Wilco
A short, incantatory song built almost entirely on paradox: the title phrase collapses conflict into itself, and the verses that…
paradox and self-negation surrender as renewal emotional armor and vulnerability
The Temptations
A blunt, unambiguous protest song built on a call-and-response question that answers itself every time: war produces nothing but…
anti-war protest grief and loss generational conflict
Leonard Cohen
Cohen catalogs a series of overlapping conflicts—class, gender, ideology, race—then collapses them into a single, inescapable…
conflict as universal condition complicity and denial domestic strife as political struggle
Cat Power
A driving, chant-like track built from fragments rather than a linear story, pairing an apology for causing harm with a…
complicity and guilt violence done in the name of loyalty or love self-assertion against being underestimated
Eric B.
Rakim narrates a first-person tour through the Gulf War, moving from a soldier's disciplined combat rhetoric to disorientation…
war and disillusionment PTSD and paranoia religious and racial contradiction
Steve Earle
Steve Earle threads together three young men from three different fronts of the post-9/11 war on terror — a working-class…
class and war economic desperation propaganda vs. lived reality
XTC
XTC turn a simple left-or-right gesture into a running metaphor for political and existential futility. Over a tense, angular…
political disillusionment futility of choice powerlessness
Wu‐Tang Clan
A posse cut from Wu-Tang's late-90s peak that stacks dense, image-heavy verses from multiple MCs into a single show of…
group supremacy and dominance street violence as metaphor for lyrical combat Five Percenter/Nation of Gods and Earths philosophy
The National
A quiet, tense breakup song built almost entirely from repetition, in which the threat of a fight stands in for a relationship's…
relational collapse emotional withholding denial and bargaining
The War on Drugs
The title track from The War on Drugs' 2014 breakthrough is a hazy, half-legible meditation on disorientation and emotional…
disorientation emotional isolation memory and nostalgia
A song about outgrowing a former self and a former place, told through the loosening grip of memory and the strange comfort of…
self-transformation nostalgia and its unreliability displacement
A road-weary meditation on drift and self-doubt, where the narrator addresses a lover or maybe himself while measuring how much…
restlessness depletion and self-estrangement ambivalent love
An instrumental-forward, motorik rock track from Lost in the Dream whose lyrics function almost as texture rather than narrative…
emotional distance self-doubt longing
Burning is a mid-album meditation on self-recrimination and endurance inside a fraying relationship, sung from a narrator who…
self-doubt emotional survival relational guilt
Red Eyes is a rush of ecstatic, half-legible sentiment stitched to a driving, anthemic rock arrangement, where the lyric's…
devotion under strain spiritual/emotional darkness self-doubt
A road-worn ballad of resistance to change dressed as a plea for connection, where the narrator keeps circling images of doors,…
fear of change isolation and running shelter versus exposure
A short, hazy meditation on emotional withdrawal and the fear of being unreachable to someone who keeps showing up anyway. The…
emotional withdrawal isolation within intimacy fear of abandonment
A hazy meditation on emerging from isolation and self-doubt into something resembling love or clarity, built on Granduciel's…
emerging from depression tentative love self-doubt and paranoia
An eight-minute opener that treats emotional exhaustion as a kind of weather system, with Adam Granduciel repeating fragments of…
burnout and psychological strain instability in relationships disillusionment with promised futures
Fleetwood Mac
Lindsey Buckingham turns a post-9/11 anxiety into a taut, addressed warning, speaking directly to an unnamed 'peacekeeper'…
war and militarism self-destruction complicity
Elvis Costello
A furious, funereal protest song in which Costello imagines dancing on the grave of a still-living political leader, using that…
political rage class resentment mortality and vengeance
John Prine
A darkly comic anti-war satire that follows an ordinary, flag-happy patriot from a seedy magazine rack to the pearly gates,…
war and complicity empty patriotism consumerism and commercialized faith
Joan Baez
A cyclical folk lament that traces flowers into girls, girls into wives, husbands into soldiers, soldiers into graves, and…
war and its cost cyclical futility loss and mourning
Lorde
Lorde's cover strips Tears for Fears' 1985 synth-pop anthem down to something colder and more brittle, turning a wry commentary…
power and control surveillance complicity
Waylon Jennings
This is a traditional Civil War-era ballad, recorded by Waylon Jennings for a tribute album, in which a soldier addresses his…
war and loss homesickness romantic devotion
A veteran returns from war addicted to the morphine that once numbed his wounds, and the song traces his decline into heroin…
war trauma addiction domestic collateral damage
Richard Thompson
A soldier's-eye monologue from the Iraq War, delivered in the blunt, blackly funny voice of an American GI who narrates the…
war and mortality dehumanization of soldiers media spin and propaganda
Vampire Weekend
This closing track from Vampire Weekend's debut is a compressed, elliptical portrait of inherited privilege and the institutions…
class and inheritance institutional power loss of innocence
Wire
A blunt, almost domestic-scale confrontation song built around one sustained image of betrayal-as-stabbing, delivered with a…
betrayal complicity disgust with manipulation
The Velvet Underground
A deceptively childlike singsong from Moe Tucker turns into an odd meditation on loyalty without limits, where devotion to a…
unconditional loyalty childlike innocence vs. danger identity merging with another
A soldier or observer of war encounters a girl playing amid devastation, and her untouched joy becomes an unbearable rebuke to…
war and its psychological aftermath lost innocence the corruption of feeling by violence
St. Vincent
A war-correspondent's letter home collides with a chant that watches a city burn while its people dance in the ashes. The song…
war and its aftermath seduction of false comfort collective denial
Minutemen
A brief, blunt piece of political arithmetic disguised as a song. Minutemen reduce the Vietnam War to numbers, bureaucratic…
war and bureaucracy dehumanization by statistics imperialism
Interpol
A murky, incantatory song built around two women's names -- Rosemary and Sandy -- that Interpol never fully reconciles into a…
complicity and denial seduction as manipulation guilt and judgment
Marvin Gaye
Marvin Gaye reframes a holiday standard as a POW's lament, layering familiar Christmas imagery over a desperate plea for peace…
war and captivity longing for home family separation
Neutral Milk Hotel
A frantic, horn-driven elegy that fuses the story of Anne Frank with a surreal, almost hallucinatory imagery of reincarnation…
death and afterlife war and atrocity obsessive love/grief
King Crimson
A blast of distorted vocals and jagged riffing that catalogues the horrors of modern civilization in fragmented, almost…
dehumanization war and violence political corruption
Merle Haggard
A late-career protest song from Merle Haggard arguing that American resources and attention spent overseas should be redirected…
war-weariness economic neglect populist nationalism
Bessie Smith
A direct address from the working poor to the wealthy, this 1928 blues sides a plea for economic justice with an implicit…
class inequality economic desperation war and sacrifice
Abbey Lincoln
Abbey Lincoln's 1991 reading of the Depression-era standard strips the song back to its bare, bitter arithmetic: a man who built…
economic betrayal labor and disposability war and its aftermath