro Boomin/Travis Scott feature that trades Blake's usual confessional ache for a more…
possessive intimacy material excess as emotional language fear of solitude
Public Enemy
This is a live-show excerpt built around crowd participation rather than a fully worked-through song, using the…
media saturation and control spiritual doubt and moral collapse authenticity versus empty spectacle
Curtis Mayfield
Mayfield takes on the voice of a blind man to critique a society obsessed with appearance and status while ignoring structural…
blindness as moral clarity social hypocrisy institutional corruption
Van Morrison
A buoyant, playful song built around a photo shoot, where the singer coaxes a model through poses while imagining the payday and…
playful eroticism work as flirtation material pleasure
Air
A single instruction repeated for the length of a pop song, this track treats lyric as texture rather than statement, letting…
repetition as meaning the cosmic versus the domestic retro-futurism
Snoop Dogg
A slow-rolling G-funk seduction track built around a single boast-and-hook structure: Snoop cycles through sexual conquest…
sexual conquest masculine bravado material excess
Gregory Porter
A gospel-inflected ballad that imagines a king or messiah figure rejecting the pomp prepared for his arrival in favor of the…
religious allegory compassion for the marginalized critique of materialism
The Notorious B.I.G.
A posthumous Bad Boy track (from the 1999 'Born Again' album) built as a victory-lap anthem, stitching together a Biggie verse…
posthumous myth-making excess and materialism hyper-masculine bravado
A posthumous posse cut built around a chanted, list-like hook that reduces street life to a sequence of imperatives: talk tough,…
bravado and reputation violence as ritual material excess
Frank Ocean
A loose, associative meditation on wealth, motion, and self-reliance disguised as a track about riding bikes through Los…
self-sufficiency wealth and its emptiness motion as escape
Kris Kristofferson
A hungover drifter walks through a quiet Sunday city, and every ordinary domestic sound he passes -- frying chicken, children…
loneliness addiction and self-medication nostalgia for domestic normalcy
D'Angelo
D'Angelo indicts the entire economy of vice, greed, and hustle that people line up for, while implicating himself as complicit…
greed and materialism complicity and self-implication spiritual/moral corruption
Florence + the Machine
A song about the void left by someone's silence, and the scale of belief or need required to fill it. Florence Welch turns…
romantic obsession spiritual emptiness unrequited longing
Gorillaz
A collaboration between Gorillaz and Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan, the track fuses a patois-inflected verse about hard-won…
survival and upward mobility fame's emptiness isolation within relationships
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
Run-DMC
This is Run-DMC's self-introduction track, a boastful roll call in which each member states his name, role, and superiority in…
self-naming and identity boasting and status group unity vs individual flash
A hedonistic travel-and-flex track built around the refrain that loyalty follows money, not the other way around. Snoop and…
material excess transactional relationships travel and escapism
This posthumous 'duet' track stitches archival Biggie verses with a Diddy guest turn and a Jagged Edge hook into a…
sexual conquest materialism and status posthumous branding
The Who
This is the climactic sequence of the Tommy narrative, where the deaf, dumb and blind protagonist becomes a messianic cult…
false messiahs and cult leadership sensory deprivation as control mob rebellion
A victory-lap posse cut that doubles as a meditation on the isolation success brings. Over a buoyant, sample-driven groove,…
success and isolation envy and betrayal paranoia/surveillance
David Bowie
A restless, jittery portrait of American life told through fragmentary vignettes of couples, sex, race, and disillusionment, all…
Americana and disillusionment race and appropriation consumerism and identity
Interpol
"Gran Hotel" is a hazy travelogue-as-longing, using a specific place name as a stand-in for an emotional destination the…
longing and devotion escape and displacement memory and time