Results for “selfhood versus otherness”

Songs

Same But Different

Vashti Bunyan

A brief, mirrored lyric about seeing oneself in another person, built almost entirely from a single repeated image of boats,…

identity and mirroring perspective-taking empathy

Exchange

Massive Attack

An almost-instrumental interlude built from a single repeated proverb about the unknowability of other people. The track…

opacity of others distrust and self-protection the gap between appearance and interior life

Outdoor Miner

Wire

A deceptively sweet pop song from a band known for angular art-punk, built around the tiny natural phenomenon of a leaf-mining…

nature observation hiddenness and exposure innocence versus threat

Sexy Boy

Air

A woozy, vocoder-warped taunt built almost entirely out of one phrase, "Sexy Boy" pokes at masculine vanity and celebrity…

vanity and self-image celebrity and consumerism irony versus seduction

Katie Cruel

Bert Jansch

This is a traditional Appalachian folk lament, here rendered by Bert Jansch in his hushed, weathered late-career voice, about a…

exile and rejection itinerancy social reversal of fortune

100%

Sonic Youth

A tribute song built from fragments of grief, aggression, and dark humor, written in memory of a scene figure lost to violence.…

violent death and its aftermath rock scene mythology and idolization gender and predation within a music subculture

Only This Moment

Röyksopp

A minimalist electro-pop meditation on love as a present-tense gamble, oscillating between dread that a relationship is doomed…

uncertainty in love presentism versus fear of the future doubt and surrender

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

Make You Feel My Love

Adele

A plainspoken devotional ballad in which the singer catalogs the hardships she'd endure to prove her love, building through…

unconditional devotion persuasion and reassurance vulnerability

Wild Fire

Laura Marling

Laura Marling narrates from the outside of a relationship, watching a woman she's fascinated by perform for others while…

watching versus being seen inherited family damage artistic self-consciousness

Diving Woman

Japanese Breakfast

A road song about self-invention, built around the image of the haenyeo, the free-diving women of Jeju Island known for their…

self-determination female labor and endurance longing and aspiration

The Sea Captain

Sandy Denny

A short, dreamlike ballad in which a wandering narrator and a sea captain mirror each other's escapes from burning or confining…

escape and departure transcendence versus disaster fate and mirroring

Modern Things

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

A jittery, half-abstract song that circles a wounded, red-eyed woman and asks whether an unnamed 'you' actually feels or heals…

emotional damage and denial technology/modernity as a metaphor for feeling identity and self-assertion

Foolish Heart

Alison Krauss

A young narrator rehearses her own exit from a doomed relationship, arguing herself into leaving before she can be hurt again.…

self-protection versus vulnerability romantic disillusionment pride as armor

Kashmir

Led Zeppelin

A hypnotic travelogue through desert and vision, where the journey itself becomes indistinguishable from a mystical state. The…

spiritual quest desert imagery as transcendence time and displacement

Hand of Kindness

Richard Thompson

A first-person account of self-sabotage—hanging, shipwrecking, sabotaging one's own vehicle of escape—that keeps circling back…

self-destruction dependence on others redemption/salvation

Mozambique

Traffic

An instrumental piece from Traffic's 1994 reunion album, "Mozambique" carries no lyric content to parse, so its meaning is…

place and travel exoticism/otherness instrumental atmosphere

La Isla Bonita

Madonna

A dreamy pop postcard from 1986, this song imagines an idealized Latin island escape through the eyes of an outsider narrator.…

escapism romanticized otherness nostalgia

No. 13 Baby

Pixies

A fragmented, image-driven portrait of a woman rendered through physical detail and refrain rather than narrative, built around…

obsessive desire fragmented portraiture exoticization/otherness

Cruel

St. Vincent

A short, hymn-like song about being conscripted into a role you didn't choose — motherhood, domesticity, or simply someone…

coercion disguised as care loss of self domestic conformity

Isn't It Romantic?

Chet Baker

Chet Baker's reading of this Rodgers and Hart standard turns a bright, playful showtune into something hushed and interior.…

anticipation of love imagination versus reality romantic idealism

Prester John

Animal Collective

A meditation on decline and letting go, framed through the legendary figure of Prester John, a mythical Christian king whose…

decay and endings myth versus reality acceptance and release

Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)

Sly & Robbie

This is a cover of the classic Doris Day standard, reframed by Sly and Robbie's rhythm-section sensibility rather than by any…

fate and acceptance generational transmission of wisdom the unknowability of the future

Hypnotized

Fleetwood Mac

A drifting, unhurried meditation on the pleasure of unexplained phenomena, built from a series of loosely connected anecdotes…

the appeal of the unexplained imagination versus proof folklore and hearsay

On Hold

The xx

A breakup song built on the gap between assumed permanence and sudden loss, where the narrator realizes too late that…

complacency in love loss of control desire versus resentment

Something He Can Feel

Aretha Franklin

A woman in a hard-pressed neighborhood insists that her devotion to her man is proof against the world's skepticism, turning a…

romantic devotion as proof poverty and resilience female desire and agency

Age of Consent

New Order

A song about a relationship curdling under the weight of unspoken resentment, built on the tension between wanting release and…

emotional withholding breakup and loss communication breakdown

It Could Be Sweet

Portishead

A hushed, anxious meditation on a relationship threatened by fear rather than betrayal, where the possibility of tenderness is…

fear of intimacy self-doubt conditional hope

Shut Up Kiss Me

Angel Olsen

A driving, garage-pop declaration of romantic persistence, in which the narrator refuses to let a faltering relationship end…

romantic persistence refusal to quit desire versus communication

New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down

LCD Soundsystem

A love-hate valediction to a gentrifying New York, delivered as a slow-building elegy that mixes weary sociological observation…

gentrification and urban decay nostalgia versus reality ambivalent love for place

Afro-Blue

Abbey Lincoln

Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyric to Mongo Santamaría's polyrhythmic tune turns a percussion pattern into a vision of ancestral homeland…

ancestral memory and diaspora eroticism as metaphor for connection to homeland Black beauty and self-affirmation

I Found a Reason

Cat Power

This is Cat Power's slowed, hushed reinterpretation of a Velvet Underground song, stripping away the original's arrangement in…

faith and doubt devotion persuasion versus surrender

Machine Gun

Portishead

A stark meditation on self-recrimination dressed as spiritual crisis, delivered over one of the coldest, most mechanical beats…

guilt and self-blame failed salvation isolation

Because the Night

Patti Smith

A co-write between Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, this song turns nighttime into a sanctuary where desire overrides doubt…

desire as sustenance night as refuge doubt versus surrender

In My Life

The Beatles

A quiet reckoning with memory, this song moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to settling on a present love that…

memory and nostalgia mortality the present versus the past

Look Into the Sun

Jethro Tull

A quiet, folk-inflected meditation on a relationship that stalled through hesitation rather than betrayal, sung by a narrator…

romantic regret missed opportunity hesitation versus action

Miss You

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

L.A.

The Fall

A brief, collage-like sketch of Los Angeles built from disconnected images rather than a story -- cinema marquees, heat-stressed…

cultural alienation artifice versus nature American excess viewed from outside

The Vigilante

Judee Sill

Judee Sill builds an allegorical portrait of a tireless spiritual guardian, half folk-hero and half angel, who patrols against…

spiritual guardianship good versus deception faith and service

Somewhere Under Heaven

Tom Petty

A quiet, late-period Tom Petty track that builds a small mythology around a girl named Jenny, using weather imagery to suggest…

innocence versus experience working-class family life nature as refuge