Results for “materialism as cultural survival”

Songs

Almeda

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

Stakes Is High

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

Fight the Power (From "Do The Right Thing" Soundtrack)

Public Enemy

A rallying anthem built on funk breaks and blunt sloganeering, the track argues that Black cultural pride and outright refusal…

Black pride and self-determination media and cultural gatekeeping collective action versus passivity

London Calling

The Clash

A blitzkrieg of apocalyptic headlines delivered as a radio broadcast, "London Calling" imagines a city besieged by nuclear…

nuclear anxiety urban decay disillusionment with youth culture

People Say

Wu‐Tang Clan

This is a posse-cut style Wu-Tang track where multiple MCs trade dense, boastful verses about street history, criminal résumé,…

street survival and generational crime materialism and excess lyrical supremacy/battle rap bravado

Fight the Power

Public Enemy

A dense, funk-driven manifesto that treats mainstream American culture's chosen icons as instruments of erasure, demanding Black…

institutional racism Black pride and self-determination media and cultural gatekeeping

Country Cousins

Talib Kweli

A track built around regional hip-hop kinship, tracing how a Brooklyn upbringing steeped in New York rap culture connects…

regional identity in hip-hop cultural kinship and slang as connective tissue coming-of-age through music

Devil's Pie

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

9th Wonder (Blackitolism)

Digable Planets

A loose, jazz-inflected posse cut in which the Digable Planets crew trade boasts about style, borough pride, and lyrical…

borough/regional pride Afrocentric and cosmic imagery lyrical dexterity as identity

Jettin'

Digable Planets

A loose, groove-driven travelogue through Brooklyn, built more on atmosphere and rhythm than narrative, where the trio's verses…

place and belonging Brooklyn/borough pride Black cultural memory

She's Crafty

Beastie Boys

A boastful party-rap narrator recounts two encounters with a woman he casts as manipulative and dangerous, only for the joke to…

misplaced bravado gullibility and comeuppance urban hookup culture

C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)

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

So Fresh, So Clean

OutKast

A hook-driven strut through vintage cars, retro cool, and pickup lines, where the chorus's braggadocio functions less as…

vanity and self-presentation seduction and courtship rituals nostalgia for Black pop-culture iconography

Bring Da Ruckus

Wu‐Tang Clan

The opening track of Enter the Wu-Tang stages hip-hop as martial arts combat, with each MC treating the microphone like a weapon…

martial arts mythology as metaphor for lyrical combat collective identity vs individual bravado urban violence and street survival

The Big Unknown

Sade

A stark, slow-burning meditation on grief and survival, written in the voice of someone descending into loss while insisting on…

grief survival descent and rebirth

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

Magazine

Magazine's version of the Sly and the Family Stone song strips the original's funk exuberance down to something clipped and…

identity and self-possession violence and threat alienation from social gathering

Doo Wop (That Thing)

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

I'm Afraid of Americans

David Bowie

A jittery industrial-rock sketch of a generic American everyman named Johnny, whose consumerist appetites and hollow…

cultural imperialism consumerism paranoia and dread

Rubble Kings Theme (Dynamite)

Run the Jewels

A theme song for a documentary about 1970s New York gang culture, this track has Killer Mike and El-P narrate street survival as…

urban survival and neglect self-made authority religious skepticism

The Cutter

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

No Shoes

John Lee Hooker

A stark, first-person account of poverty rendered in the repetitive, incantatory style of Delta blues. Hooker strips the song…

poverty desperation fatherhood and helplessness

Corona

Minutemen

A terse, two-minute political sketch that moves from a stark statement about poverty and inherited injustice to a small, almost…

economic inequality inherited guilt survival

The Morning Fog

Kate Bush

This short closing piece functions as an emergence from crisis into ordinary gratitude. After the storm and drowning imagery of…

rebirth gratitude family bonds

South Side

Moby

This is Moby's spare, half-sung meditation built around a repeating road-trip refrain that cycles through the four points of the…

urban danger friendship and loyalty hope versus fear

Thankful N' Thoughtful

Sly & Robbie

This is Sly Stone's post-crisis testimony, delivered as a loose funk sermon on survival and gratitude. It reads less as a song…

survival and mortality gratitude spiritual reckoning

On My Way to Harlem

Gregory Porter

Gregory Porter narrates a pilgrimage to Harlem that turns into a meditation on cultural inheritance and gentrification—the icons…

cultural memory gentrification and displacement artistic lineage

409

The Beach Boys

An early Beach Boys car song that treats a Chevrolet engine like a lover and a racehorse at once, built almost entirely on chant…

car culture masculine pride and status consumerism/saving toward a goal

The World Is Yours

Nas

A dense, imagistic monologue from the Queensbridge projects that reframes the Scarface-derived hook — the world is yours — as a…

self-determination amid poverty mortality and survival fatherhood and legacy

Why We Thugs

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

Pink + White

Frank Ocean

A soft, wandering meditation on maternal love and mortality, built around the image of a hurricane and the small acts of…

maternal love survival and resilience impermanence

The Unsinkable Fats Domino

Guided By Voices

A cryptic, riddling GBV track that uses Fats Domino's real-life survival of Hurricane Katrina as an emblem of resilience, then…

survival and resilience flood/water imagery as threat and purification fame versus obscurity

Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

Talking Heads

A polyrhythmic groove built on Afrobeat-inspired repetition, this track dramatizes a speaker who is simultaneously a…

power and bureaucracy bodily panic and breathlessness dehumanization

The Healer

John Lee Hooker

This is less a song than a testimony delivered over a slow-burning groove: John Lee Hooker declares the blues itself a curative…

the blues as spiritual medicine suffering and survival heartbreak and abandonment

F.U.B.U.

Solange

F.U.B.U. is a direct address to Black listeners, reclaiming the phrase 'for us, by us' as a statement of cultural ownership. The…

Black solidarity cultural ownership racial profiling

Stairway to Heaven

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

My Love Is Your Love

Whitney Houston

A reggae-tinged declaration of love built around apocalyptic and historical extremes, the song insists that a bond between two…

unconditional love survival and endurance spirituality and judgment

Nights

Frank Ocean

A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…

isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia

Praise God

Kanye West Tribute Band

A gospel-adjacent opener that stages resurrection as both spiritual claim and career narrative, framing survival and success as…

redemption and resurrection survival against despair fame and scrutiny

3 Tearz

Danny Brown

A three-verse posse cut where Danny Brown, Run the Jewels' El-P and Killer Mike (implied by the guest verses) trade dense,…

nihilism as armor drug-trade nostalgia gallows humor around death

Me and My Husband

Mitski

A brief, waltz-like song that frames marriage not as romance but as a bulwark against mortality and self-loathing. The…

mortality and impermanence self-erasure marriage as survival strategy