Mott the Hoople
An early Mott the Hoople track built on a swaggering put-down dressed up as rock bravado, with a narrator addressing a woman he…
misogyny/double standards rock star posturing public image vs private reality
The Velvet Underground
A simple origin myth about the redemptive power of rock and roll, told through a suburban girl named Jenny whose bleak home life…
salvation through music suburban alienation radio and mass culture
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
Traffic
A road-worn account of touring life, set to a loose groove that mirrors its subject's fatigue and drift. The song moves from…
touring exhaustion rootlessness alienation from ordinary life
Muddy Waters
A late-career Muddy Waters track that functions as a genealogical claim and a roll call, tracing rock and roll's parentage…
musical lineage authorship and ownership of a genre community and testimony
Smokey Robinson
A late-70s slow-jam invitation built almost entirely around a single repeated request: an offer to share the night. The song…
seduction mutual vulnerability intimacy as exchange
Elton John
A pastiche of early rock and roll nostalgia, built around an invented dance craze and a lost teenage romance. The song uses…
nostalgia lost youth first love
Adele
A breakup anthem that transforms grief into a threat, built on gospel-inflected repetition and a rising, percussive arrangement.…
betrayal and revenge transformation of pain into power lost potential
Bad Company
A loose, groove-driven invitation to physical and emotional surrender, built almost entirely on repetition rather than…
surrender to sensation comfort and reassurance physical intimacy
The Clash
A cartoonish fable about a ruler banning music and a population that defies him anyway, set to a bouncy synth-and-rock groove…
authoritarianism vs. popular culture religious/political censorship satire of Western intervention
Snoop Dogg
A breezy, sun-drenched ode to Los Angeles life that runs its title's double meaning -- rolling a joint and 'going with the flow'…
California/L.A. mythology cannabis culture seduction and courtship
Elliott Smith
A cover of a Big Star song, reworked here into something quieter and more aching, this is a teenage courtship scene rendered in…
adolescent love innocence and vulnerability rock and roll as shared language
Rush
A meditation on chance and fate dressed up as a gambling metaphor, Rush's title track argues that existence has no grand design…
randomness vs. determinism mortality and suffering free will within constraint
Sade
Sade builds an entire song out of a single sustained image: a lover as bedrock stability amid emotional chaos. The lyric barely…
emotional refuge isolation vs connection stability in love
Thin Lizzy
This is Thin Lizzy's most explicitly Irish statement, a medley that stitches together fragments of traditional ballads with a…
Irish identity and heritage oral tradition and storytelling myth and heroism
Harry Nilsson
A stripped-down invitation to abandon restraint set to a rolling backbeat, the song works less as narrative than as incantation,…
seduction release/abandon repetition as persuasion
Four Tet
An instrumental piece built from a warm, looping folktronica pulse, this track uses its title as its only verbal cue, suggesting…
domesticity and intimacy repetition as comfort organic rhythm
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
Bob Dylan
A six-minute takedown song that watches a once-privileged woman lose every social prop that made her feel untouchable. Dylan…
fall from privilege social exposure and humiliation freedom through loss
The Rolling Stones
A brief, almost slight set of lyrics serves as launchpad for one of the Stones' longest and most instrumentally ambitious…
desperation and pursuit addiction and decadence desire as siege
Aesop Rock
A meandering, list-like meditation on rivers that uses the image as a container for memory, mortality, and imagination. Aesop…
mortality and grief memory and nostalgia escapism/fantasy
Aesop Rock delivers a rapid-fire history of human technology, tracing tools from prehistoric stone implements through…
technological progress human ingenuity moral ambivalence of innovation
A driving, riff-driven rock song that fuses the imagery of slavery-era sexual exploitation with a leering come-on chorus,…
exploitation and power race and sexualized violence historical memory as spectacle
A dense, image-saturated indictment of predatory social hierarchy, war profiteering, and phony authority, delivered in Aesop…
corruption and hypocrisy violence disguised as order class and survival
Aesop Rock builds a dense allegory around farm-animal escape and surveillance-state paranoia, using the imagery of Animal Farm…
surveillance and control anxiety and hypervigilance complicity versus escape
A relentless riff-driven come-on built almost entirely from a single mechanical metaphor: sex as an engine or vehicle that needs…
sexual desire machinery/car imagery as metaphor loss of control
A weary declaration of devotion dressed up as a refusal: the singer insists he won't be exploited or taken for granted, even as…
emotional labor in relationships self-worth and insecurity devotion disguised as protest
A song built from apocalyptic weather and violence, treating storm, fire, flood, war, and rape as a single continuous threat…
apocalypse and dread violence and its proximity the search for shelter/refuge
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
A dense, image-flooded piece from a concept album about visions and threshold spaces, in which the speaker positions himself at…
liminality and thresholds exhaustion/burnout distrust of moral binaries
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 gospel-choir-backed anthem that stitches together disconnected scenes of desire, disillusionment, and death, all resolving…
disillusionment compromise the counterculture's limits
A song built entirely around addressing a cat named Kirby, whose small, absurd domestic behaviors become a lens for talking…
companionship as coping mechanism mental illness and medication domesticity
A ballad of exhausted devotion, where a narrator caught between wanting to leave and being unable to admits that love has…
ambivalent love emotional exhaustion freedom versus attachment
Creedence Clearwater Revival
A cover of the Gene Pitney-penned, Ricky Nelson-popularized 1961 pop-rock standard, this Mardi Gras rendition is CCR playing it…
love at first sight teenage infatuation nostalgia for early rock and roll
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
Mos Def
This is Mos Def's rendition of Chuck Berry's rock-and-roll foundational text, recorded for the Chess Records biopic soundtrack.…
infidelity and suspicion pursuit and competition American car culture
R.E.M.
Drive opens Automatic for the People as a stark, semi-acoustic address to an unnamed younger generation, built almost entirely…
generational drift autonomy and its risks rock and roll as inheritance and myth
Patti Smith
Land is a nine-minute fever-dream that fuses a violent locker-room assault narrative with the deliriously banal patter of 1960s…
violence and vulnerability transformation through imagination adolescent sexuality
A car-as-lover conceit built on classic Mick Ralphs blues-rock riffing, where the singer casts himself as a Cadillac cruising…
romantic ambivalence masculine bravado cars as bodies/desire