X‐Ray Spex
A flat, almost clinical address to an unnamed "you" strips away personhood, reducing the subject to a marketing abstraction…
commodification of identity surveillance and fame mass media critique
Depeche Mode
A blues-electro stalker's chant built almost entirely around a single fixation: sexual compulsion framed as addiction and…
obsession addiction desire as compulsion
Faith No More
A title track built almost entirely around describing an unnamed, overwhelming peak experience rather than naming it. The song…
obsession and compulsion ecstasy and pain intertwined the ineffable
Mel Tormé
A Cole Porter standard about romantic obsession that the speaker recognizes as self-destructive but cannot shake. The song…
obsessive love self-awareness vs. compulsion futility of resistance
DEVO
Devo turns a single, relentlessly repeated adjective into a parody of consumerist and addictive craving, dressing up compulsion…
consumerism addiction and compulsion loss of free will
Ann Peebles
A woman alone on a rainy night confesses to a desire strong enough to make her willing to wreck another relationship just to…
forbidden desire loneliness emotional compulsion versus morality
Wire
A short, incantatory list of contradictory claims about love, built almost entirely on repeating a single grammatical…
ambivalence of love transformation and distortion paradox
King Crimson
A short, incantatory lyric built from paired phrases that circle the idea of self-scrutiny curdling into self-destruction. The…
obsessive self-analysis psychological drowning fragmentation vs. wholeness
Billy Joel
A young narrator describes a destructive, one-sided infatuation using imagery of physical danger — electrified rails, hidden…
obsessive infatuation self-destruction adolescent isolation
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
Suede
A short, hallucinatory B-side that circles a single obsessive refrain about someone's departure, delivered through disjointed,…
obsession loss and absence drug culture
The Cars
A jittery new-wave fixation song in which the narrator describes mental overload caused by obsession with another person. The…
obsession anxiety loss of control
Kylie Minogue
A minimal, hook-built track in which an unnamed narrator describes an obsessive, almost involuntary attachment to a lover,…
obsession desire and restraint loss of control
Free
A brash blues-rock boast about womanizing that curdles into confession, as the narrator's swagger about juggling multiple…
infidelity and desire self-awareness vs self-destruction masculine bravado
Faithless
A trip-hop confession of romantic addiction, built on a hypnotic looping chorus and a spoken-sung verse that describes love as…
addiction as metaphor for love codependency and control self-deception
Todd Rundgren
A blues-drenched confession addressed to a personified nocturnal terror—likely obsessive desire or a destructive relationship…
obsession fear and desire intertwined loss of control
Waylon Jennings
A short, obsessive breakup lament built almost entirely around one plea repeated over and over: some accusation aimed at a…
heartbreak escape and flight self-destruction
Lupe Fiasco
A straightforward pop-rap infatuation song in which Lupe Fiasco uses the language of songcraft itself—hooks, choruses, verses—as…
infatuation obsession music as metaphor for love
Kasabian
Club Foot is a swaggering, paranoid rock track built on murky electro-rock production and a lyric that reads less like a story…
paranoia obsession drug-induced disorientation
The Rolling Stones
A disco-inflected blues about romantic obsession, where a narrator's loneliness is undercut by the party noise and distraction…
obsessive longing denial and self-deception urban loneliness
The Teardrop Explodes
A brisk, bright pop-psych song about romantic fixation, where longing tips into something more obsessive and unstable. The lyric…
obsessive longing distance and return emotional instability
Perfume Genius
A song about obsessive desire wrestled through the language of recovery and self-denial — the narrator tries to pray and…
obsessive desire shame and self-denial religious or recovery language applied to love
Interpol
A fractured, obsessive address to a woman who dominates the narrator's inner life, built from disjointed images of intimacy,…
obsessive desire emotional damage decay and aging
Robert Johnson
A traveling blues about the compulsion to leave a lover who has wounded the singer, and the ache that compulsion produces even…
compulsive wandering romantic betrayal ambivalence between love and self-preservation
The Triffids
A meditation on memory's unreliability, built around a man clutching physical relics of a lost woman while admitting each…
memory and distortion obsession idealization vs reality
Archers of Loaf
A noisy, fragmented song about wanting to be essential to someone and finding yourself reduced instead to an obstruction in…
codependency and control self-deception miscommunication
The Cure
"Push" is largely an instrumental-driven track with sparse, cryptic lyrics that arrive late and function more as texture than…
self-protection alienation obsession
Cassandra Wilson
This is Cassandra Wilson's 2015 reading of the 1938 Coots/Gillespie standard, delivered as part of a tribute to Billie Holiday.…
intoxication as metaphor for desire self-awareness versus helplessness obsession
The Decemberists
A rangy, harmonica-flecked folk-rock tune built around a single refrain that fixes the action in one riverside, working-town…
desire and self-destruction place and memory erosion/nature as metaphor
Electric Light Orchestra
A ballad built around a single fixation: a man haunted by a vision of a woman glimpsed on the water, unable to shake the image…
obsession escapism fantasy versus reality
Roxy Music
A short, hypnotic track built almost entirely around a single repeated phrase, using minimal lyrical content to evoke a mood of…
obsession romantic devotion ambiguity of desire
The Psychedelic Furs
A hazy meditation on memory and interior voices, where a speaker revisits a fading relationship or lost presence that only…
memory and forgetting interior life vs. external reality regret
Prince
A pulsing, funk-driven fantasy in which lustful thought itself becomes a punishable crime, with the narrator gleefully accepting…
desire as transgression punishment and pleasure obsession
Mercury Rev
A short, mantra-like song built almost entirely from a single repeated claim of near-arrival, set against an image of racing an…
pursuit of an unreachable goal time pressure and mortality obsession
Harry Nilsson
A short, incantatory set of lines about the impossibility of escape gets stretched into a nearly six-minute groove, with the…
inescapability codependency self-destruction
The Hollies
A tightly wound confession of romantic captivity, built around a plea for the beloved to explain the hold they have over the…
obsession loss of control romantic dependency
Sturgill Simpson
A menacing, minimalist track built around predator imagery and a chorus that reads as either seduction or something far darker.…
predation and violence dissociation internal darkness/duality
The Stooges
A slow-burning ballad of surrender, "Ann" strips The Stooges' usual noise down to a hypnotic drone so Iggy Pop can perform total…
erotic surrender loss of control obsession
Death Cab for Cutie
An extended, deliberately monotonous instrumental build frames a lyric spoken by someone who refuses to accept another person's…
obsession denial of rejection unreciprocated desire
A retro-soul come-on built around a single, overworked double entendre, this theme song for HBO's Vinyl trades on 1970s funk…
desire as addiction performance of seduction decay behind glamour