Results for “youthful defiance”

Songs

The Jam

A brisk punk-era manifesto that frames the city as both battleground and stage for youthful self-assertion. The narrator speaks…

generational conflict youthful defiance urban alienation

The Beach Boys

"409" is an early Beach Boys car song that treats a Chevrolet muscle car like a lover and a racehorse at once, celebrating…

car culture youthful aspiration/consumerism masculinity and status

Ramones

This is the Ramones' cover of a 1964 surf-pop nugget, stripped down and sped up into a blast of bubblegum escapism. It's not a…

escapism idealized geography youthful pleasure-seeking

Bruce Springsteen

A young man stands in a driveway trying to talk a woman named Mary into getting in his car and leaving town with him. Over five…

escape and flight the limits of romantic promise small-town decay

Al Green

A young man addresses a train conductor directly, pleading for the impossible: reverse the train's direction so he can return to…

regret and reversal longing/separation loneliness

Mott the Hoople

A glam-rock anthem that assembles a cast of disaffected, gender-bending teenagers and hands them a vague, urgent 'news' to…

generational rupture glam identity and androgyny disaffection with 60s idealism

David Bowie

A song about self-reinvention that treats identity as something perpetually in motion rather than a fixed achievement. Bowie…

self-reinvention generational conflict identity instability

The Beatles

A meditation on memory that moves from cataloguing remembered places and people to a declaration of present love, arguing that…

memory and nostalgia mortality the persistence of the past