Results for “ritual and routine”

Songs

Red Guitar

Cassandra Wilson

This is a meditative, almost devotional song built around a simple ritual: each day's mundane and sensory acts are catalogued by…

impermanence ritual and routine art as anchor

My Babe

Spoon

A song about staying put — emotionally and literally — inside a routine that has worn thin, and choosing devotion anyway. The…

endurance of routine devotion as choice stasis versus escape

Heads Will Roll

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

A dancefloor incantation built on a beheading command, this track turns a nightclub into a site of ecstatic dissolution. Karen O…

ecstatic dissolution surveillance/spectacle of the body ritual and repetition

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Broken Social Scene

This is Broken Social Scene's rendition of Joy Division's 1980 classic, recorded for the soundtrack of The Time Traveler's Wife,…

romantic disintegration emotional stasis guilt and self-recrimination

Earth Intruders

Björk

A relentless, drum-heavy chant that casts a collective 'we' as an invading army of natural forces, half-tribal ritual and…

collective identity vs. individual doubt militarism and ritual violence nature reclaiming or overwhelming order

Midnight Special

Lead Belly

A prison work-song built around the recurring image of a train's headlight sweeping across a cell, used as both literal detail…

incarceration longing for freedom surveillance and policing

Sinnerman

Nina Simone

A traditional African-American spiritual reworked into a nearly ten-minute incantation, tracking a sinner's frantic search for…

judgment and reckoning futility of escape divine justice vs. mercy

The Next Episode

Dr. Dre

A West Coast victory-lap posse cut in which Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg reassert their partnership and their region's dominance,…

regional pride hedonism and ritual (weed, cars, drinking) reunion/partnership

Wild

Spoon

A restless meditation on the pull between domesticated, image-managed adulthood and some untamed force outside it. The song…

restlessness under routine authenticity vs. performance longing for freedom

Oh! Sweet Nuthin'

The Velvet Underground

A closing-track litany that names a small cast of the dispossessed—people with literally nothing left to their name—and turns…

poverty and dispossession resignation found community among outcasts

Do You Wanna Dance

Ramones

A three-minute cover of a 1958 rock and roll standard, stripped down and sped up until the invitation to dance becomes an…

teenage romance dance as ritual nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll

Long Legged Larry

Aesop Rock

A children's-book superhero story about a heroic frog who rescues people (and a poodle) from peril, delivered with a straight…

heroism as ritual childlike wonder absurdism

Spit Your Game

The Notorious B.I.G.

A posthumous posse cut built around a chanted, list-like hook that reduces street life to a sequence of imperatives: talk tough,…

bravado and reputation violence as ritual material excess

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Ella Fitzgerald

A cozy standard about wanting bad weather to keep two people indoors together, sung by Fitzgerald with light swing rather than…

domestic coziness reluctant departure desire disguised as weather talk

Harder Better Faster Stronger

Daft Punk

A single fragmented phrase is chopped, looped, and reassembled through vocoder into a mantra about relentless productivity and…

labor and productivity machine identity repetition and ritual

Magic Dance

David Bowie

A propulsive novelty-funk number written for the film Labyrinth, in which a chant-like spell is cast to soothe a crying infant…

childhood fear transformation through play ritual and incantation

Bull In the Heather

Sonic Youth

A slippery, almost mantra-like track built from a numeric countdown and a cycling list of demands, where desire and commerce…

desire vs. commodification repetition and ritual unpredictability/chance

Flower

Moby

This track isn't really a Moby lyric at all but a looped field-recording-style sample of an African American work/children's…

labor and repetition folk memory loss

Lover

Taylor Swift

A wedding-vow of a love song built around domestic imagery and a slow-waltz tenderness, where the small details of shared life…

domestic intimacy commitment and permanence vulnerability through plainness

California Sun

Ramones

A cover of a 1960s surf-pop tune, blasted through the Ramones' buzzsaw guitars and deadpan delivery, turning a sunny travelogue…

escapism nostalgia and pastiche repetition as ritual

Party and Bulls**t

The Notorious B.I.G.

Biggie's debut single is a snapshot of Brooklyn nightlife rendered with documentary precision: the party is inseparable from the…

street life as routine violence normalized within leisure masculinity and reputation

Who Are You

The Who

A drink-and-punch-soaked night in London becomes the occasion for a much larger identity crisis, as the narrator wakes…

identity crisis self-destruction and burnout urban alienation

So Fresh, So Clean

OutKast

A hook-driven strut through vintage cars, retro cool, and pickup lines, where the chorus's braggadocio functions less as…

vanity and self-presentation seduction and courtship rituals nostalgia for Black pop-culture iconography

Finally Friday

George Jones

A workingman's release-valve anthem: cash burning a hole, a weekend lover waiting, and a chorus that treats Friday night as a…

escapism the work week grind hedonism vs. routine

KILL DEM

Jamie xx

KILL DEM is less a song with a plot than a piece of dancehall-derived sound sculpture, built from a stuttering patois vocal…

violence as ritual/rhythm paranoia and evasion dancehall/soundsystem lineage

Ms. Fat Booty

Mos Def

A narrative rap unfolding like a short film in three scenes, tracking a pursuit-and-fallout romance with a woman the narrator…

desire versus discernment the performance of masculinity and vulnerability cynicism eroded by intimacy

Fake Empire

The National

A quiet, waltz-time song that uses childlike, storybook imagery to describe willful escapism, both personal and political. Its…

escapism denial numbness

Down by the Water

PJ Harvey

A murder ballad told in fragments, where a narrator confesses to drowning a girl referred to alternately as lover and daughter,…

guilt and confession incest/taboo desire folk horror and Southern gothic

He Got Game

Public Enemy

This is a live-show excerpt built around crowd participation rather than a fully worked-through song, using the…

media saturation and control spiritual doubt and moral collapse authenticity versus empty spectacle

Things I Miss the Most

Steely Dan

A recently divorced narrator insists he's fine with solitude, then keeps undercutting himself by cataloguing everything lost —…

divorce and its aftermath denial versus admission materialism as emotional substitute

My Little Town (with Art Garfunkel)

Paul Simon

A bitter recollection of a suffocating hometown, stripped of color and possibility, sung as a reunion piece by Simon and…

small-town claustrophobia loss of faith inherited identity

She's Lost Control

Joy Division

A stark, clinical account of watching someone lose command of their own body and mind, built around a mechanical repeated…

loss of control epilepsy/illness powerlessness of the observer

My God

Jethro Tull

A sustained attack on institutional religion, contrasting the rigidity of church ritual with a pantheistic sense of the divine…

institutional religion vs. personal spirituality hypocrisy pantheism/immanence

This Ain't No Picnic

Minutemen

A short, blunt punk song about wage labor as a form of daily indignity. The narrator describes clocking in and out for a boss he…

wage labor and exploitation class resentment dignity versus survival

Get Ur Freak On

Missy Elliott

A pure sound-and-swagger track built around a hypnotic, bindi-and-bhangra-inflected beat, where Missy Elliott spends most of the…

self-assertion dominance and rivalry sound over sense

Mannish Boy

Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters restages his own 1955 declaration of manhood as a late-career victory lap, spelling out the word itself to leave no…

masculinity and self-definition aging and vitality racial dignity ('man' vs 'boy')

Bring Da Ruckus

Wu‐Tang Clan

The opening track of Enter the Wu-Tang stages hip-hop as martial arts combat, with each MC treating the microphone like a weapon…

martial arts mythology as metaphor for lyrical combat collective identity vs individual bravado urban violence and street survival

All My Friends

LCD Soundsystem

A song about a night out that becomes a meditation on an entire adult life, as the narrator watches youth-culture rituals repeat…

aging friendship and its erosion nightlife and nostalgia

Friday

Ice Cube

This is Ice Cube's contribution to the 'Friday' soundtrack lineage, a loosely structured verse-by-verse tour of a South Central…

neighborhood pride and territoriality hedonism as escape normalized violence

Winter Wonderland

Eurythmics

This is a cover of the 1934 standard, recorded for a mid-1980s charity Christmas compilation, and it plays the song fairly…

young romance seasonal escapism imaginative play