Billy Joel
Billy Joel builds a mock-heroic Wild West ballad complete with outlaw legend and hanging, then in the final verse reveals it as…
mythmaking self-deprecation Americana pastiche
Gillian Welch
Gillian Welch turns Elvis Presley's death into a meditation on American folk mythology, tracing his rise as a synthesizer of…
fame and its costs racial synthesis in American music mortality and mythmaking
Guy Clark
A grown narrator remembers the old oilman who raised him, tracing their bond from childhood through the man's decline and death.…
intergenerational friendship aging and mortality masculine mythmaking
Little Feat
This is a good-humored tall tale that dresses up dancing and music as medical treatment, casting a mysterious small-town figure…
music as healing Southern folklore/tall tale communal ritual
Madvillain
A pure showcase of technical rap virtuosity built almost entirely on internal rhyme chains and boastful non-sequiturs, "All…
braggadocio persona/mythmaking criminal alter-ego
Meat Grinder is a woozy, off-kilter showcase for MF DOOM's dense internal rhyme, wrapped around a strange recurring image of…
surreal domesticity/confinement hustler bravado alter-ego mythmaking
Beastie Boys
A cartoonish spaghetti-Western pastiche in which the three Beastie Boys members appear as characters in their own tall tale,…
mythmaking and self-invention outlaw fantasy adolescent bravado
Run the Jewels
This interlude-style track opens RTJ4 with a radio-show framing device that quickly gives way to a dense, boastful verse trading…
outlaw persona and mythmaking police violence and self-preservation brotherhood and loyalty
A boastful, mythmaking duo track in which El-P and Killer Mike cast themselves as outlaw legends -- part supervillain, part folk…
self-mythologizing violence as performance drug use and excess