Blondie
A study in control disguised as romance: the narrator insists nothing between her and the person she's watching is chance,…
control vs. fate obsession and surveillance determinism
Interpol
Interpol pairs one of their most euphoric, propulsive arrangements with a lyric that keeps circling wounds, surveillance, and…
obsessive love surveillance and paranoia self-destruction
Frank Ocean
"Chanel" is a loose, associative track built around the Chanel logo's interlocking C's as a metaphor for bisexuality and duality…
bisexuality and duality surveillance and paranoia wealth as armor
Eurythmics
A propulsive, largely nonsensical dance-pop chant built around the fetishized repetition of a single composer's name,…
obsessive repetition performance and artifice gendered desire and control
Fugazi
A tense, elliptical piece built around the image of a man walking a psychological margin, caught between admiration and violence…
obsession and surveillance jealousy self-destruction
Fleetwood Mac
A Stevie Nicks composition for Fleetwood Mac's 2003 reunion album, this song circles a fraught reconciliation between two people…
romantic obsession broken trust self-abasement in love
R.E.M.
A stalker's boast dressed up as a superhero anthem: the narrator claims omniscience and inevitability in pursuing a woman who…
obsession disguised as devotion toxic masculinity/control surveillance and pursuit
PJ Harvey
A jealous, obsessive lover refuses to let go, oscillating between pleading vulnerability and menacing possessiveness. The song…
obsession codependency possessiveness
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
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
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
Lorde
Lorde's cover strips Tears for Fears' 1985 synth-pop anthem down to something colder and more brittle, turning a wry commentary…
power and control surveillance complicity
Mos Def
Mos Def builds a dense, statistics-driven indictment of American racial and economic injustice around the conceit of numbers,…
mass incarceration systemic racism economic inequality
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
Sturgill Simpson
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
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 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
A blunt, riff-driven declaration of desire that keeps colliding with the speaker's own disbelief at how simple and overwhelming…
desire versus complexity secrecy and shame repetition as devotion
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
A minimal, incantatory sketch of a woman rendered almost entirely through color, repeated like a chant until a single image of…
absence obsession dissolution of identity
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
Elvis Costello
A jealous, media-poisoned narrator watches a woman who watches TV crime dramas, and the two kinds of watching collapse into each…
voyeurism and media saturation emotional numbness jealousy and control
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 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
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
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
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
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
A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will
Neutral Milk Hotel
A distorted, obsessive love song that swings between tenderness and revulsion, built around the fixation of a narrator who both…
obsessive desire idealization vs. disgust possession and control
Deep Purple
This is a straightforward garage-pop cover turned hard-rock workout, built almost entirely from nonsense syllables and a simple…
obsessive infatuation powerlessness in love physical desire
Muddy Waters
A slow, grinding blues in which Muddy Waters uses a strange, oversized cat as a comic stand-in for suspicion and sexual…
jealousy and suspicion infidelity domestic surveillance
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
Spoon
A pulsing title track built almost entirely around a single obsessive phrase, tracking a mind hijacked by desire while it's set…
obsession and infatuation loss of control urban nightlife / travel
Public Enemy
This track is Public Enemy's tribute to their DJ, built around a chant-and-scratch structure that treats turntablism itself as a…
black musical mastery as resistance surveillance and policing industry gatekeeping
Abbey Lincoln
A standard-turned-jazz-vehicle built entirely on circular imagery, this lyric maps the disorienting churn of memory after a…
memory and obsession the end of love time's circularity
David Bowie
Written for Bowie's Jareth character in Labyrinth, this is a confrontation disguised as a torch song: a possessive figure…
obsession and control power and powerlessness seduction versus manipulation
A grief-drenched meditation on a lost relationship, told entirely through the act of staring at photographs and the memories…
grief and loss memory versus reality obsessive love
Traffic
A straightforward blues-rock come-on built around infatuation and helplessness in the face of a magnetic, emotionally elusive…
desire and obsession loss of control emotional manipulation
A jilted narrator sifts through the physical debris a lover has left behind, treating each object as evidence of who she was and…
romantic obsession grief and loss self-deception