Results for “the archive as document”

Songs

Mississippi John Hurt

This is less a full performance than a fragment captured on tape: Mississippi John Hurt sings the familiar gospel chorus of the…

incompleteness oral tradition humility

Johnny Cash

This is Johnny Cash's stripped-down take on the standard "You Are My Sunshine," but the version on Unearthed leaves the tape…

heartbreak and loss irony of the title versus the lyric the mechanics of recording

Lauryn Hill

A meditation on a love relationship built on unequal devotion, where the speaker documents her own exhaustion at loving someone…

unequal love codependency emotional exhaustion

Broken Social Scene

This is Broken Social Scene's rendition of Joy Division's 1980 classic, recorded for the soundtrack of The Time Traveler's Wife,…

romantic disintegration emotional stasis guilt and self-recrimination

Eric B.

This is the title track and origin document of hip-hop's most sampled record, a first-person account of a hustler talking…

hustling and survival redemption through legitimate work the music industry as a means of escape

Public Enemy

This is a live-show excerpt built around crowd participation rather than a fully worked-through song, using the…

media saturation and control spiritual doubt and moral collapse authenticity versus empty spectacle

Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash's version of this traditional folk song turns a simple hitchhiker's lament into a meditation on permanent distance…

distance and displacement homesickness regret

Hüsker Dü

A song from Hüsker Dü's original run recast here as a live document, this track builds a bleak inventory of loss — a broken…

mortality emotional numbness aging and decline

Wu‐Tang Clan

Two verses from Raekwon and Inspectah Deck lay out parallel autobiographies of poverty, hustling, and incarceration in…

economic desperation and survival the school-to-prison pipeline urban poverty in New York