Results for “retro soul performance”

Songs

Souls of Mischief

This is a straightforward braggadocio track built around a single repeated mandate: pursue women, collect cash, and move on…

transactional sexuality financial hustle masculine bravado

Soul Sista

Bilal

A neo-soul love song built almost entirely on a single repeated affirmation, treating physical and spiritual intimacy as…

spiritual intimacy sensual desire authenticity vs. language

All That You Have Is Your Soul

Emmylou Harris

A mother's warning becomes a hard-won personal confession, as the narrator traces her own failures to heed advice about…

inherited wisdom moral compromise self-possession versus loss of self

Soul Meets Body

Death Cab for Cutie

A gentle, folk-inflected love song built around a fantasy of full integration - body and spirit, self and other - as the…

union of body and soul romantic devotion mortality and shared fate

Step to My Girl

Souls of Mischief

A posse-cut brag track built around a single scenario: other men hitting on the narrators' girlfriends, and each rapper…

jealousy and possessiveness masculine status competition hypervigilance/insecurity masked as confidence

Stone Rollin'

Raphael Saadiq

A rollicking, retro-soul come-on built around physical infatuation, cast in the swagger and slang of vintage R&B and soul-blues…

physical attraction retro soul performance masculine bravado

Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)

De La Soul

De La Soul turns their own answering machine into a comic stage set, using its looping outgoing message as a chorus to frame a…

fame and its unwanted attention the hip-hop demo-tape hustle authenticity versus hype

Eye Know

De La Soul

"Eye Know" is De La Soul's sunniest love song, built on a Steely Dan sample and playful Daisy Age slang. Both Posdnuos and…

courtship and seduction wordplay as intimacy group identity and self-naming

Soothe My Soul

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

Easy on My Soul

Free

A late-period Free track that trades narrative for mantra, circling the questions of what love and life amount to before…

exhaustion self-forgiveness spiritual uncertainty

Batting Practice

Souls of Mischief

A posse cut built around a single extended conceit: rapping as batting practice, with each Souls of Mischief member (plus…

braggadocio competition/skill display crew unity

In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul

The Clean

A deadpan sketch of suburban middle-class malaise, built around a pun that fuses spiritual emptiness with protective numbness.…

suburban conformity spiritual emptiness emotional numbness

Tour Stories

Souls of Mischief

A road-diary rap where four Oakland MCs trade verses about the surreal mundanity of touring the world -- customs hassles,…

travel and displacement hustle and reward disbelief at success

93' Till Infinity

Souls of Mischief

This is a live-recording rendition of the Oakland classic that built its reputation on effortless, unhurried braggadocio. The…

hip-hop regionalism crew loyalty hedonism and leisure

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

The Magic Number

De La Soul

De La Soul turns Schoolhouse Rock's arithmetic lesson into a manifesto for the trio itself, using the number three as a stand-in…

group identity and unity originality vs. imitation in hip-hop numerology/mysticism as playful device

Breakadawn

De La Soul

A loose, free-associative posse-cut style track from De La Soul's most abstract album, built on stream-of-consciousness wordplay…

identity and origin hip-hop lineage and Native Tongues affiliation industry skepticism

Say No Go

De La Soul

De La Soul takes on the crack epidemic of the late 1980s not through gritty street reportage but through wordplay, sampling, and…

addiction and its generational cost complicity versus resistance community warning and moral instruction

Buddy

De La Soul

"Buddy" is a posse-cut party track from De La Soul's debut, built around an extended and deliberately silly sexual code word…

sexual innuendo through wordplay collective male bravado playful group identity

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

Oooh.

De La Soul

A posse-cut braggadocio track from De La Soul's Art Official Intelligence era, featuring Redman on hooks and ad-libs while Pos…

lyrical supremacy authenticity vs. commercialism hustle and survival

Wild Side of Life (Rare Radio Performance)

Hank Williams

A jilted lover addresses an ex-partner who has returned to bars and nightlife, framing her departure as a betrayal of domestic…

betrayal domesticity vs. nightlife wounded pride

A Roller Skating Jam Named "Saturdays"

De La Soul

A radio-skit framed jam that turns Saturday roller-rink culture into a loose celebration of release after the work week,…

leisure and release community ritual casual romance and its double standards

Fool

Perfume Genius

A short, hallucinatory piece built on near-identical repeated lines, "Fool" stages a domestic act of devotion that curdles into…

performed devotion self-abasement concealed suffering

Nessun Dorma

Aretha Franklin

This is Aretha Franklin's rendition of Puccini's aria from Turandot, sung in a hybrid of the original Italian and an English…

secrecy and revelation romantic conquest defiance of darkness

Smooth Sailin'

Leon Bridges

A streetwise come-on dressed up as a nautical fantasy, where a woman walking down a city boulevard becomes a ship gliding…

desire and pursuit urban romanticism surrender/submission in courtship

Sugar Daddy (Theme from "Vinyl")

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

If Lovin' You Is Wrong

Faithless

A straightforward, unapologetic sex boast set to a dance-floor pulse, built around Maxi Jazz's rapid-fire verses of carnal…

sexual desire bravado and performance pleasure as defiance of judgment

Dance On a Volcano

Genesis

A driving opener built around the image of a lethal dance performed on the lip of an active volcano, where every misstep is…

risk and consequence performance under pressure mortality

New York Comeback

Lucinda Williams

A defiant address to an audience already heading for the exits, built around the insistence that the performance—and the…

persistence late-career resilience performance and audience

Lovesick Blues (Show 4)

Hank Williams

This is a live radio broadcast performance of Hank Williams' signature hit, complete with the show's folksy introduction and…

romantic abandonment wounded masculine pride performance and showmanship

She's Just Killing Me

ZZ Top

A boogie-blues come-on built around a stage performer who may or may not be literally lethal, ZZ Top's contribution to the From…

desire as self-destruction objectification of a performer blues/boogie bravado

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey

A performance-song built around a real 1920s social dance craze, this track is Ma Rainey turning a live novelty number into…

performance and spectacle dance as communal ritual Black vernacular culture

Victim of Love

Charles Bradley

A classic deep-soul testimony of romantic surrender dressed up as affliction: the singer frames helpless devotion as a kind of…

romantic surrender powerlessness in love soul-music confession

Hunger

Florence + the Machine

An opening confession about adolescent anorexia expands into a wider meditation on addiction, performance, and the human need to…

eating disorders and body control addiction and substitution performance versus intimacy

Unless It's Kicks

Okkervil River

A road-worn musician's interior monologue about the desperate, half-fraudulent transaction between performer and audience — the…

the fraudulence and necessity of performance touring exhaustion and self-destruction music as addiction/self-medication

Brando

Lucy Dacus

A retrospective portrait of a manipulative older figure who performed cinematic romance and intellectual superiority to disguise…

manipulation disguised as romance performed masculinity retrospective clarity

Laugh Track

Unwound

A tense, minimal piece about a mind that has turned its own loneliness into a performance for an imaginary audience, complete…

isolation self-surveillance mental health

Drop Dead Legs

Van Halen

A strutting party-rock throwaway built entirely around physical fixation, delivered with the band's trademark bravado and…

physical attraction sexual bravado hedonism

King of Dreams

Deep Purple

A swaggering character sketch of a seductive performer-illusionist who trades in charm and disguise rather than substance. The…

seduction as performance illusion vs. authenticity narcissism and self-mythologizing