Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald's reading of this holiday standard is pure surface pleasure: an invitation to a winter courtship ride rendered…
winter romance togetherness seasonal nostalgia
Eurythmics
This is a cover of the 1934 standard, recorded for a mid-1980s charity Christmas compilation, and it plays the song fairly…
young romance seasonal escapism imaginative play
Ethan Whitney
A straightforward pop declaration of romantic devotion dressed up in comic-book imagery. The narrator pledges protective,…
devoted love self-sufficiency vs. support escapism
Talking Heads
A song about waking up inside a life you don't remember choosing, stitched together from the trappings of suburban success and a…
suburban alienation loss of agency time and repetition
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
Van Morrison
A rapturous, almost weightless love song built from a single sustained feeling rather than a plot. Van Morrison strings together…
romantic rapture renewal and lost time nature as emotional mirror
Mercury Rev
"Holes" is a hazy, impressionistic meditation on loss and the failure of memory to hold together, built almost entirely from…
memory and forgetting grief disorientation
Thin Lizzy
This is Thin Lizzy's most explicitly Irish statement, a medley that stitches together fragments of traditional ballads with a…
Irish identity and heritage oral tradition and storytelling myth and heroism
Ice Cube
This is Ice Cube's contribution to the 'Friday' soundtrack lineage, a loosely structured verse-by-verse tour of a South Central…
neighborhood pride and territoriality hedonism as escape normalized violence
Nas
Nas stitches together two dense verses of violent, luxury-drenched bravado and a grim first-person shooting narrative, unified…
vigilance and mortality street violence and retaliation loyalty and betrayal
Missy Elliott
Missy Elliott's signature single is a maximalist celebration of sexual confidence and self-invention, built on a literal sonic…
sexual agency self-invention and reinvention female solidarity and hustle