Results for “myth-making”

Songs

The Same Thing (Makes You Laugh, Makes You Cry)

Sly & Robbie

This is a single proverbial statement stretched into a full song: the idea that any given force in life -- pleasure, sustenance,…

duality of experience impermanence skepticism toward truth

Make Some Noise

Beastie Boys

This is the Beastie Boys doing what they do best: rapid-fire boasting, absurdist non sequiturs, and a chant-along hook, all…

comeback/reassertion braggadocio as comedy collective unity vs individual ego

Makes No Sense At All

Hüsker Dü

A pop-punk blast of exasperation aimed at someone whose contradictions and self-inflation have stopped registering as anything…

frustration with a partner's inconsistency emotional exhaustion refusal to engage further

The Way You Make Me Feel

Michael Jackson

A buoyant, physically driven declaration of infatuation built almost entirely around a single hook that gets repeated, echoed,…

infatuation desire and pursuit possessiveness

Make You Feel My Love

Adele

A plainspoken devotional ballad in which the singer catalogs the hardships she'd endure to prove her love, building through…

unconditional devotion persuasion and reassurance vulnerability

U Make My Sun Shine

Prince

A duet-style track (this reading assumes a female vocal responds within the arrangement, as on the recorded version) about…

exploitation vs. devotion self-worth and awakening romantic sanctuary

I Just Want To Make Love To You

Etta James

Etta James takes a Willie Dixon blues lyric written for a male singer and, sung from a woman's voice, turns a checklist of…

desire and domesticity gender role reversal possessiveness dressed as devotion

Not Great Men

Gang of Four

A terse, almost slogan-like song that attacks the 'great man' theory of history, arguing that the version of the past kept on…

historiography and ideology class inequality myth-making

Notorious B.I.G.

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

Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)

Pixies

This is the slowed, dreamier remake of a song originally built on distorted urgency, and the shift in tempo changes its meaning:…

self-destruction reframed as escape transformation through death or disappearance oceanic myth-making

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

Poncho & Lefty

Townes Van Zandt

A weathered ballad about a Mexican bandit and the friend who may have betrayed him, told with the flat, elliptical tone of a…

betrayal and guilt myth-making and unreliable legend exile and diminishment

The Conversation

Waylon Jennings

Waylon Jennings imagines a barroom conversation with Hank Williams Jr. about his late father, using it as a vehicle to reckon…

musical inheritance/legacy myth-making around dead legends fatherhood and absence

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

Waylon Jennings

A meditation on the gap between the mythic cowboy and the man who tried to live inside that myth. The song traces how a…

disillusionment with myth loneliness and rootlessness masculinity and emotional detachment

Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend

Thin Lizzy

This is Thin Lizzy's most explicitly Irish statement, a medley that stitches together fragments of traditional ballads with a…

Irish identity and heritage oral tradition and storytelling myth and heroism

Immigrant Song

Led Zeppelin

A short, blunt battle-cry sung from the perspective of Viking raiders sailing west, framed less as narrative than as invocation.…

conquest and invasion myth and legend masculine bravado

Transatlanticism

Death Cab for Cutie

A song about distance rendered as flood myth: the ocean between two people is imagined as newly created, cutting off any…

long-distance separation longing creation myth as metaphor

Satellite Anthem Icarus

Boards of Canada

Satellite Anthem Icarus is an instrumental piece built from warm, slightly detuned guitar figures laid over a slow, hypnotic…

flight and falling distance/isolation nostalgia for analog technology

Where Corn Don't Grow

Waylon Jennings

A grown narrator recalls the day he told his farmer father he wanted a life away from the land, and revisits his father's quiet,…

generational conflict rural vs. urban life regret and hindsight

Slip Jigs and Reels

Fairport Convention

A ballad-style narrative that follows an Irish emigrant from the boat to New York through a life of gambling, violence, and…

emigration and displacement the making of an outlaw loss of innocence

Ramble On

Led Zeppelin

A wandering-troubadour song that fuses restless road-life imagery with an unexpected detour into Tolkien fantasy, using the…

restlessness and wanderlust romantic quest fantasy/myth as metaphor

America!

Bill Callahan

Bill Callahan turns the word "America" into a chant, a mantra, and eventually an indictment, roll-calling country singers who…

national identity military service and myth American exceptionalism vs. its violent history

Texas Twister

Little Feat

A boozy, tall-tale narrative about a drifter drawn in by a radio siren's voice and then by a woman (or maybe a car, or a storm,…

seduction and danger the open road as myth radio as folklore/siren call

Prester John

Animal Collective

A meditation on decline and letting go, framed through the legendary figure of Prester John, a mythical Christian king whose…

decay and endings myth versus reality acceptance and release

Hard-Core Troubadour

Steve Earle

A wry character sketch of an unrepentant romantic drifter told from the outside, by a narrator warning a woman about the man's…

romantic recidivism performance vs. sincerity the myth of the outlaw lover

Liar

Built to Spill

A meditation on obsessive thinking and the indifference of the natural world, built around a repeated denial that functions…

obsessive thought indifference of nature anxiety over decision-making

Ooh Las Vegas

Gram Parsons

A honky-tonk lament about a gambler caught in the loop of losing, drinking, and going back for more, with Las Vegas cast as a…

addiction and compulsion poverty vs. glamour self-destruction

Must Be Santa

Bob Dylan

Dylan's version of the polka novelty song plays it almost entirely straight as a call-and-response Christmas romp, building…

holiday tradition Americana kitsch absurdist humor

Big Dipper

Built to Spill

A woozy meditation on childhood perception, drinking, and loneliness, built around the image of the Big Dipper as an unreliable…

perception vs. reality loneliness alcohol and self-deception

One Big Holiday

My Morning Jacket

A loose, sun-warmed travelogue about escaping a hometown for the promise of somewhere better, built around a phone call and a…

escape and reinvention friendship and collective movement music-making as ritual

Me Myself and I

De La Soul

De La Soul use a mirror-gazing conceit to push back against critics and industry types who wanted to pigeonhole them as hippies…

individuality vs. conformity authenticity in art resistance to stereotyping

My Ride's Here

Warren Zevon

A dying man's fever-dream inventory of Hollywood Westerns, biblical epics, and Romantic poets, all jumbled together as he waits…

mortality and impending death faith and skepticism entangled art and myth as coping mechanisms

Drive

R.E.M.

Drive opens Automatic for the People as a stark, semi-acoustic address to an unnamed younger generation, built almost entirely…

generational drift autonomy and its risks rock and roll as inheritance and myth

Where It's At

Beck

A cut-and-paste party anthem that treats meaning as beside the point, stitching together carnival barker patter,…

collage/pastiche nostalgia for analog music-making irony toward hip-hop authenticity tropes

Something Special

Randy Newman

A plainspoken love-song reassurance built almost entirely out of pop-ballad stock phrases, where the title refrain stands in for…

romantic reassurance genre pastiche insecurity beneath confidence

This Town Gets Around

Margo Price

Margo Price surveys the transactional culture of Nashville's music industry from the vantage of a newcomer who has already been…

music industry exploitation gender and power authenticity vs. commerce

Boats to Build

Guy Clark

Guy Clark turns the craft of boatbuilding into a meditation on making a life with your own hands and getting on with it before…

mortality and urgency craftsmanship as self-definition self-reliance

Pocket Calculator

Kraftwerk

A deadpan celebration of the pocket calculator as both tool and instrument, in which Kraftwerk collapses the distinction between…

human-machine merger automation of creativity consumer technology as instrument

I'm On Fire

Bruce Springsteen

A minimal, hushed blues built on obsessive desire, where the narrator's want curdles into something closer to torment than…

obsessive desire sleeplessness and mental anguish transgressive attraction

Coming Up Roses

Elliott Smith

A hallucinatory address to a self or double, tracking a slow poisoning that the speaker frames as a kind of blooming. The song…

addiction and self-destruction dissociation from the self toxic inheritance