Results for “wordplay as identity”

Songs

Breakadawn

De La Soul

A loose, free-associative posse-cut style track from De La Soul's most abstract album, built on stream-of-consciousness wordplay…

identity and origin hip-hop lineage and Native Tongues affiliation industry skepticism

Resurrection

Common

An early showcase of Common's dense, freestyle-adjacent wordplay, this track is less about narrative than about verbal…

wordplay as identity self-improvement and discipline legal/moral peril

Eye Know

De La Soul

"Eye Know" is De La Soul's sunniest love song, built on a Steely Dan sample and playful Daisy Age slang. Both Posdnuos and…

courtship and seduction wordplay as intimacy group identity and self-naming

The Magic Number

De La Soul

De La Soul turns Schoolhouse Rock's arithmetic lesson into a manifesto for the trio itself, using the number three as a stand-in…

group identity and unity originality vs. imitation in hip-hop numerology/mysticism as playful device

Completeness

Minnie Riperton

A soft, incantatory love song built almost entirely from direct address and imperative pleading, in which the singer asks a…

romantic surrender identity through the other sensuality

Changes

David Bowie

A restless self-portrait of an artist who treats identity as provisional, staged against a generational standoff between an…

self-reinvention generational conflict impermanence

Black

Pearl Jam

A song about the aftermath of a devastating breakup, built on the image of a world drained of color and identity once a lover is…

heartbreak and loss loss of identity grief's distortion of perception

Junkhead

Alice in Chains

Junkhead is a first-person monologue delivered from inside addiction, voiced with unsettling contentment rather than confession…

addiction as identity self-justification and denial alienation from mainstream values

Who Are You

The Who

A drink-and-punch-soaked night in London becomes the occasion for a much larger identity crisis, as the narrator wakes…

identity crisis self-destruction and burnout urban alienation

Figaro

Madvillain

A dense, breathless verse from MF Doom that piles up boasts, jokes, and half-narratives without ever settling into a single…

braggadocio wordplay for its own sake sexual innuendo

Seven Seas

Echo & the Bunnymen

A jubilant, oddly triumphant piece of nonsense-poetry built on nautical and elemental imagery, "Seven Seas" trades linear…

self-mythology transformation catharsis through destruction

Hollis Crew (Krush-Groove 2)

Run-DMC

An early foundational Run-DMC record built almost entirely around boasting: each MC takes a turn establishing his name, his…

braggadocio and self-mythologizing identity and naming hip-hop lineage/crew loyalty

Monkey Suite

Madvillain

A dense, freewheeling verse from MF Doom that piles up internal rhyme and non-sequitur imagery to sketch a self-portrait through…

identity through negation authenticity vs. costume/disguise street survival and hustling

The Real Me

The Who

An opening track that functions as a diagnostic scream: a young man cycles through the authority figures meant to know him —…

identity and authenticity institutional failure (medicine, family, religion) alienation

Giving Up the Gun

Vampire Weekend

A meditation on retired warriors and burned-out rebels, using the image of a decommissioned weapon to talk about aging out of…

aging and obsolescence nostalgia for youthful intensity loss of purpose

Lyrics to Go

A Tribe Called Quest

A pure showcase track in which Q-Tip and Phife Dawg trade verses of boastful wordplay, with the title hook functioning less as a…

braggadocio craft and mastery of rhyme group identity and loyalty

Snakeskin

Deerhunter

A funk-inflected litany of self-definition, "Snakeskin" strings together a series of blunt "I was born" and "I was" declarations…

disability and bodily difference fatalism versus resilience identity as inherited condition

Oh My God

A Tribe Called Quest

A showcase track built almost entirely on braggadocio, wordplay, and interlocking verses from Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, with the…

braggadocio lyrical dexterity group chemistry

Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend

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

ATLiens

OutKast

A two-verse-plus-hook showcase where Big Boi and André 3000 each stake out their identity as outsiders within their own city and…

regional pride and specificity outsider/alien identity self-improvement and discipline

I Am a Scientist

Guided by Voices

A short, deceptively simple lo-fi anthem in which the narrator cycles through professional identities—scientist, journalist,…

self-examination addiction and escape art as self-medication

Blackbird

Nina Simone

Nina Simone's "Blackbird" is a bleak lullaby-like address to a bird who is repeatedly told it cannot fly. Beneath the simple,…

racial identity and constraint internalized despair isolation and abandonment

Don't Touch My Hair

Solange

Solange turns a simple bodily boundary into a statement about Black identity, autonomy, and the exhaustion of having one's body…

bodily autonomy Black identity and hair politics boundary-setting

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

Steve Biko (Stir It Up)

A Tribe Called Quest

A three-MC posse cut built almost entirely from boasts, wordplay, and Queens pride, borrowing the name and instrumental cue of…

hip-hop bravado and lyrical skill group identity and borough pride fleeting social consciousness

She

Elvis Costello

This is Costello's recording of a song originally written by Charles Aznavour, best known in English through Herbert Kretzmer's…

the elusiveness of the beloved identity as multiplicity devotion despite uncertainty

Favorite Thing

The Replacements

A scrappy, two-minute blast of teenage bravado that barely holds together as a song, which is the point: Westerberg sketches a…

adolescent defiance self-destructive pride desire disguised as indifference

My Little Town (with Art Garfunkel)

Paul Simon

A bitter recollection of a suffocating hometown, stripped of color and possibility, sung as a reunion piece by Simon and…

small-town claustrophobia loss of faith inherited identity

Crosseyed and Painless

Talking Heads

A jittery, funk-driven interrogation of what it means to trust information at all, framed through a narrator who feels…

epistemological doubt information overload identity dissolution

Carry the Zero

Built to Spill

A guitarist-narrator watches a relationship or friendship unravel through the metaphor of broken, uncountable pieces and faulty…

fractured identity failed reconciliation self-consciousness and surveillance

Mystery Achievement

The Pretenders

A live rendition of a Pretenders deep cut that treats fame and validation as a slippery, half-mocked obsession. Chrissie Hynde's…

ambivalence toward fame self-invention desire versus disillusionment

Bedbugs and Ballyhoo

Echo & the Bunnymen

This is a self-titled album's late, throwaway-sounding track built almost entirely from paired nouns and nonsense refrains…

nonsense/wordplay power and submission repetition as meaning

Babooshka

Kate Bush

Kate Bush tells a compact fable of a wife who sets a trap for her own marriage by inventing a mysterious alter ego, only to…

jealousy and self-sabotage disguise and identity the decay of romantic feeling

Come As You Are

Nirvana

A hazy invitation dissolves into contradiction as soon as it's offered: the singer welcomes you exactly as you are, then…

contradiction and self-cancellation false reassurance identity as unstable

YYZ

Rush

YYZ is an instrumental showcase built around the Morse-code rhythm for Toronto's Pearson International Airport identifier, which…

homecoming and travel technical virtuosity Canadian identity

Kush Ups

Snoop Dogg

A lighthearted stoner anthem built on a single extended pun: rolling so much weed becomes a kind of workout, a "kush up." Snoop…

marijuana culture excess and abundance leisure as status

In the City

The Jam

A debut single that doubles as a manifesto, announcing a generational voice against the backdrop of late-70s urban Britain. It's…

generational conflict youth identity urban alienation

Batdance

Prince

A collage rather than a song, this track stitches film dialogue samples, chant-like hooks, and rapid genre-shifting funk into a…

identity and masquerade seduction and menace media spectacle

Swamp

Talking Heads

"Swamp" plays like a fever-dream noir, David Byrne narrating a shadowy transaction with the devil and a cast of menacing,…

paranoia moral corruption identity dissolution

Alive

Pearl Jam

A mother's confession about a son's true parentage collides with an unsettling second revelation, and the phrase that should…

inherited trauma identity and paternity survivor's guilt