Results for “survival through motion”

Songs

Motion Sickness

Phoebe Bridgers

A breakup song built on the whiplash of contradictory feelings toward an ex who wronged her, mixing bitterness, residual…

emotional ambivalence power imbalance in relationships toxic nostalgia

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

Pacifics (From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack “N.Y. Is Red Hot")

Digable Planets

Digable Planets turn a Sunday in New York into an extended meditation on rest, community, and creative replenishment, moving…

urban leisure and rest Black cultural inheritance (jazz, literature, hip-hop lineage) community and belonging

Jettin'

Digable Planets

A loose, groove-driven travelogue through Brooklyn, built more on atmosphere and rhythm than narrative, where the trio's verses…

place and belonging Brooklyn/borough pride Black cultural memory

Gettin' By, High and Strange

Kris Kristofferson

A restless travelogue of a song in which the narrator treats geography as therapy, moving from city to city to outrun whatever…

restlessness and evasion self-medication rootlessness as identity

That Lonesome Road

James Taylor

A spare, almost proverbial song about walking away from a failed relationship or a bad chapter of life, addressed as much to the…

self-recrimination forward motion as survival regret

The Big Unknown

Sade

A stark, slow-burning meditation on grief and survival, written in the voice of someone descending into loss while insisting on…

grief survival descent and rebirth

South Side

Moby

This is Moby's spare, half-sung meditation built around a repeating road-trip refrain that cycles through the four points of the…

urban danger friendship and loyalty hope versus fear

The Morning Fog

Kate Bush

This short closing piece functions as an emergence from crisis into ordinary gratitude. After the storm and drowning imagery of…

rebirth gratitude family bonds

Corona

Minutemen

A terse, two-minute political sketch that moves from a stark statement about poverty and inherited injustice to a small, almost…

economic inequality inherited guilt survival

The Cutter

Echo & the Bunnymen

A dense, incantatory piece of post-punk imagery in which the speaker pleads for mercy from some undefined judging or cutting…

self-doubt judgment and punishment survival

Thankful N' Thoughtful

Sly & Robbie

This is Sly Stone's post-crisis testimony, delivered as a loose funk sermon on survival and gratitude. It reads less as a song…

survival and mortality gratitude spiritual reckoning

Pony Blues

Son House

A loose, half-spoken reworking of a traditional blues frame in which a horse becomes a vehicle for restlessness, desire, and…

restlessness and wandering the search for a lover freedom through motion

Why We Thugs

Ice Cube

Ice Cube builds a blunt structural argument: the chorus states a thesis about systemic setup, and the verses supply case studies…

systemic entrapment mass incarceration survival and violence

The World Is Yours

Nas

A dense, imagistic monologue from the Queensbridge projects that reframes the Scarface-derived hook — the world is yours — as a…

self-determination amid poverty mortality and survival fatherhood and legacy

Pink + White

Frank Ocean

A soft, wandering meditation on maternal love and mortality, built around the image of a hurricane and the small acts of…

maternal love survival and resilience impermanence

Going Mobile

The Who

A buoyant, almost novelty-song ode to caravan life, in which freedom is defined entirely by motion and lack of fixed address.…

freedom through motion rejection of domesticity escapism

Ray of Light

Madonna

A cosmic dance track that fuses spiritual searching with astronomical imagery, using the image of light and celestial motion to…

spiritual awakening cosmic scale vs. personal feeling impermanence

The Unsinkable Fats Domino

Guided By Voices

A cryptic, riddling GBV track that uses Fats Domino's real-life survival of Hurricane Katrina as an emblem of resilience, then…

survival and resilience flood/water imagery as threat and purification fame versus obscurity

Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

Talking Heads

A polyrhythmic groove built on Afrobeat-inspired repetition, this track dramatizes a speaker who is simultaneously a…

power and bureaucracy bodily panic and breathlessness dehumanization

The Healer

John Lee Hooker

This is less a song than a testimony delivered over a slow-burning groove: John Lee Hooker declares the blues itself a curative…

the blues as spiritual medicine suffering and survival heartbreak and abandonment

Bees

Caribou

"Bees" is an instrumental piece from Dan Snaith's early Caribou period, built from layered percussion, warped samples, and…

natural imagery repetition and accumulation psychedelia

My Love Is Your Love

Whitney Houston

A reggae-tinged declaration of love built around apocalyptic and historical extremes, the song insists that a bond between two…

unconditional love survival and endurance spirituality and judgment

Nights

Frank Ocean

A two-part song that splits itself at its own midpoint, moving from a hazy, drug-fogged meditation on isolation and hustling…

isolation within closeness hustle and survival memory and nostalgia

Praise God

Kanye West Tribute Band

A gospel-adjacent opener that stages resurrection as both spiritual claim and career narrative, framing survival and success as…

redemption and resurrection survival against despair fame and scrutiny

3 Tearz

Danny Brown

A three-verse posse cut where Danny Brown, Run the Jewels' El-P and Killer Mike (implied by the guest verses) trade dense,…

nihilism as armor drug-trade nostalgia gallows humor around death

Freeway of Love

Aretha Franklin

A joyous, motorized courtship song built around a single sustained conceit: romance as a drive on an open highway. Aretha…

romance as motion/escape freedom and self-determination playful flirtation

Gutter Rainbows

Talib Kweli

Talib Kweli uses the title's central paradox—beauty found in filth—as a lens for describing street life shaped by drugs,…

urban poverty moral complexity of survival authenticity vs. commercial rap

Love More

Sharon Van Etten

A quietly devastating account of an abusive relationship told with disorienting flatness, where the speaker's memories of…

domestic abuse and control normalization of harm survival and self-deception

Fight the Power (From "Do The Right Thing" Soundtrack)

Public Enemy

A rallying anthem built on funk breaks and blunt sloganeering, the track argues that Black cultural pride and outright refusal…

Black pride and self-determination media and cultural gatekeeping collective action versus passivity

Keep Yourself Alive

Queen

Queen's debut single is a wry survival manifesto disguised as a rock anthem, tracking a narrator who has chased every…

disillusionment with self-improvement excess and hollow experience survival versus success

The Big Ship

Brian Eno

"The Big Ship" is a short instrumental piece built almost entirely on a single sustained chord progression and a rising…

arrival and scale stillness within motion the sublime treated as ambient event

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

Saturnz Barz

Gorillaz

A collaboration between Gorillaz and Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan, the track fuses a patois-inflected verse about hard-won…

survival and upward mobility fame's emptiness isolation within relationships

Rubble Kings Theme (Dynamite)

Run the Jewels

A theme song for a documentary about 1970s New York gang culture, this track has Killer Mike and El-P narrate street survival as…

urban survival and neglect self-made authority religious skepticism

Red Eyes

The War on Drugs

Red Eyes is a rush of ecstatic, half-legible sentiment stitched to a driving, anthemic rock arrangement, where the lyric's…

devotion under strain spiritual/emotional darkness self-doubt

Bring It on Home to Me

B.B. King

This is less a song than a spoken monologue set to guitar, in which B.B. King explains his relationship to his guitar, Lucille,…

companionship and loneliness music as confession survival and near-death experience

Mad

Solange

"Mad" is a meditation on the exhaustion of having to justify one's own anger, built around a call-and-response between a…

the right to anger versus the demand for composure respectability and emotional policing of Black people survival and trauma disguised as success

People Say

Wu‐Tang Clan

This is a posse-cut style Wu-Tang track where multiple MCs trade dense, boastful verses about street history, criminal résumé,…

street survival and generational crime materialism and excess lyrical supremacy/battle rap bravado

I'm Still Standing

Elton John

A breakup anthem built entirely around defiant repetition, where the narrator addresses an ex directly to declare emotional…

resilience revenge through self-sufficiency emotional survival