Joni Mitchell
A three-part meditation in which the speaker sets a naive, image-drunk way of seeing against a disenchanted one, then refuses to…
disillusionment the limits of knowledge aging and changed perception
David Bowie
A radio drama in miniature: a space agency counts an astronaut into orbit, celebrates him as a media sensation, then loses him.…
alienation celebrity and spectacle technological failure
Prince
A slow, gospel-shaped ballad in which a speaker apologizes for hurting someone, then gradually widens the address from a single…
apology and regret failed intimacy that could not become friendship spiritual deliverance
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
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