Results for “surveillance and shame”

Songs

Iz - Us

Aphex Twin

Iz - Us reduces language to a single barked command, looping and mangling it until the phrase stops functioning as speech and…

dehumanization of language surveillance and shame childhood discipline

Everybody Wants To Rule the World

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

Mathematics

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

Digging In the Dirt

Peter Gabriel

A song about excavating buried psychic damage, staged as a confrontation between a wounded self and an internal accuser. Peter…

psychological excavation self-recrimination control and coercion

Watching the Detectives

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

Werewolf

Cat Power

Cat Power turns the werewolf myth into a spare, almost hymn-like meditation on shame, desire, and the parts of ourselves that…

shame and secrecy duality of self compulsion and desire

Slow Hands

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

The Adults Are Talking

The Strokes

The opening track of The New Abnormal frames a generational and interpersonal standoff as one continuous scene of…

generational conflict surveillance and judgment romantic ambivalence

Underneath the Radar

Underworld

This early, pre-techno Underworld track is a nervy pop-funk song about living small and invisible under the threat of…

Cold War anxiety surveillance and invisibility smallness/powerlessness

It's a Sin

Pet Shop Boys

A confessional pop song built on the grinding logic of Catholic guilt, where every desire and action the narrator has ever had…

religious guilt internalized shame repression

Serpents

Sharon Van Etten

"Serpents" is a slow-burning indictment of a manipulative partner, built from fragmented images of surveillance, control, and…

emotional abuse surveillance and suspicion self-protection

Chanel

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

Infinity Fill Goose Down

Aesop Rock

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

Lover Lover Lover

Leonard Cohen

A prayer disguised as a love song, built from a dialogue between a son and a father-God about shame, embodiment, and the…

shame and self-loathing faith and divine dialogue the body as trial

Chase the Tear

Portishead

A brief, incantatory piece built from fragmentary phrases rather than a clear narrative, tracking a speaker moving between…

shame and self-reckoning emotional withdrawal cyclical time / seasons as feeling

Kevin's Heart

J. Cole

J. Cole builds a confessional about infidelity around a strained pun on actor Kevin Hart, whose public cheating scandal becomes…

infidelity and guilt addiction as metaphor for compulsive behavior self-loathing and identity fracture

Queen Bitch

David Bowie

A voyeuristic narrator watches a street-corner seduction unfold from a hotel window, alternately mocking and envying the…

voyeurism and surveillance queer desire and rivalry gender performance and camp

Numbers

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk turn a numbing exercise in counting into a protest song, framing the reduction of a person to a numeral as a kind of…

dehumanization by bureaucracy loss of identity surveillance and control

The Apprentice

Gorillaz

A brittle, self-alienated meditation on being watched and misread, built around a narrator who repeatedly defines himself only…

surveillance and misperception emotional numbness/detachment identity as reflection rather than substance

Philadelphia

Neil Young

A spare, hymn-like address to fear and mortality, written for Jonathan Demme's film about a man dying of AIDS-related illness…

mortality stigma and shame need for belonging

For What It's Worth

The Staple Singers

This is the Staple Singers' cover of Buffalo Springfield's 1967 protest classic, recast through the group's gospel-soul vocal…

surveillance and fear generational conflict protest and its costs

Arrest the President

Ice Cube

Ice Cube stitches together a barrage of boasts, sci-fi imagery, and political fury into a chant demanding Donald Trump's removal…

political corruption distrust of institutions black survival and defiance

Superman

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

Holes

Mercury Rev

"Holes" is a hazy, impressionistic meditation on loss and the failure of memory to hold together, built almost entirely from…

memory and forgetting grief disorientation

All of the Lights

Kanye West Tribute Band

A maximalist anthem that fuses celebration with confession, using the image of light in all its forms—stage lights, police…

fame and surveillance guilt and self-justification fatherhood and estrangement

Illegal Smile

John Prine

A deadpan comic monologue about waking up defeated by ordinary life and reaching for a cheap, illicit pleasure to get through…

escapism paranoia and surveillance poverty and disillusionment

The Working Hour

Tears for Fears

A meditation on institutional life and creative anxiety disguised as a workplace anthem, built around a long, brooding…

surveillance and judgment fear and self-doubt institutional conformity

The Midnight Special

Creedence Clearwater Revival

CCR's take on this traditional American folk-blues song reworks a prison-camp lament into a swampy rock anthem, keeping its cast…

incarceration and forced labor folk tradition and inheritance longing for deliverance

Let's Impeach the President

Neil Young

A blunt protest song built as a literal list of impeachable offenses against George W. Bush, set to the plainest possible music…

political dissent war and deception government surveillance

Run Like Hell

Pink Floyd

A pounding, paranoid rocker from the second half of The Wall, built almost entirely on a chanted command to flee. It stages the…

paranoia and surveillance fascism and mob violence guilt and self-disgust

The Model

Kraftwerk

A deadpan, synth-driven character sketch of a fashion model, delivered with the same flat affect Kraftwerk applies to machines…

commodification of beauty surveillance and consumption media and celebrity

This Is Hell

Elvis Costello

Costello imagines the afterlife as a tacky nightclub of endless small humiliations rather than fire and brimstone. The song's…

damnation as banality social embarrassment kitsch and bad taste

Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town

Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey's 1994 reading of the 1934 novelty standard turns a simple children's warning song into a full-scale gospel-pop…

surveillance and reward childhood obedience holiday anticipation

You Know I'm No Good

Amy Winehouse

A confessional soul number in which the narrator catalogues her own infidelities and self-sabotage inside a volatile…

infidelity self-sabotage guilt and shame

Teenage FBI

Guided by Voices

A compact power-pop confession about being trailed by an old, adolescent version of oneself. The narrator can't explain why…

arrested development loss of self-control in relationships surveillance of the self

Season of the Witch (From the Motion Picture "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark")

Lana Del Rey

This is Lana Del Rey's cover of Donovan's 1966 psychedelic classic, recorded for the horror anthology film it lends its title…

paranoia surveillance and being watched cultural anxiety

Beethoven (I Love To Listen)

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

Pacifying Joint

The Fall

A Mark E. Smith sound-poem built almost entirely around one phrase, worked through its multiple possible meanings — a drug, a…

ambiguity of language youthful drift surveillance/paranoia

Mo Money Mo Problems

The Notorious B.I.G.

A victory-lap posse cut that doubles as a meditation on the isolation success brings. Over a buoyant, sample-driven groove,…

success and isolation envy and betrayal paranoia/surveillance

Crosseyed Cat

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