Leonard Cohen
A meditation on the pull between transcendence and the grinding routine of ordinary commerce and appetite, imagined as a street…
sacred vs. profane mortality and impermanence spiritual longing amid worldly routine
Billie Holiday
A three-stanza protest song about the lynching of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, built on a single sustained metaphor:…
racial terror and lynching the corruption of Southern pastoral imagery the body as evidence
Public Enemy
A protest anthem built as a dance record: Chuck D argues that political consciousness and Black pride are things you build in…
Black pride and self-definition institutional racism who gets to be a national hero
Kate Bush
A song about two lovers who keep wounding each other without meaning to, and the narrator's fantasy of a supernatural fix: a…
empathy as an impossible exchange the violence hidden inside love gendered misunderstanding