Results for “transition and threshold states”

Songs

State of the Union (STFU)

Public Enemy

This is a blunt protest track released ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, aimed squarely at Donald Trump and framed as an urgent…

authoritarianism electoral urgency racial oppression

N.Y. State of Mind

Nas

A dense, almost stream-of-consciousness portrait of Queensbridge street life, delivered with a density of imagery more…

urban survival mortality and insomnia criminal economy

Across the Great Divide

Nanci Griffith

A meditative folk song about aging and the passage of time, built around the image of a geographic divide as a metaphor for…

aging and memory the passage of time transition and threshold states

First Light

Brian Eno

An instrumental piano-and-synthesizer piece from Eno and Harold Budd's ambient collaboration, built around slow, spaced piano…

dawn/threshold states stillness gradual emergence

The Gates

Aesop Rock

A dense, image-flooded piece from a concept album about visions and threshold spaces, in which the speaker positions himself at…

liminality and thresholds exhaustion/burnout distrust of moral binaries

The Tipping Point

Tears for Fears

A hushed meditation on grief and the threshold between holding on and letting go, written by Roland Orzabal in the aftermath of…

grief and mourning the limits of love in the face of death liminality/thresholds

La Femme Fetal

Digable Planets

Digable Planets narrate a friend's unplanned pregnancy and impending abortion as a small, intimate scene that opens onto a much…

reproductive rights bodily autonomy class and access to healthcare

Mekon Headman

Wire

A clipped, paranoid vignette that fuses interrogation-room menace with pulp sci-fi imagery, built from disjointed phrases rather…

interrogation and coercion surveillance/security state paranoia

This Must Be It

Röyksopp

A hazy, dreamlike track that stages a search for revelation inside what feels like an altered or trance-like state, where…

altered states / intoxication longing for transcendence isolation and communion

Atlas Air

Massive Attack

A slow, dread-laden meditation built around the language of extraordinary rendition and secret flight logistics, fused with…

state violence and rendition complicity and coercion bodily sacrifice

Ain't That Nothin'

Television

A restless, riddling song built from fragmentary images of heat, motion and spinning objects, addressed to a companion who never…

evasion and unanswered questions restlessness and burnout attraction to chaos

Don't Want to Know If You Are Lonely

Hüsker Dü

A breakup song built on a contradiction: the narrator claims he wants distance from an ex-partner but keeps monitoring her…

ambivalence after a breakup emotional self-protection denial

Night

Bill Callahan

A short, incantatory piece built around a single image—a door that both conceals and contains someone or something unknowable.…

mystery of death or absence the limits of knowledge ritual and repetition

White Summer

The Yardbirds

White Summer is an instrumental guitar piece built on a droning, modal figure that Jimmy Page performed with the Yardbirds,…

modal drone and stasis East-meets-West folk fusion virtuosity as narrative device

Stay the Same

Bonobo

A hushed travel narrative built around a single image—someone on a night train, luggage at their feet, leaving a relationship…

departure and transition emotional numbness vs. movement change and stasis

Mermaid

Sade

"Mermaid" is a short instrumental interlude on Love Deluxe, functioning less as a standalone song than as an atmospheric pause…

fluidity and drift the sea as feminine mystery transition and pause

Posing In Bondage

Japanese Breakfast

A stark, minimalist opener to Jubilee, this song strips away the album's usual maximalism to sit with a single image: a speaker…

longing and neglect self-objectification as control isolation within intimacy

Talisman

Air

"Talisman" is a short instrumental interlude on Moon Safari, built from softly picked, harp-like tones and a warm analog synth…

talismanic protection/ritual exoticism and escapism nostalgia for retro-futurism

Break On Through (To The Other Side)

The Doors

A short, propulsive rock song built almost entirely around a single command repeated until it becomes a mantra. It uses images…

transcendence limits of perception desire and entrapment

Left Side Drive

Boards of Canada

An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's Trans Canada Highway EP, built around warm analog synth pads, a loping mid-tempo…

travel and transit nostalgia analog memory

Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds

The Flaming Lips

This is a cover of the Beatles psychedelic classic, and the Flaming Lips' version leans into the song's dreamlike dissolve…

altered perception longing for an unreachable figure dream logic

My Ride's Here

Warren Zevon

A dying man's fever-dream inventory of Hollywood Westerns, biblical epics, and Romantic poets, all jumbled together as he waits…

mortality and impending death faith and skepticism entangled art and myth as coping mechanisms

Union City Blue

Blondie

A moody, color-drenched new wave anthem built around a chant-like refrain, using the industrial geography of Union City as a…

urban alienation possessive love liminality/transition

Anymore

Goldfrapp

A hypnotic, minimal-lyric track built almost entirely on desire and impatience, where sexual and mystical/transcendent longing…

desire and impatience transformation through another the sacred and the carnal merged

Trouble, Heartaches and Sadness

Ann Peebles

Ann Peebles addresses trouble, heartache, and sadness as if they were unwelcome visitors, ordering them off her doorstep now…

deliverance through love personification of emotional states resilience

Trigger Hippie

Morcheeba

Trigger Hippie is a downtempo trip-hop track built around a deliberately fuzzy paradox — pacifist idealism ('hippie') fused with…

counterculture and its contradictions pacifism versus violence altered states/dissociation

When I Dream

The Teardrop Explodes

A brisk, bright pop-psych song about romantic fixation, where longing tips into something more obsessive and unstable. The lyric…

obsessive longing distance and return emotional instability

Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos

Public Enemy

This live rendition preserves Public Enemy's 1988 prison-break narrative, a first-person fiction about a Black man who refuses…

mass incarceration militant resistance state coercion and the draft

Ali Rap Theme

Public Enemy

This Public Enemy track functions as a tribute-mixtape theme, weaving Muhammad Ali's own boasts and cadences into Chuck D's…

Black pride and self-definition resistance to state power sports as political theater

What's on Your Mind?

Eric B. & Rakim

A narrative rap about a chance subway meeting that develops into a courtship built on mental rather than purely physical…

courtship as narrative mind versus body urban geography and transit

Small Plane

Bill Callahan

A quiet domestic love song disguised as an account of piloting a small plane together. The flight becomes a working metaphor for…

domestic trust shared control in partnership contentment

I'm Always In Love

Wilco

A jaunty, hooky pop song built on Wilco's Summerteeth-era trick of pairing sunny arrangements with anxious, fractured lyrics.…

compulsive romantic attachment anxiety masked by upbeat presentation disorientation and exhaustion

Elegia

New Order

Elegia is an instrumental piece built from slow, mournful synth lines and guitar that gradually accumulate density before…

mourning and memory absence and silence transformation of grief into sound

Jersey Shore

The Promise Ring

A brief, offhand travelogue of restlessness set against a fading summer, where the speaker's physical drift along the Jersey…

transience aging out of youth seasonal decline

Trouble

Ray LaMontagne

A slow-burning confessional in which the narrator personifies his own chronic anxiety as a female antagonist, then pivots to…

chronic anxiety/depression redemption through love self-destructive cycles

Trem Two

Mission of Burma

A dense, dreamlike lyric from Mission of Burma's 'Trem Two' that treats a streetcar ride as a passage through half-formed memory…

dissociation and self-confrontation loss of intimacy transit as metaphor for consciousness

This Is England

The Clash

This is The Clash's late, embittered self-portrait of Thatcher-era Britain, stitching together images of unemployment, racist…

national decline unemployment and social decay racist violence

Harrowdown Hill

Thom Yorke

A hushed, paranoid elegy widely understood to be about the death of UK weapons inspector David Kelly, sung partly in the voice…

state power and expendability conspiracy and doubt surveillance/paranoia

Rodent

Burial

Rodent is built almost entirely around a single vocal fragment, looped and re-pitched until a simple declaration of dependency…

dependency and loss isolation repetition as emotional state

circle the drain

Soccer Mommy

A song about depression that persists despite outward stability, built around the image of a body slowly failing while the…

depression and mental illness the gap between appearance and interior state exhaustion from performing wellness