Guy Clark
Guy Clark builds a plainspoken inventory of worn, dependable objects and people, using them as a working definition of value…
durability vs novelty authenticity friendship and loyalty
Gang Starr
A boastful street-level anthem built around the double meaning of 'work' as both hustle/grind and criminal labor, delivered with…
hustler ethic street surveillance and paranoia status and reputation
J. Cole
A club-and-bedroom track built on interpolated Vanessa Carlton hooks, where a rapper on the come-up frames casual sex and…
casual sex versus emotional attachment material success as leverage fame and status anxiety
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
St. Vincent
A breakup song built almost entirely out of blunt, escalating metaphors, each one recasting the addressee as some kind of prop…
toxic attachment self-deception performance vs. authenticity
Maxwell
Maxwell's Unplugged reading of Kate Bush's ballad turns a song about a man helplessly watching his wife through a dangerous…
helplessness in the face of mortality regret over words and gestures withheld gendered division of labor and pain
The Replacements
A cranky airline passenger gripes about being served by a flight attendant, sneering at her job title and demanding the…
class resentment entitlement euphemism and job-title inflation
Rodney Crowell
A plainspoken proposal song built almost entirely around one repeated pledge: that devotion, not money, will be the measure of a…
romantic devotion class and money courtship and destiny
Emmylou Harris
This is Emmylou Harris's take on the Chuck Berry classic usually known as "You Never Can Tell," a breezy, affectionate narrative…
young love domesticity working-class aspiration
George Jones
A workingman's release-valve anthem: cash burning a hole, a weekend lover waiting, and a chorus that treats Friday night as a…
escapism the work week grind hedonism vs. routine
Pavement
A wry, deadpan tour through the small humiliations of dating, class anxiety, and suburban aspiration, filtered through Malkmus's…
class and status anxiety suburban aspiration irony and detachment
Minutemen
A punk band's origin story told without irony or distance, this song insists that ordinary friendship and local geography are as…
friendship and collaboration punk rock lineage and influence self-mythologizing vs. humility
Weezer
A self-described nobody fantasizes about the glamour of Beverly Hills while admitting, almost in the same breath, that the class…
class envy celebrity worship self-deprecation
Lorde
A teenager from an unglamorous town catalogs the luxury clichés of contemporary pop and mass media, then refuses them, proposing…
class and aspiration media saturation and celebrity excess authenticity versus performance
Kanye West Tribute Band
A Ray Charles sample and a party-ready hook frame a much darker set of verses about money, sex, race, and resentment between men…
gender and money distrust and betrayal black masculinity and provider anxiety
The Jam
A savage class-conflict narrative disguised as a sports report: a ragtag group of protesters or strikers clashes with the Eton…
class conflict failed solidarity British class system
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
Chris Stapleton
A road-trip song about leaving a stale life behind for the sake of a relationship, built on plainspoken folk-country imagery of…
renewal and reinvention risk and commitment partnership over place
The Clash
A ska-inflected celebration of a London rude boy who refuses to reform, structured as a call-and-response between disapproving…
youth rebellion respectability politics working-class identity
John Prine
A young man's ventriloquized portrait of an aging woman worn down by a marriage and a life that never became what she imagined.…
aging and disillusionment domestic entrapment lost youth
Ramones
A blunt manifesto-as-anthem in which the Ramones demand radio play for rock 'n' roll, framing corporate gatekeeping as an enemy…
media gatekeeping artistic frustration working-class impatience
Guy Clark builds a heartbroken travelogue out of restlessness, cataloguing cities and cultural landmarks as a way of avoiding…
heartbreak and longing restlessness and travel as avoidance pride versus vulnerability
Warren Zevon
A mock-heroic ballad about a Canadian enforcer whose only real ambition was to score a goal, told with the deadpan cadence of a…
thwarted ambition masculine role and duty violence as commodity
Merle Haggard
A grief-haunted ballad in which a river becomes both the site of love and the site of loss, and the refusal to ever swim it…
grief and loss fear of intimacy after tragedy California working-class geography
Townes Van Zandt
This is a Rolling Stones cover (Jagger/Richards) performed live by Townes Van Zandt on Roadsongs, and in his hands the song's…
class resentment addiction and self-destruction romantic betrayal
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
Uncle Tupelo
A grim, working-class dirge about exhaustion and dead ends, delivered in the voice of someone addressing a person on the verge…
industrial despair class fatigue futility versus endurance
Jason Isbell
A working-class narrator describes his days through the rhythm of manual labor, framing exhaustion and diminished expectation as…
labor and class faith as consolation resignation vs. dignity
The Smiths
A stranded young man with a broken bicycle is picked up by an older, wealthier stranger, and the encounter becomes a charged,…
class anxiety closeted desire vanity and self-consciousness
The Roots
A motivational anthem built around the word "champion," stacking boasts about relentless work ethic against a chant-like hook…
perseverance self-mythologizing competition
A short, blunt punk song about wage labor as a form of daily indignity. The narrator describes clocking in and out for a boss he…
wage labor and exploitation class resentment dignity versus survival
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
Pet Shop Boys
A cold, hypnotic portrait of London's class and consumer divide, delivered in a near-rap monotone over a synth-pop groove. The…
class division urban alienation consumption and desire
Simon Jäger
Simon adapts Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem into a song about class envy and its blind spot: a factory worker idolizes a…
class envy the emptiness of wealth irony of appearances
Blondie
Blondie's debut single reframes a streetwalker's infatuation with a police officer as a giddy crime narrative, blurring the…
desire as transgression policing and power irony of legal language repurposed as romance
Elton John
A spaceman narrates the mundane dread of leaving home for another routine off-world shift, and finds the glamour of space travel…
alienation the gap between public and private self domestic loss
The Fall
This is The Fall's 1988 cover of the Kinks' 1969 song, a mock-anthem that impersonates Victorian-era patriotic sentiment so…
empire and nationalism class and inequality irony and pastiche
Johnny Cash
A first-person prison lament in which the narrator, confined and hopeless, is tormented by the sound of a train he cannot board.…
confinement and freedom guilt and moral consequence class resentment
Emmylou Harris narrates the entire life of a childhood friend from rural Alabama, from adolescence to an early, unremarked…
rural poverty thwarted ambition female friendship
Jamie xx
This Jamie xx track builds a euphoric, sample-driven dance anthem around a simple mantra of anticipated joy, then hands the mic…
anticipation and collective release hedonism and excess class and hustle