50 Songs That Explain America

I wouldn’t be here—in America, or inside my nervous system as it’s currently constituted—without American music.

That’s no exaggeration. As a metalheaded, punk-rock-obsessed, hip-hop-curious English teenager, I projected my mind toward America. The music summoned me: I couldn’t wait to be around it. On my first trip to New York, 18 years old, I bought cassettes (cassettes!) of LL Cool J’s Radio and Metallica’s Master of Puppets. Holding them in my hands, I felt touched by some essential binary. Big spare beats over here, pulverizing guitars over there: Had the dual nature of reality just revealed itself?

I chased bands, I chased sounds, city to city: New Orleans, San Francisco, D.C., Boston. It was a quest. American music roused me and deepened me. Sometimes I wondered whether I had an American self: louder, braver, more committed to his own evolution than my smelly-socks English self. I’ve now lived here for 30 years, and I’m still wondering about that. As mystifying as this country can be, as merciful and brutal and wildly openhearted, American music has helped me understand it.

But there’s understanding, and then there’s understanding what you’re understanding. Writing has always been my way of bringing submerged ideas and images into daylight. Hence this list. Fifty times, in 50 different ways, I’m asking: What does this song teach me about this country? What is the America of this song? Sometimes it’s right there; sometimes it’s harder to get at. Hit or miss, my hope is that an immigrant’s perspective will be interesting.

Now then: a couple of things that this list is not.

First: It’s not canonical. It makes no claim to being definitive or to establishing or solidifying any kind of orthodoxy of appreciation. Nobody should be outraged at the nonappearance of songs by Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift or Hank Williams or Nina Simone or Prince. Why isn’t there more hip-hop? This whole list could have been hip-hop.

Second: It’s not representational. No attempt is made in this list to include every genre of American music, or to cater to every type of American music fan. Does it seem like a list made by a guitar-oriented white guy in his late 50s, an English guy of wide listening and fairly catholic taste who used to go see the Butthole Surfers? Sure it does. Because that’s exactly what it is.

So there’s nothing programmatic about this list. The selection process was intuitive: The songs were chosen on the basis that they told me something, sonically or lyrically or emotionally or vibrationally, about America and the idea of America—even if, especially if, I didn’t yet know what that something was. And there’s no shortage of these songs; on another day, I could have picked a different 50.

But there is a Big Idea here. The proposition driving the list is this: The greatest American songwriting has always been a broadcast from the national unconscious. Things forgotten, or buried, or not yet sayable, or sayable only in music. They’re out to get meee! / They won’t catch meee! / I’m fuckin’ innocent, says Axl Rose. Do you ever feel like a plastic bag / Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again? says Katy Perry. I know we can take it / I know we can shake it, says Pastor T. L. Barrett.

These songs perforate the numbness of the everyday; they burst the spirit’s sleep. They ironize and jeopardize and sanctify and exalt. These are 50 songs that explain America to me. Will they explain America to you? Let’s see.

Love

Two Tickets to Paradise

Eddie Money

It sails off immediately on luxury spools of post–Steely Dan guitar, with a pattering of holiday bongos. Vacation! Getaway! But this is not a song about paradise—no piña colada, no porno sunset. This is a song about longing: longing to get out, to change your life, to be somewhere or somebody else. Which is a very American kind of longing. It’s Gatsby’s green light: the chased-after promise, the rushing-away future.

The longing is in Eddie Money’s voice, hairy-chested, broken-hearted, with a lovely nightclub languor to it—a ’70s voice that could almost be a ’50s voice, testosterone in a tux. And it’s in the build of the song. The floaty pre-chorus—Waited so long … We’ve waited so long—is perfect, a McCartney-esque simultaneity of sense and sound. And the chorus itself, Jesus—it’s immense, a quantum acceleration. Three super-chords and a whiteout of meaning: The two lovers could be going to the Bahamas or embarking on an end-of-the-world crime spree. Pack your bags / We’ll leave tonight. One way or another, they’re escaping constriction—which is political, which is existential. One way or another, they’re escaping themselves.

We Found Love

Rihanna

Rave music is about nothing. Or rather, it’s about nothing but rave music. But here is a song, or the germ of a song—a spacey, poetic, and dreamily desperate song—embedded in a rave track. Something meaningful is delicately alive inside those whooshes of standardized euphoria. A song written and produced by a Scottish DJ, performed by a pop star born in Barbados—what’s American about this song is the eagerness with which it was embraced: 10 weeks at No. 1. We found love in a hopeless place. Is the love conditional upon the lack of hope, the emptiness? Love out of nowhere, like a drug rush? America, how sophisticated you are, to take such wistfulness and dance your ass off to it.

Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Linda Ronstadt

Warren Zevon’s song is a hedonist’s lament, the croak of a raddled old lotus-eater. His voice is clenched and ironic. Burned-out endorphins are grating at the back of his brain. Interesting choice for Linda Ronstadt. Commercially, she’d spent most of the ’70s reigning smoothly over the middle of the road; Zevon was from the cantankerous margin. But Ronstadt’s version, gender-reversed and emotionally reengineered, is springlike by contrast: a hymn to American resilience. Oh, these boys won’t let me be, she sings, full of life, embracing vicissitude, rejoicing in her baggage.

Luck Be a Lady

Frank Sinatra

American luck: It has the quality of a religious mystery. If you’ve got it, you deserve it, and if you haven’t got it, you deserve that too. Winners and losers, changing their lives in a split second. Changing their natures. Round and round the Boethian wheel goes, and where it stops—well, somebody knows, but not you.

So here’s Frank Sinatra sending up his prayer to the goddess Fortuna, devout as any ancient Roman. But he’s sending it up through nightclub smoke and blasting Vegas brass, in long sallies of ’50s wit: This goddess is American. Written and composed by Frank Loesser for Guys and Dolls, this song briefly traveled before Sinatra made it his own, before he pumped it taut with masculine pizzazz and scorn for the lesser emotions. You can almost hear the current of luck itself moving through the song: the rise and the fall, the whoop and the crash. Win big; lose with style—that’s the Sinatra way. But win or lose, you’re going to have to gamble.

Prom

SZA

SZA’s got one of those voices—it has an aura, a separateness, as if the weave of the world has loosened momentarily around it. Not a big voice, but a voice that reliably, in any context, makes its own envelope of space-time. Prom: that great American rite of passage about which English people like me know nothing. Is that what this song is about? SZA is on an odyssey around her own emotions, her own nervous system, and it makes her feel like Dorothy in Oz: Hoppin’ through poppy fields / Dodgin’ evil witches / These houses keep droppin’ everywhere. The assonance of these lines—hop, pop, drop—is from rap music, but the articulation, the melodic clairvoyance, the swerves and the divings: That’s all SZA’s own. An American unicorn.

I Hate Myself for Loving You

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Does she really hate herself, though? This song has the emphatic stomp of celebration—fat handclaps and blocky major chords. Pump your fist for unhealthy choices; do another shot and text your ex: This is an anthem of American compulsion. I wanna walk, but I run back to you. You can’t argue with those monosyllables. Having survived the music industry in all of its mid-’70s swinishness, having survived L.A. punk rock, Joan Jett retools herself for the ’80s as a kind of cyborg rock-and-roll classicist, all the parts indestructibly locking: the Spector-esque girl-group drums; the AC/DC guitar mega-minimalism; the glam-rock gang chorus. And on top, Joan’s million-dollar, street-toughened, raspily knowing, come-and-get-it voice. Success is assured. What deluded being, what leather-jacketed lunatic, would risk running around on this person?

I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You?

Funkadelic

Writing about the music made by Funkadelic in the early ’70s is like writing about the music of Jimi Hendrix: You’re verbally and conceptually exhausted before you begin. Such wildness; such finesse; such mocking, thesaurus-destroying chemtrails of guitar. Both Hendrix and Funkadelic used musical Blackness (funk, soul, gospel, the blues) to explode musical whiteness (rock), and both, to a degree, politicized psychedelia: Hendrix by infusing it with his own suffering—the suffering of a Black man in America; Funkadelic by filling it with street chaos, street knowledge, street visions, street characters.

“I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You?” is a sex song, but with Funkadelic’s trademark spectral menace wavering behind it. Echo, sizzle, decay: This sex is happening in the kind of space that might take a body, or an unwary psyche, apart. Originally a doo-wop crew from Plainfield, New Jersey, and then self-transplanted to Detroit, Funkadelic was vandalistically creative in the studio: Listen as the sound goes treble-y, washes upward into distilled hiss, like the unheard frequency in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and then clanks down again. Look out here I come / Right back where I started from.

Sprout and the Bean

Joanna Newsom

You hear the harp, the spangly notes of Joanna Newsom’s harp, and your mind’s eye goes Disney: images of Tinker Bell, or Merlin’s wand whipping up stardust. But then this wizened little Appalachian-sounding voice arises, complaining of having slept all day, of experiencing “distaste,” and you feel the sharpness in the writing, the elfin charm and acid intelligence, as if Emily Dickinson has joined the Stanley Brothers. 

And what is it, anyway, she’d like to know—the difference between the sprout and the bean, between the thing in potential and the thing realized? Between the what-if and the now-what? Maybe there’s no way to tell, because in America, you’re always becoming.

I’m in Love

Junior Kimbrough

To his juke joint in the Mississippi hill country they came, the blue bloods of rock—U2, the Rolling Stones, Sonic Youth—to pay court to Junior Kimbrough. No one else played like him. With his right thumb, he connected himself to all of the trance musics of the world, knocking out a nonstop 4/4 drone on the bass string of his guitar, while his fingers on the higher notes plucked out their private, spooky designs. No one else sang like him either: his plaint, his gummy yowl, his moon-sick sound that seemed to be actually vocalizing the instrument in his hands. Kimbrough was a master of the hill-country blues, and he carried a whole tradition in his body.

His friend the rockabilly artist Charlie Feathers described him as “the beginning and end of all music,” but Kimbrough’s genius had been midwifed by obscurity. He released his debut album at the age of 62. In “I’m in Love,” he sounds possessed but unfazed, out of control but weirdly serene, routinely in touch with the spirits of lust and distraction.

I Know You Rider

Judy Henske

Queen of the Beatniks, they called her. Judy Henske came before the hippies, but only just. Out of her huge voice seemed to emanate the other huge female voices of the ’60s: Janis Joplin’s self-immolating, bluesy scream; Grace Slick’s warrior cry, resonating through a thousand acid trips; Mama Cass’s strong, clear tone. “I was a beltin’ person,” Henske said in a late interview. “I was belting all the time.” Her voice went everywhere, a Rabelaisian alto that could take on show tunes, coffeehouse folk, or—as here—the blues.

This song exists in many versions, going back to the 1930s. The Grateful Dead’s is weightless American Zen: I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train. Henske’s, by contrast, is heavy with carnality—joyously, grievously remembering great sex, a vanished partner, a “long slow rollin’.” There is such longing in her delivery, and such relish, as if desire has taken her to the deepest notes in her body.

Gary’s Song

SpongeBob SquarePants

Why does Gary leave home? Why does SpongeBob’s beloved pet snail, with his signature meow, take a last look around their undersea pineapple house, blink sadly, and then shuffle off into the great world of Bikini Bottom, a hobo’s bindle over his non-shoulder? Simple: neglect. Obsessed with his new paddleball game, the heedless young sea sponge has forgotten to fill up Gary’s food bowl. The covenant between pet and owner is broken. Time to go.

Skill in pastiche is a mark of cultural sophistication—also, potentially, of cultural bankruptcy. But there’s nothing used-up about “Gary’s Song.” A mid-’70s-style soft-rocker with a hairy white-soul vocal, it could be a song by Dr. Hook or Three Dog Night: that husky yearning, that denim-y self-pity. And the lyrics! Your meow right now would sound like music to me / Please come home ’cause I miss you, Ga-ry. Nested in the middle of a children’s TV show, an act of glowing postmodernism that is also a great little song. Only in America.

Partying

Turn Down for What

DJ Snake and Lil Jon

Is this even a song? Or is it a sequence of stacked hysterias, one on top of the next, drug music that has so cleanly gobbled up the neurology of excitation that it has obviated the need for drugs? It’s a pressure gig, being an American: Every morning, you step out into emptiness and re-create yourself. This country needs to party; this country needs to lose its mind. And here to help is Lil Jon, demon-voiced, roasted to his essence in the industrial furnace of American hedonism, lining up another round of shots and asking the big question: Turn down for what?! For nothing, is the answer. Turn up. Crank the knob. Go, go, go, America. Go freaking bananas. You know you want to.

Jump

Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen was a guitar genius. The guitar to him was less an instrument than a condensed state of possibility, a universe-crossing wave of potential slowed down just enough to assume the shape of a Flying V. But he also loved his synthesizers. And in particular, he loved fiddling with the knobs of his Oberheim OB-Xa. This was 1983, year of Eurythmics and Duran Duran, and Eddie—always a crossover artist, quite ego-less in his pursuit of the next idea—wanted a synth-driven hit.

Preordained as it sounds, the synth riff for “Jump” came into being against much resistance, from inside the band and from the producer Ted Templeman: too pop, they felt, not Van Halen enough. But Eddie knew what he was doing. “Jump” would be Van Halen’s only No. 1. And this is indeed pop music. The most affecting line, given a lovely hoarse bend by David Lee Roth, is literally the most empty: Can’t you see what I MEE-EAN?

Not that “Jump” is meaningless. The lyrics are starting-at-zero American positivity, an exhortation to leap boldly, gladly, spandex-splittingly into the void: Go ahead and JUMP. Very ’80s—Ronald Reagan’s America, high-gloss MTV exuberance—but also transcendent. Eddie’s touch on the synth is heavy, like a lot of the era’s pop: a world away from the slippery proficiency of his guitar playing. But deep inside that keyboard solo, between the coruscating arpeggios and the slashes of background guitar, in the heat and atmosphere of Roth’s all-consuming optimism, something non-pop, non-rock, purely American and almost extramusical happens. Some songs make you feel happy; some are happiness itself.

Sorcerer

Stevie Nicks

Someone is marooned, cocaine-bitten, love-bitten, frozen in the witch’s castle of dependency: A man and woman on a star stream / In the middle of a snow dream. Stevie Nicks is here to break the spell—or is she its victim? It’s been a decade since she left Fleetwood Mac, and 24 years since Rumours, that zillion-selling bonfire of the soft-rockers. As a solo artist, she has cultivated an ambiently sorcerous persona: veils and candles, gothic twinkle, feathered hair diffusing into a mystical vapor. But there’s a hard edge of realism too. Can Stevie free the victim, the captivated one? Or is she too hooked and exhausted? Does she need the sorcery too badly? This is American alchemy: This is self-transformation. Out of the swirl of the L.A. music scene, Stevie has risen like Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus. Fame, toxicity, heartbreak, all the destructive forces: You fight them with magical warfare.

Beat Biters

Missy Elliott

The selfish gene—the one identified by Richard Dawkins—lives also in pop music. Now and again, you get a song that is basically a vessel of transmission: an organism built by certain fringe noises, and certain avant-garde ideas, in order that they might propagate themselves and seep into the mainstream. “Beat Biters” is one of these songs.

Hard now to hear just how fresh this all was at the time, which is of course the measure of the selfish gene’s success. The producer Timbaland’s little blips and shuffles and inversions and exotic atmospheres; Missy’s grid-stretching flow or counterflow, her jumpy against-the-beat syllables—pretty soon, they’d be everywhere. This is how pop music works. It’s how American culture works. It’s also what this song is about: Even as Missy calls out the beat biters, the pulse burglars, the light-fingered producers who will pilfer Timbaland’s storehouse of whimsy, and the rappers who will steal her breath, she’s giving them more to work with.

Shake Your Body Down to the Ground

Rebirth Brass Band

New Orleans, summer 1990. In the Glass House, a neighborhood bar on South Saratoga Street, the power goes out. No lights, no AC. Inside, Rebirth Brass Band pauses briefly mid-set. A car swings around in the street and then pulls up bumper-first to the bar, its headlights shining through the open door. The set resumes.

Rebirth plays second-line music, named for the cavalcade of dancers and celebrants that follows the band—the first line—in the street, like the “vast horde of souls” straggling zanily into heaven at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story “Revelation,” “shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” To the standard repertoire of funeral marches and parade tunes, all that slow-rolling, dizzy New Orleans dignity, Rebirth adds its own cranked-up party tunes: a Michael Jackson cover, for example.

At the Glass House, the dance floor is drastically illumined, and the dancers are throwing scarecrow shadows. The band, meanwhile, at the back of the room, is half in darkness: stray glints and humid gleams from the nodding trumpets, the swaying tuba. The room is overheating. Blare of brass, tunneling glare of light, full-tilt revelry: an apotheosis of second-line music.

Afterward, we spill into the street, gasping for air. The moon is full. Our eyes are wide. “How about this?!” I say to a local. And he answers with something so apt, so idiomatic, so spherical with lunar perfection that I forget it immediately. Beautiful America, you have included me. You have wrapped me in swaggering celebratory music; you’ve put me in the second line.

Lost in Music

Sister Sledge

People did a lot of cocaine to this song, but it doesn’t sound like cocaine. It sounds natural and compassionate and connected: piano-gushes; a warm rush of strings; breathy, confiding vocals. The message is uncompromising: Get out on the dance floor, because the Protestant work ethic will kill you. But the delivery is generous, luxurious, streaming with a kind of angelic sanity. Formally, this song represents the perfection of dance music as played by humans. After this, more or less, it was over to the machines. The kick drum hits all four beats in the bar, and so does the bass. But these are master musicians, not synthesizers, so they can bend the rhythmic grid; they can warp it with their bodily presence; they can push, or inject a sweet, subliminal lag to which other bodily presences—especially those in disco pants—immediately respond; they can create a groove. And in America, the great groove is always militant: It sets you against society. Melody is good to me! Is there a lovelier battle cry than that?

Pills N Potions

Nicki Minaj

Two voices, two Nickis. The first is lush and rueful, the voice of a torch singer still lingeringly high on the chemicals of romantic love, or refusing to come down; the second is that of a hitmaking rapper, sardonic and poised, with too many hangers-on, too many sycophants, too many bloodsuckers (including perhaps, the object of her love). Two forms of attachment. We’re overdosin’, sings the first voice, dreamy with desire, delivering itself to annihilation. The second voice is flatly managing its own fury and disappointment, and its refusal to be drained by parasites: Still don’t wish death on ’em / I just reflect on ’em. Success in America: It’s not for the faint of heart.

The Big Rock Candy Mountains

Harry McClintock

The candy mountains of this song are a particularly American kind of fantasy: the idyll of an early 20th-century hobo, a gentleman of the road who’s keenly feeling his predicament. So rich and fantastic is this reverie—free money growing on bushes, hens laying soft-boiled eggs—that we learn exactly what isn’t there, exactly what the singer has not got, exactly what he needs. And his needs are so basic! It’s not nirvana he’s looking for: He wants food and booze and cigarettes, and a change of socks.

McClintock had been a union organizer in the Texas oil fields, and a campaigner for the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—so he knew what he was singing about. In his hobo wonderland, for example, there is a magical absence of short-handled shovels (much used by chain gangs), and the railroad bulls, sworn enemy of the boxcar-jumping hoboes, are helpfully blind. Best of all, it’s a life without consequences: In the Big Rock Candy Mountains / The jails are made of tin / And you can walk right out again / As soon as you are in.

Longing

Firework

Katy Perry

Hearing this song over the PA at CVS, its bellowed affirmations—Baby you’re a FIII-YA-WURK!—thinned to a Muzak crackle while you’re standing in line to pick up your tube of special ointment. Now that’s an American experience. 

It was that faulty firework Russell Brand, Katy Perry’s then-husband, who directed her to the famous line in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: the one about the people who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” Or like proto–pop stars. So with the songwriter Ester Dean, and the Norwegian production duo Stargate, she wrote a mighty manifesto and a total banger. Her voice, wheedling through the downbeat verses—Do you ever feel like a plastic bag / drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?—rather exposed amid the spongy Stargate chords, swells to a superhuman enormity in the chorus.

Hey, Jack Kerouac, how was this for you? To see your delicate Beat gospel retooled as a city-crushing robo-saurus of a hit single—how did it make you feel? Like a plastic bag?

Gloomy Sunday

Billie Holiday

Not everyone liked Billie’s version of this song. The great New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett pronounced it “depressing.” The BBC wouldn’t play it, on the grounds that it was detrimental to wartime morale. Also known as the “Hungarian Suicide Song,” “Gloomy Sunday” was composed in 1933 by Rezső Seress, a pianist from Budapest—who, 35 years later, indeed committed suicide. So here, in a clarinet-laden arrangement, we have lethal slow-acting Mitteleuropean doldrums coming up against … Billie Holiday: the narrow brassy purity of her note; her vibrato, like little throbs of life diffusing into a waste; her wised-up, witty, witchy way of sliding around the beat; and, above all (or below all), her sublime American fatalism, which is its own style, a kind of dark drollery—the flip side of American zeal.

I Wanted Everything

The Ramones

Here, carried on the brute wave of Johnny’s guitar tone, is a tale of alienation, a Dostoyevskian skit—if Dostoyevsky was from Queens, New York. I heard about the Easter bunny / Presents under a Christmas tree / It was juvenile fantasy / There was no Mom or Daddy. Societally, this was the function of the Ramones: They made nursery rhymes for people who never had a nursery. (Or who, if they had one, burned it down.) With this song, the Ramones are moving fast. Their brand—an ultra-American mash-up of street gang, minor corporation, and feral family unit—is intensifying, as is their playing. In the compacted chords of the main riff, you can hear hardcore punk rock being born. Growing up, our narrator perilously enters society: He must interface with the job market. Knew I was ready for it / Some kind of employment. Brilliant writing: the off-kilter hauteur of the truly estranged. Obviously it’s never going to work out. So what can he do but rob a supermarket?

Ten Cents a Dance

Ruth Etting

Taxi dancers, they were known as: hostesses renting themselves out as dance partners, one song at a time. Brittle gaiety was the mood, with an undertow of darkest misery. Or at least that’s the push-me-pull-you vibe of this song: The creaky little band strains against the slowed-down tempo—with one manic, foxtrotting outbreak—and Ruth Etting sings like a fast-talking movie dame who’s been drugged by melancholia. Seven to midnight I hear drums. She’s in musical hell. Shift over, she retires to her chilly hall room: quintessence of American loneliness. And there’s an answering American loneliness in her clientele, the men who pay for a dance; men adrift, unattended; her chorus of elderly beaus. Body warmth for sale.

It’s Only a Paper Moon

Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards

A spiritual catastrophe has occurred. That’s what this song is about. Not that you’d know it from Ella Fitzgerald’s version, or Nat King Cole’s, or even droopy James Taylor’s—each of which is either too lush or too jaunty or too suave to touch the reality of the problem. And the problem is this: The world has been drained of meaning. It has become depthless, a kind of absurdist stage set, a canvas sky and a cardboard sea. So it falls to Cliff Edwards, vintage vaudevillian (he’s the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio), to convey the mood—the seeing-through of American illusion. It’s a Barnum and Bailey world / Just as phony as it can be. Edwards sounds almost nihilistically airy, like there’s no one else around, like he’s singing to himself, tickling his tiny ukelele, rooty-toot-tootling on an American streetcorner where everything has changed while looking exactly the same.

Escape

Metallica

Loving this song gives me a nice lick of perversity, because the songwriters themselves notoriously don’t love it. In 1984, having delivered its second album—and first masterpiece—Ride the Lightning, Metallica finds itself under record-company pressure to add one more track, and to make it hit-like. A single, maybe. What the group comes up with is “Escape”: mid-paced, mega-chorused, written at speed in the studio. It wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t even a single. And it left the band unthrilled: In the 42 years since its release, its authors have performed it live precisely once. But “Escape” is a great Metallica song. The playing, and particularly James Hetfield’s rhythm-guitar work, guarantees its seriousness. Out for my own, out to be free / One with my mind, they just can’t see. Is this a statement of austere individualism, chiseled by the winds of time? Or is it pure, mutinous boneheadedness? Either way, American as hell.

Drinking With the Jocks

Against Me!

Individuation: the American’s highest calling. But becoming yourself is a lonely business, by definition. Through levels of private wrongness you rise, through stages of almost esoteric discomfiture. If you’re lucky, you’ll recognize the initiatory moments for what they are. If you’re not, and you miss them, the change could bypass you altogether. Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of Against Me!, is trans, and “Drinking With the Jocks” records a kind of botched initiation: an attempt to join the wrong tribe. Ritualized boozing and misogynist bluster. Horrible, violent laughter. If I do that, if I behave like that, will the jocks like me? The lyrics are brutal. This is an epic statement of injury—All of my life! All of my life!—delivered at high speed and with severe instrumental density. It’s what punk rock was invented for.

Something I Learned Today

Hüsker Dü

This one’s for the runaways. For the young Americans packing one bag and taking off, shaking the dust from their feet. It builds through a sequence of beginnings: a sharp tattoo of snare drum, an adrenalized bass line, a mind-clearing chord, and then a full-band detonation. Zen Arcade, of which this is the opener, is a double album, a Who-like creative sprawl. And it has a concept. It tells a story: young person runs away from home; takes to the road; is challenged, instructed, seduced, and finally overwhelmed by the merciless psychedelia of reality. The music is hardcore punk rock, furiously compacted and accelerated, but with mini-flourishes of pop classicism—a glancing vocal harmony, a chiming Byrdsy outro—that seem to trigger the enormity of the dream-space, of the unattainable American horizon.

P.S.K. What Does It Mean?

Schoolly D

The first gangsta-rap track? Could be. P.S.K. refers to a Philadelphia gang, the Parkside Killers, and Schoolly D’s wild-night narrative is a criminal picaresque: drugs, guns, prostitution, all of that. He raps in dissociated singsong, each line descending in pitch, downwardly curving like a sneer or an arc of desensitization. Groundbreaking stuff, at the time.

The rapping was one thing, but then there was the icy futurism of the beat. Programmed on a Roland TR-909 drum machine, it’s a masterpiece: an almighty synthetic crash, an emptiness shot through with spasms of mechanized rhythm, a hanging second of supercharged silence—repeat. Second, what they did to the beat. Finding themselves very high in a studio that contained a plate reverb—a refrigerator-size unit containing a sheet of stretched steel, built by the pre-digital American masters of echo and space to tingle, resound, deepen the wave—Schoolly and his associates went to town. “All of a sudden,” he told Philadelphia City Paper in 2004, “the song just took on this whole other life because we were just so fucked up. It just made this sucking sound like ‘boosh, boosh’ and we just looked at each other and were like, ‘Yeah, do more of that shit.’”

Some of the spaces—sonic and verbal—opened up by this song would soon be occupied. Ice-T and Eazy-E were attending closely to Schoolly’s hardcore flow, and the cymbal sounds of the 909 would find their way into Chicago house music. But that mystical, bass-y boosh, boosh—that came out of nowhere, went back into nowhere: an American anomaly, untouched by time.

Wildwood Flower

The Carter Family

There’s musicological interest here: Sara Carter’s voice, on this song, was one of the first recorded female lead vocals in country music, and her sister-in-law Maybelle Carter’s guitar technique—the famous “Carter scratch,” in which the melody twangs cleanly while the rhythm is scuffed out behind—was a stylistic breakthrough.

But that’s not why we listen to “Wildwood Flower.” The music of the Carter Family, reaching out to us from the area in the mountains of northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia known as Poor Valley, is archetypal stoical American understatement, of the sort that Ernest Hemingway would have appreciated. “The dignity of movement of an iceberg,” he wrote in Death in the Afternoon, “is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” 

Malibu

Hole

Late-period Hole. Courtney Love and her band have already left their red, red mark on the culture with 1994’s Live Through This, a howling fem-storm released the week after her husband, Kurt Cobain, killed himself. Love, by this point, has become a volatile celebrity. And now, with her band, she is seeking something very American: absolution via the mainstream. A remission from your own craziness, measured in records sold.

So with the producer/sonic hygienist Michael Beinhorn, they smooth it out. They shed the crusty vestments of grunge and go SoCal: Love still dominates, she’s still at the center of the mix with her slouchy-snarly, melody-smearing, poetry-uttering, big-mouth, punk-rock voice, but the cleaned-up band now pumps along in a nice Fleetwood Mac groove.

It works. It’s a hit. And it’s beautiful. The song is addressed to someone who’s right on the line, or perhaps already over it: either being reborn or self-incinerating. And Malibu is the magic word—the dreamy shoreline, America’s dissolution, waves leveling waves in the sunset while all of the red-hot sins of whoever you are sink hissing into the Pacific.

Rebellion

Out ta Get Me

Guns n’ Roses

Musically, GNR always felt worn-out to me, sort of a jaded, late-stage confection: stale riffage, reheated rock-and-roll moves. But the anger, the shortwave wrath of Axl Rose, that was real. That was vivid. “To hear that fly out of the radio,” as Mary Gaitskill wrote in a classic essay for Details, “streamlined by Axl’s high, carnal, glandularly defined voice, is an invitation to step into an electrical stream of pure aggression.”

And the chorus of this song is anger plus righteousness: holy indignation. They’re out to get meee! / They won’t catch meee! / I’m fuckin’ innocent. Who was out to get Axl? Cops. Accountants. “You know,” he expanded in a record-company press kit, “parents, teachers, preachers … everybody.” So the innocence here lives on the underside of paranoia: It’s a dark American innocence, a kind of moral immunity. Not: I’ve done nothing wrong. More like: Nothing I do is wrong. Axl, in this song, is literally unimpeachable.

The Drama You’ve Been Craving

Sleater-Kinney

At some shows, there’s a thrilling sensation of addition: You can feel the room, the crowd, the universe, your brain warping and adjusting to make space for a genuinely new thing. That’s what happened the first time I saw Sleater-Kinney, 30-odd years ago at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. The music was recognizably in the tradition of post-punk. But the vocals—the rippling vehemence of Corin Tucker, and the unpredictable reactions-in-song of Carrie Brownstein, not a dialogue so much as the bifurcation of an interior monologue—they were something else. The combined effect was simultaneously one of white-knuckle control and an almost voluptuous abandonment.

The singer of this song is someone at the end of her tether, someone who feels like quitting, someone about to incinerate a relationship just to smell the brimstone. Dull as it is to characterize Sleater-Kinney as an all-female trio (no one ever described ZZ Top as an all-male trio), this is music made by women, and the dual action of the women’s voices becomes a way of cutting into experience. All the bridges gonna burn / Gonna fall down / Burn it down, it’s so hot, it’s so hot, hot. It has the rhythm of anguished sleep-talk, of something exquisitely private being said out loud.

Mama Said Knock You Out

LL Cool J

Ego: You’ve gotta have one, especially in America. Otherwise, the invisible flying brickbats will take you out. But what happens when ego is not enough—when your loud, repeated assertions of selfhood bring diminishing returns? In 1990, LL Cool J was a former hip-hop prodigy, now a hip-hop superstar, but he was going out of style. His kind of rapping, based in a tradition of boasts and put-downs that stretches back beyond the blues, was being superannuated by gangsta rap, politically conscious rap, basically any rap that wasn’t about the everlasting amazingness of LL Cool J. Still only 22, LL was looking old.

Did the force field of ego flicker? It did not. It redoubled in strength. It swelled with a mighty vibration. I’m gonna take this itty-bitty world by storm / And I’m just getting warm. In this song, over a scorchingly treated loop from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” LL spews threats, lands punch lines, and shares visions, expanding to such clanking self-magnitude that the rest of rap music is temporarily blotted out. A hallucination of personal greatness, becoming—while the song lasts—a fact.

A Boy Named Sue

Johnny Cash

To hear that grave voice humorously aroused, that rich, austere voice in a register of levity—it’s like someone has found a joke in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Johnny Cash apparently sprang this number on his band at the last minute, and you can hear them chugging along watchfully behind him, taking their cues from the lifts and the falls and the chuckles in his recitation.

In this performance, three entities are creatively converging. First, the composer: that brilliant cosmopolitan Shel Silverstein, Playboy cartoonist, children’s author, hit songwriter, and—for the duration of “A Boy Named Sue”—cowboy poet, like Robert W. Service with a ’60s glint in his eye. Second, the singer: Cash, with his biblical marrow and his dark glow of charm, a ruefully commanding presence. Third, the audience: the incarcerated men of San Quentin, starved of entertainment, starved of love, aggressively ready to laugh, roar, feel.

 Johnny Cash liked playing prisons. He had a connection with men doing time: He knew it, and they knew it. He believed in redemption. (They might not have been so sure.) And this song that he sings them at San Quentin, semi-serious but very serious, is about fathers and sons, and fighting, and becoming a man in America. You can hear it: Inside the prison walls, every punch line, every witty Silverstein rhyme, lands like a revelation.

Ghost Rider

Suicide

Suicide: You were either for them or against them. They were a Lower Manhattan art shock, a dividing line—Alan Vega’s phantom voice; Martin Rev’s distorted post-tuneful keyboard blast, like a melted robot trying to remember rockabilly music. Politically, they came out of anti–Vietnam War protests; culturally, they twitched and scurried in the fiscal necropolis that was early-’70s New York City.

Bruce Springsteen was for them. Infatuated with the first Suicide album, he would soon be making Vega-like noises, those atavistic little hoots and yips, on Nebraska. But where Springsteen seemed to be testing the depth of his own isolation, Suicide was into the void itself, an infinite recession of burning skulls. “Ghost Rider”—inspired by the Marvel character, a motorcycle stuntman riding paths of hellfire—is the song of an American demon, nothing but glamour and nihilistic propulsion. Vega gibbers and swoons over a filthy, driving three-note electronic riff: America, America is killin’ its youth. What can you do but follow this trail of incineration across the sky?

Mumblin’ Guitar

Bo Diddley

A mad professor disguised as a thick-bodied, black-hatted rhythm-and-blues man, Bo Diddley built his own guitars (they were square-shaped), and he built his own rhythms, which were the syncopated thunder of industrial U.S.A., the grating of machine parts, the thrust and clatter that would turn the blues into rock and roll. This song, seething with shakers and maracas, features his signature beat, the Bo Diddley beat—bomp, bomp, bomp, ba-bomp-BOMP—but sped up, with the swing crushed out of it, the better to display the wild moods of his guitar. Diddley was also a trailblazer in his use of the tremolo pedal, and you can hear that going on too: No longer an elegant after-flutter of sound, tremolo in his music was a crude force, driving, destabilizing, its signals overlapping, creating a rhythm and almost uncreating it in the same instant. American volatility, American innovation, American electrification. 

Guillotine

Death Grips

Has America gotten crazier in the 15 years since this leering, shuddering, articulated beast of a song was released? Or is it just that the craziness has broken the surface? In their desperate prime, Sacramento’s Death Grips seemed to have cornered the market on free-roaming insanity. Public-transport mutterings, cell-block din, oracular street rants, profane telepathic zaps, hissed rebuttals to the unheard voice: All were gleefully enfolded into their punky-clunky emergency hip-hop. For these guys, in Martin Amis’s phrase, every straw was the last straw. And they could make it catchy.

Memphis Underground

Herbie Mann

Across layers of vanilla-smooth pop-jazz, the guitar of Sonny Sharrock comes creeping. Lithe, ductile, unsettling, glimmering with distortion. Something elemental is going on here, a confluence or collision of energies: The flute of bandleader Herbie Mann is charged with breath, whimsically fluttering human breath; Sharrock’s guitar is charged with hulking electricity. There’s something political too. Mann is white, heterodox but commercially oriented, a purveyor in this context of lightweight fluty whiteness; Sharrock is Black, a ferocious improviser and noisemaker—the fumes of the New York free-jazz scene are still on him—who liked, in his own words, to “shatter the tune.”

And how they depend on each other, how beautifully it works, Mann’s little pointillistic puffs against Sharrock’s ragged current. When the guitarist opens up, everything around him—the tinkling vibraphone, the choogling drums—shifts, levitates, and begins to diffuse at its edges into a kind of blinding solar frazzle. The wildness is contained; the container is renewed. America, land of great imbalances—why can’t you do this more often?

Institutionalized

Suicidal Tendencies

Hidden away inside ’80s L.A. hardcore punk, on a track so singular, it’s almost a novelty record, is one of the all-time great American monologues: ludicrous and desperate, solipsistic and righteous, a system-indicting suburban teenage mind-purge. Our narrator, Holden Caulfield with a skateboard, is having problems. He’s thinking about everything, and he’s thinking about nothing. His parents are worried, but they don’t understand. All he wants is a Pepsi, and his mom won’t give it to him. To look at, the members of Venice, California’s Suicidal Tendencies were not theater kids: They were gang-affiliated bruisers, and their shows were famously violent. But what a reading their front man, Mike Muir, gives here, hoarse with pain and thwarted entitlement. This is 1980s American suburbia: Adolescence is being pathologized, and the culture of therapy has a totalitarian shadow. They’re going to put him away.

I’m Against It

The Marx Brothers

There’s a flavor of Lewis Carroll about Bert Kalmar’s lyrics here, a pipe-y whiff of old-school English nonsense: For months before my son was born / I used to yell from night ’til morn / “Whatever it is, I’m against it!” This, however, is American nonsense—bigger, shaggier, crazier. (And more Jewish.) Like its English cousin, it depends, for its proper discharge, on order. Authority figures, traditions, uniforms, syntax, meter: It needs the shibboleths of reason to present themselves for destruction. But only America, unchained immigrant America, could have produced Groucho Marx.

Look at him in this scene, at the beginning of Horse Feathers. He is, for some reason, the president of Huxley College, solemnly robed, and the tassel on his mortarboard flips and twitches in a kind of organic irony as he addresses the college trustees. Then he’s away, singing his song of total opposition, American contrarianism raised to a pitch of absurdity, because Groucho would be against contrarianism itself. And it’s not satire either, as Lee Siegel explains in his seriously instructive Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence, because even the most violent satire implicitly takes a moral position: For Groucho, there is simply no satisfactory position at all. It’s Bartleby—“I would prefer not to”—on crystal meth.

God

Ray of Light

Madonna

It’s 1998, and Madonna’s club children are weary. The dance floor has drained and deranged them. They have reached the end of the night. So like a balm upon their parched receptors, direct from her all-mothering spirit, she flowingly bestows it: Ray of Light, and its beautiful title track. Mysticism, yoga, breath control. Healing beats. An infusion of wellness before anybody knows what “wellness” is. How many absolute bangers use imagery from the Kabbalah? Not many. How often can we connect a pop song with the Jewish mystical concept of the kav—God’s primal bolt of illumination into the darkness? And this song is a ray of light. The sweetly climbing guitar figure; the soul-elevating groove. Madonna’s voice—that tight, glassy, airless, unmistakable pop-ruling voice—is transformed. Now she roams, now she soars. The great American artist can do this, mass-market the revelation, make the mainstream gleam with the first radiance of the universe.

Oh, What a World

Kacey Musgraves

Fall in love, and you fall in love with everything: Love for another will open your heart to the lovable otherness of the world. Is that the philosophical proposal of this song? I think it kind of is. Through wafts of pedal-steel guitar, she rises, the Texan country-pop queen Kacey Musgraves, floating with cartoon buoyancy past magic mushrooms and luminescent fish toward the you to whom the song is addressed.

The obvious forebear here is “What a Wonderful World,” from 1967, Louis Armstrong’s rumbling beatification of everyday life. But the universe has deepened in weirdness since then. A more contemporary parallel might be Insane Clown Posse’s much-mocked but to me quite valuable “Miracles,” from 2009: Fucking rainbows, after it rains / There’s enough miracles here to blow your brains. “Oh, What a World” is much sleeker and lovelier than ICP, but it partakes of the same—what shall we call it?—experiential openness. Which is an American style of perception, an American freshness: everything shining, everything renewed.

River Song

Dennis Wilson

What do you do if you’re a washed-up Beach Boy in 1977? If you’re Dennis, best-looking and most doomed of the Wilson brothers, you pull it all together—all the years of pain and knowledge and queasy close harmonies—and you make a solo record: Pacific Ocean Blue, of which this song is the opener.

“River Song” is immense: a hair-raising, gospel-boosted thumper, proceeding at a gorgeous orchestral trudge, about the river that runs under us all, under all beauty and under all ugliness, bearing us along and carrying us away. Dennis the surfer, his voice roughened by time and substances, has drifted inland—into the veins of the country. (The song came to him in the High Sierras.) The city has used him up; the river beckons. Maybe it’ll do for him what it did for Huck Finn—cleanse the grease spots from his mind.

Journey in Satchidananda

Alice Coltrane

When John Coltrane died, in 1967, his second wife and musical partner, Alice Coltrane, sought consolation in the presence of the guru Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, part of the second wave of Indian yogis to bring their teachings to the United States. “Anyone listening to this selection,” she wrote in the liner notes to Journey in Satchidananda, of which this song is the title track, “should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchinandaji’s love.”

It’s a busy place, the ocean of love: full of music. Spiny, ego-unwinding tamboura, keen as a sitar; Pharoah Sanders on saxophone, following the line of his breath; Coltrane’s harp. A classical pianist mentored into jazz by Bud Powell, in Paris, she had taken up this instrument only a few years before, and uses it here to put us all into a state of tingling harmonic awareness. Meditation and yoga have arrived in the culture. Listen closely, and you can hear America’s third eye as it flickers its lid, stutters, and then bangs wide open.

I Got So High That I Saw Jesus

Noah Cyrus

Nothing is more American than a personal experience of Jesus Christ. And nothing is more American than getting high. So we need not look for irony here, or any level of sacrilegious naughtiness: Noah Cyrus—sister of Miley, daughter of Billy Ray—and her writing partner PJ Harding are offering this beautiful song to us with the glossy-eyed sincerity of the super-stoned, and the bony earnestness of the spiritually tweaked. Put away your metaphors. They really did get high, and they really did see Jesus, and this is really what he said.

You just need me in your heart / Tennessee whiskey and love: Is this how Jesus talks? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think he has no scruples around derangement, chemical or otherwise—that he’ll show himself to the out-of-their-minds as readily as he’ll show himself to the sober. The music is devotional Americana, slo-mo but not sad, rootsy but with up-to-the-minute production. There’s so much Kingdom left to come: What a line.

The Lion for Real

Allen Ginsberg

The spirit of William Blake visited Allen Ginsberg in 1948, in his cold-water flat in New York. Ginsberg heard Blake’s voice, and Blakean visions of eternity beamed themselves derangingly into his noggin. This is the American mid-century: into the great buildings of the metropolis, a shaft of eternity. Ginsberg’s world was rocked, and his poetic calling was crystallized. In 1958, he wrote up the experience in “The Lion for Real”—not an act of bombastic self-exposure like 1955’s “Howl,” the nervous-breakdown-in-verse that made him famous, but a bumptious, generous, wonderfully slapstick account of the losing of his American mind. This version, recorded more than 30 years after the poem’s composition, finds Ginsberg extra jolly, extra goofy, a kind of outpatient raconteur riding waves of broken jazz. William Blake has become the Lion, a complex golden presence that will neither eat the poet nor leave his front room. What does the Lion want? It wants what America wants: It wants you to face your own nature, your own mortality, your own disgrace, your own divinity.

Waiting for the Sun

The Doors

Who says Jim Morrison wasn’t a great American poet? At first flash of Eden / We raced down to the sea / Standing there on freedom’s shore. What a vista: pristine, Emersonian, the dew-dazzle of original America. But this is 1970. The ’60s are over almost before they began, their great project incomplete. Consciousness remains unredeemed. And Morrison is a broken prophet: heavy, boozy, whiskery. He sounds bemused: This is the strangest life I’ve ever known. The following year, he’ll be dead.

He can still sing, though—that croon of his, Bing Crosby with shamanic antlers. He can lift his voice in a wolfish shout too. The flower children have followed him into the darkness of Freud and Dionysus—weakened as he is, can he lead them now into the virgin dawn? It doesn’t look like it. The people are gathered on the beach, but the sun won’t rise, and the high priest sings his song over a long, withdrawing tide of American serotonin.

No Sun to Burn (For Brass)

Kali Malone

Kali Malone is known for the drone. (I can’t help these rhymes.) And the drone goes on forever, but breath is finite. So listen carefully, after each long velvety curving-in-space note played by the ensemble in “No Sun to Burn,” for the discreet sound of a musician inhaling. An American composer based in Stockholm and Paris, Malone works with pipe organs, synthesizers, and—here—brass. “No Sun to Burn” is elegiac in its mood and countercultural in its slowness. The notes accrete, more of a formation than a sequence: It’s like watching a Civil War band being turned to stone while it plays “Woodman, Spare That Tree.” Can it cure your ADD? Your terminal fidgets? Probably not. But listening to it puts you into a different kind of American time. Whatever you’re doing, when this comes on, you’re going to have to stop: stop rushing, stop judging, stop arguing.

Shake Appeal

Iggy and the Stooges

Wild American beauty: Iggy Pop in 1973. Big night-creature eyes and the body of an acrobat—like David, if Michelangelo had sculpted him with a welding torch. Like David if he came from a Michigan trailer park. Iggy’s career, however, was in the dumps. Even the tiny constituency of rock-and-roll recidivists that he’d earned as fans with the first couple of Stooges albums seemed to have lost interest. No one appreciated him.

No one? Not quite no one. David Bowie, the parasite genius, the man with the waving antennae and the sci-fi taste buds, had battened on to Iggy. Wrangling him and his band into the studio in London, Bowie mixed Raw Power as a thin scream of sound, a narrow infernal transmission. “Shake Appeal” was Iggy’s favorite track: the closest he ever came, as he later expressed, to being Little Richard. It is indeed shudderingly pure and very danceable rock and roll: The Stooges guitarist James Williamson obliges with a primal solo, a sequence of shrieking but cleanly phrased Chuck Berry–isms. The incoming generation of upstarts would idolize Iggy as the Godfather of Punk, but here he’s nothing more or less than an electrically enhanced child of ’50s America: chest-baring, goofily intrepid, rock-and-roll-adoring, whooping it up, bouncing into the future with Looney Tunes resilience.

Like a Ship (Without a Sail)

Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir

The massed voices of the Youth for Christ Choir, from the South Side of Chicago, are at moments in this song almost too seraphically strident: They scrape at the underside of heaven. But what a contrast they offer, what a celestial counterpoint, to the worldly, funky, individual, all-too-human, and very much down-here-with-us voice of Pastor T. L. Barrett, to his ecstasy of personal fallibility. I search for pleasure / But I found pain. Are you listening, young people? This is America’s great and constant sermon: By all means, gratify yourself, but in the end, it won’t be enough. You’re going to need community, and—unspoken in this song, but present in the vertical noise of the choir—a dose of grace from above.

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Image sources: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Al Pereira / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Larry Hulst / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Mike Coppola / Getty; Larry Busacca / WireImage.

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