Results for “tabloid horror as everyday backdrop”

Songs

What About Us

The Fall

A talking-animal narrator, a rabbit émigré from East Germany living in Britain, stumbles across a newspaper story about a killer…

displacement and immigration institutional trust and betrayal tabloid horror as everyday backdrop

Thriller

Michael Jackson

A horror-movie pastiche built as a seduction, where the terror on screen and the terror of intimacy blur together. The song…

horror as seduction voyeurism and spectacle predator/prey dynamics

Float On

Modest Mouse

A catalogue of everyday mishaps—fender benders, cons, firings, verbal blunders—gets deflated by a chorus that refuses to treat…

resilience through indifference everyday misfortune collective endurance

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

Strange Fruit

Billie Holiday

A protest song built on a single sustained metaphor, comparing lynched Black bodies hanging from Southern trees to fruit ready…

racial violence and lynching complicity of the pastoral South witness and testimony

Suzanne

Leonard Cohen

A meditation on grace and surrender disguised as a portrait of a woman by a river, Cohen's song moves from intimate seduction…

spiritual longing disguised as romance the sacred in the everyday trust and surrender

Jack the Stripper / Fairies Wear Boots

Black Sabbath

This closing track from Paranoid pairs a lurching instrumental jam with a half-comic, half-paranoid account of drug-induced…

drug paranoia unreliable perception self-deception

I Just Called To Say I Love You

Stevie Wonder

A simple, deliberately unadorned love song built on a single conceit: stripping away every calendar occasion that might justify…

unconditioned love everyday devotion anti-occasion romance

Acuff-Rose

Uncle Tupelo

A short, plainspoken tribute to country music's staying power, built around the songwriting publishing house Acuff-Rose as…

musical heritage comfort and companionship everyday transcendence

Trust

Prince

Written for the Batman soundtrack, this track uses seduction as camouflage for a darker interrogation of manipulation and…

seduction as manipulation power and control faith versus flattery

Merry Christmas Baby

B.B. King

This is a blues-idiom Christmas song built almost entirely on gratitude and physical warmth rather than religious or sentimental…

romantic gratitude domestic contentment sensual celebration

Burn

The Cure

A hypnotic, dread-soaked incantation in which the speaker is consumed nightly by obsession, grief, and something like…

obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and loss of will

A Lover's Concerto

The Supremes

A pastoral love song built on borrowed classical melody (adapted from a Baroque minuet traditionally attributed to Bach,…

idealized romance nature as backdrop for love devotion and permanence

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

Video Games

Lana Del Rey

A woman narrates her devotion to a boyfriend who barely looks up from his console, describing domestic small moments as if they…

self-abnegation in love performed femininity idealized domesticity

Tiny Dancer

Elton John

A soft-focus portrait of a woman moving through the early-1970s Los Angeles music scene, seen through the eyes of an admirer who…

idealized femininity life on tour / music-industry culture memory versus presence

Dear Abby

John Prine

John Prine builds a comic song out of the format of a newspaper advice column, staging a series of absurd reader complaints that…

absurdity of everyday complaint futility of advice-seeking identity and self-acceptance

Feels Like Summer

Weezer

A breezy, synth-pop surface hides a set of oddly bruised, disconnected images -- loss, isolation, and a relationship that has…

emotional avoidance loss and grief digital-age isolation

Good Fortune

PJ Harvey

A New York love song that treats romantic euphoria as a kind of superstition-defying miracle, sung by a narrator who has…

romantic euphoria reinvention/renewal New York as mythic backdrop

What's on Your Mind?

Eric B.

A New York subway pickup evolves into a slow-building courtship narrative, told from the perspective of a smooth-talking…

courtship and seduction urban geography as narrative backdrop mind versus body

Mysterons

Portishead

Mysterons opens Dummy with a woozy, disorienting address to someone caught between denial and defiance. Beth Gibbons' vocal…

denial and repression guilt and judgment futility of desire

In the City

The Jam

A debut single that doubles as a manifesto, announcing a generational voice against the backdrop of late-70s urban Britain. It's…

generational conflict youth identity urban alienation

Ghosts Again

Depeche Mode

A meditation on mortality and impermanence dressed in soft, dreamlike imagery, written and released in the shadow of a…

mortality and impermanence grief and remembrance spiritual uncertainty

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

Strange Fruit

Nina Simone

A ballad built on a single, sustained metaphor that forces the listener to see lynched Black bodies hanging from Southern trees…

racial terror and lynching complicity of the pastoral South witness and testimony

It's Gonna Get Better

Genesis

A closing-track anthem of forced optimism, built on simple exhortations to hold on and reach out against a backdrop of urban…

urban alienation perseverance solidarity

Sanctified Lady

Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye sketches a wish list for a monogamous, church-going partner against a mid-80s backdrop of promiscuity and disease…

sexual anxiety in the AIDS/herpes era the sacred vs. the profane desire for domestic stability

I Put a Spell On You

Annie Lennox

Annie Lennox's reading of this Screamin' Jay Hawkins standard, cut for her covers album Nostalgia, strips the song down to its…

possessive love jealousy desperation

Needle In the Hay

Elliott Smith

A stark, minimally strummed song that follows a young addict on a bus and on foot toward a dealer, narrated with a flat,…

addiction dissociation self-erasure

Who Tells Your Story

The Roots

A meditation on legacy and mortality built around the Hamilton-borrowed refrain about who survives to tell one's story. Three…

legacy and memory mortality Black identity and violence

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

21st Century Schizoid Man (Including "Mirrors")

King Crimson

A blast of distorted vocals and jagged riffing that catalogues the horrors of modern civilization in fragmented, almost…

dehumanization war and violence political corruption

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

Roxy Music

A deadpan monologue delivered by a consumer trapped inside his own showroom lifestyle, who eventually confesses to owning an…

consumerism and alienation artificiality vs intimacy suburban/domestic satire

When It Rain

Danny Brown

A relentless portrait of Detroit street violence set to a hyper-fast, footwork-inspired beat, where the manic tempo and…

urban poverty and survival violence and fatalism addiction as coping mechanism

I'm the Man Who Murdered Love

XTC

XTC's Andy Partridge stages a mock-confession, casting himself as an assassin who has killed off the very idea of romantic love…

disillusionment with romance performance of confession cynicism as self-defense

Coffin Nails

MF DOOM

Coffin Nails is an instrumental beat from MF DOOM's Special Herbs series, the long-running set of production-only tracks he…

mortality vice and self-destruction underground hip-hop craft

F.U.B.U.

Solange

F.U.B.U. is a direct address to Black listeners, reclaiming the phrase 'for us, by us' as a statement of cultural ownership. The…

Black solidarity cultural ownership racial profiling

The Dead Don't Die

Sturgill Simpson

A slow-moving meditation on mortality written as the title theme for a zombie comedy, Sturgill Simpson's song strips the genre's…

mortality and the afterlife modern alienation grief and memory

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Mariah Carey

This is Mariah Carey's 1994 cover of the Phil Spector/Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry classic, reworked as a Wall-of-Sound production…

loneliness during celebration longing and absence nostalgia for past happiness

We Will Become Silhouettes

The Shins

A survivalist's bunker monologue set to an oddly buoyant melody, this song imagines nuclear or environmental apocalypse as a…

apocalypse and isolation denial and coping through routine loss of a loved one