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A word on the last record of Ed Sheeran, Project n ° 6 of collaborations, is disguised as a fairly big humblebrag.
The British singer has unveiled the album, of which each song is a collaboration: among them are Justin Bieber, Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and Eminem and 50 Cent on the same title.
It's the collaboration between Sheeran and Stormzy, the former star of Glastonbury, that caught the attention of people. It seems that, at the time of the first respective listening, it is the song which receives the most praise on the social media.
We will tell you what is true. You can form your own view.
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Hidden in the song is a lyrical that sees Sheeran gloating over how much money he has earned on his last tour.
The lyrics say: "Because I did not go home on time, yes, I / but it's my fault / half-billi" on the Divide Tour / Yes, I'm not kidding, I'd be lying for what? "
To be fair to the singer, he is not wrong. In May, Billboard announced that this two-year tour was the second in its history to gross of more than $ 600 million, becoming the second tour in history to reach such a mark.
Despite this, it is highly likely that this will never justify placement in the gallery below.
1/40 Nirvana – "My apologies"
"I'd like to be like you / Easily amused / Find my nest of salt / It's all my fault."
As headbangers in the hearts of bloody poets, Nirvana was singular. Yet, their slower songs have been obscured unjustly over the decades. Kurt Cobain has still articulated his anguish and anger more moving than the best song of their album of songs of swans, In Utero of 1993?
All the excuses – a mea culpa screamed from the precipice – were directed to his wife, Courtney Love, and their granddaughter, Frances Bean. Six months later, Cobain would commit suicide. No other composition articulates in a more moving way the despair that was to devour him entirely and the overflowing bads of love that he felt for his family. His circumstances are tragic, but his message – that love lingers after our departure – is edifying. EP
Rex
2/40 Nine Inch Nails – "Injured"
"And you could have everything / My land empire / I'll let you down / I'll hurt you."
Trent Reznor's heartbreaking diagnosis of his penchant for self-destruction – he never confirmed if the song was referring to heroin use – would have an unlikely rebirth with Johnny Cash's cover in 2002. But all this pain, this torrid lyricism and this terrible beauty are already present and correct in the original Reznor. EP
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3/40 Joy Division – "Love will tear us apart"
"Why is the cold room diverted to your side? / Is my timing flawed, is our respect so dry?
Taking advantage of its unofficial status as a student disco anthem, the biggest success of Joy Division has undoubtedly suffered from too much familiarity. Yet, approached with new ears, the painful humanity of Ian Curtis's words flickers in a dark voice. His marriage was falling apart when he wrote the lyrics and he would commit suicide shortly thereafter. But far from a macabre despatch from the beginning, "Love Tears Us" unfolds like a scathing guitar sonnet – sad and burning. EP
Paul Slattery / Retna
4/40 Arcade Fire – "Spreading II (Mountains Beyond the Mountains)"
"They've heard me sing and told me to stop / leave these pretentious things and hit the pendulum."
Locating the dreamy underworld of suburban boredom was perhaps the crowning glory of Arcade Fire and their most beautiful album, The Suburbs. Many artists have tried to talk about the asphyxiating conformity of life in the midst of impeccable lawns and two-car purgatory in the reader of stick life.
But Arcade Fire has articulated the frustrations and the feeling of something better on the horizon that will be immediately familiar to anyone who grew up away from the lights, the exciting synths of "Sprawl II", Regine Chbadagne's counterpoint that sings as Bjork if Bjork were supplying shelves in a supermarket while studying for his night graduation. EP
AFP / Getty Images
5/40 Beyonce – "Training"
"I love my baby hair, with baby hair and afros / I love my negro nose with the five nostrils of Jackson Five / I've earned all that money but they do not will never leave the country / I have hot sauce in my bag, booty. "
Beyonce had made politically charged statements before, but "Training" seemed to her the most explicit. The lyrics take up the power of her identity as a black woman from the great south and boast of her wealth and refuse to forget her roots. In a society that still judges women who boast about their success, Beyonce recognizes it and wants to badert its power, including on men. "Maybe you're just a black Bill Gates in the making," she thinks, but then decides, "I could be just a black Bill Gates in the making." RO
(Photo by Kevin Winter / Getty Images for Coachella)
6/40 Laura Marling – "ghosts"
"Loving, do not bother / Fall on your knees / It's not like I believe / Everlasting love."
Haunted Folkie, Marling was 16 when she wrote her ballad, a teenage grief sorrow divination with a flinty mature trail that hits the listener in the belly. It's one of the most scathing anti-love songs in recent history – and a reminder that, despite Mumford and Sons – the mid-2000s nu-folk scene was not quite infernal posterity fandango. EP
Alan McAteer
7/40 LCD Soundsystem – "Losing My Edge"
"I'm losing my edge / For all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin / I'm losing my edge in the Brooklyn art school, wearing little jackets and borrowing from the nostalgia of the 80s."
One of the best songs ever written about aging and the obligation to make peace with the person you become. Long before the concept of "hipster" became popular, James Murphy, aged thirty or so, lamented the cool kids – with their beards and trucker hats – slamming on his heels.
Out of his school DJ experiences too cool for New York, the song works perfectly like a satire of Nathan Barley type trends. But while Murphy desperately dispels all his peak influences, it is a real pain that runs through the lyrics and gives him his universality. EP
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8/40 Leonard Cohen – "See you soon, Marianne"
"Well, you know I love to live with you / but you make me forget so much / I forget to pray for the angels / then the angels forget to pray for us."
You can fill a whole book with unforgettable lyrics of Cohen, couplets that cut you in half like a samurai blade, so you do not even notice what's going on until you sneak into pieces.
"So Long, Marianne" was dedicated to his mistress, Marianne Jensen, whom he had met on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. As the words attest, they finally pbaded like ships in a long and sad night.
She died three months before Cohen, in July 2016. Shortly before, he had written her last goodbye – a coda to the ballad that had defined her in the world. "Know that I'm so close behind you that if you reach out, I think you'll be able to reach mine … Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you soon. "EP
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9/40 The Libertines – "Can not stand me now"
"A suitable ending for the beginning / you twist and tear our love apart."
The great pop music of our time collapsed shortly after Carl Barat and Pete Doherty tied their arms around their shoulders and delivered this incredible platonic love song. Has a breakup quarrel already stung so bitterly that when the duo of Libertins counted how everyone had betrayed each other?
Shortly after, Doherty was driven out of the group by chemical chemistry and he would become the national mascot of the drug addicts – a kind of Danny Dyer carrying marks on his arm. But he and Barat – and the rest of us – would always have "I can not stay up now," an exhaustive list of little betrayals that puts you in the chest. EP
Rex Features
10/40 Kate Bush – "Cloudbusting"
"You're like my yo-yo / who shone in the dark / What made him special / Made him dangerous / So I bury him / And forget him."
Few artists use surrealism as successfully as Kate Bush – or take inspiration from such unusual places. So you have "Cloudbusting" about the relationship between the psychobadyst Wilhelm Reich and his son Peter, the latter whom Bush lives with disarming tenderness. The way Peter's father is compared to such a living childhood memory is a perfect and haunting testimony to how we are affected by the loss to adulthood. RO
Rex
11/40 Nick Cave – "In my arms"
"I do not believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do it / But if I did, I would get on my knees and ask / not to intervene when it's up to you."
Certainly, the lyrics spit and coo and, written, look like something that Robbie Williams could write after returning from the tattoo parlor ("And I do not believe in the existence of angels / But looking at you , I wonder if it's true ").
Yet they are delivered with a ferocious ferocity from the Cave Chair while he exposes his feelings for another (opinions are divided, whether addressed to the mother of his eldest son Luke, Viviane Carneiro, or to PJ Harvey with whom he was briefly involved). It gushes well, but like the lava of a volcano, about to burn everything before. EP
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12/40 Sisters of Mercy – "This Corrosion"
"In days like this / In times like these / I feel an animal deep in him / The heel is clinging to his lap."
Andrew Eldritch is the great lyricist of his generation. Dominion / Mother Russia was a rumination about the apocalypse and a critique of efforts to engage in a constructive dialogue with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
Always better, and from the same album of Floodlands, we find "This Corrosion" – a title more epic than to watch the three films of Lord the Rings from the summit of Mount Everest. In the middle of the choruses and primordial guitars, which gives to the power nine hours later, it is the words – which can (or not) allude to the not very friendly departure of the Sisters of Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams.
Be that as it may, Eldritch paints striking images in the listener's head, especially during the flow of consciousness, unfolds as an excerpt from HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon or the Book of Revelations: The Musical. EP
Rex
13/40 Sultans of Ping FC – "Where am I Jumper?"
"It's good to say that things can only improve / You have not lost your new sweater / Pure virgin wool and perfect dots / This is not the type of sweater that makes you itch.
Received as a novelty in its infancy – Break to Feel Old – January 1992, the Sultans' complaint for a missing woolen garment was revealed over time. It is obviously playful and parodic indie words full of anguish (which he did not miss in the early 90s). But there is a scream of pain woven deep into the fabric of the song, so that the alarm is sustained by persistent discomfort. EP
Flickr / Ian Oliver
14/40 The Smiths – "There is a light that never goes out"
"Take me away tonight / Take me anywhere, I'm plugged in / I'm on the record, I'm plugging it."
As with Leonard Cohen, you could spend the rest of your days debating Morrissey's best lyrics. But surely there was no such perfect collection of couplets as they had in their 1982 opus. It is hysterically witty, the narrator portraying the ten-ton truck death as the last word of the romantic dead. But the brand spirit, Moz's sardonic spirit, is elsewhere eclipsed by a blinding light of spiritual torment, which culminates in a song that works both as a cosmic joke and a howl in the world. ;abyss. EP
Rex
15/40 Bruce Springsteen – "I'm on fire"
"At night, I wake up wet sheets / And a freight train going through my head / In the middle of my head / You alone can cool my desire."
Written, Springsteen's words can – stop for the hardened steel helmet to be attached – read like a crazy commercial of Bud Light. It's the delivery, husky, hokey, believer who gives them life.
And he never wrote verse so perfectly lying down as this poem about the forbidden desire that was born in 1984 in the United States. At the time, Springsteen was engaged to the actress and model Julianne Phillips, who had already had ties to her future wife, Patti Scialfa, recently joined the E-Street band as a singer. Thus, the representations of the song do not require a careful badysis, because lust and longing are mixed in one of the most combustible badtails of traditional rock. EP
(Photo by Brian Ach / Getty Images for the Bob Woodruff Foundation)
16/40 Tori Amos – "Father Lucifer"
"He says that he thinks I'm a watercolor stain / He says I run, then I flee in front of him and then I run / He has not seen me look since the day before." plane / He wiped a tear then he threw our apple seed. "
Daughter of a strict Baptist preacher, Amos was constantly writing about his dad's problems. Lucifer's father was also inspired by the visions she had had when she was taking peyote with a South American shaman.
The result was a feverish dive into family anxiety, framed by a prism of nightmarish hallucination. It is love, death, God and the dark things of our life that we will not confront – the precipitation of words delivered with a fascinating euphemism. EP
AFP / Getty
17/40 Public Enemy – "Black Steel at Chaos Time"
"I received a letter from the government / the other day / I opened it and I read it / she said that they were suckers / they wanted me to their army or anything / describe me to me "I'm mad, I never said. "
Decades before Black Lives Matter, Chuck D and Public Enemy articulate the besieged reality of the daily lives of millions of African-Americans. Black Steel, later covered by Tricky's trip-hopper, is a categorical refusal to be co-opted into American Land of the Free mythology – a message no doubt as relevant today as when it was inaugurated 30 years ago. years. EP
Secret Garden Party
18/40 Kendrick Lamar – "Pool (steam)"
"First, you get a pool filled with alcoholic drinks, then you dive in / a pool filled with spirits, then you dive in / jiggle a few bottles, then I watch them en mbade" .
Lamar is widely recognized as one of the greatest lyricists of contemporary hip-hop. It has never been as hot as on this young confessional – a rumor about his childhood torn apart by the poverty and addictions that ravaged his extended family in Compton and Chicago. There is also an early warning regarding the destructive temptations of fame as the young Kendrick is invited to join the tradition of the raging excesses of hip-hop and get lost in an acid bath and of forgetfulness. EP
Getty Images for NARAS
19/40 Prince – "Sign the time"
"A skinny man died of a big disease with a small name / By chance, his girlfriend fell on a needle and she did the same."
Prince's words had always been seen as an extension of his evil and dreamy character, and even as the African-American community bore the brunt of the reactionary policy of the Reagan era, Prince lived in his own world. He returned to earth with his 1987 masterpiece – and his title, an amazing meditation on gang violence, AIDS, political instability and natural disasters. EP
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20/40 Rolling Stones – "Gimme Shelter"
"The war, the kids, it's just a shot / it's just a shot."
No one better captured the violent turmoil of the late sixties than Mick, Keith, and others. Their only masterpiece to govern them all was, of course, "Gimme Shelter". Today, the merit of his supernatural power goes largely back to Merry Clayton's choruses.
But the satanic majesty also stems from the words – which speak of the pandemonium of the time and the feeling that civilization could immerse itself at any time. EP
Redferns
21/40 David Bowie – "Station to Station"
"Once upon a time there were mountains on mountains / And once, there were sunbirds on which to skyrocket / Once, I could never be down / I have to keep looking and searching."
What words of Bowie to choose? The Gordian Mystery of Bewlay Brothers? The horror film of Ashes to Ashes? The throttling will that made up the entirety of Blackstar – the countdown to a disc that completely turned into an entirely different item when Bowie died three days after his release?
You can stay up all night arguing, so let yourself be tempted by one of the biggest: the trans-continental odyssey that includes the title track leading from station to station. Recorded, this is the myth, in the darkest days of Bowie's phase of addiction to LA, the piece is a masterful eulogy of the Europe he had abandoned and would soon return to for his Berlin period.
Bowie makes the phrase "these are not the side effects of cocaine …" sound like a proclamation of ancient wisdom. EP
Express / Getty
22/40 Oasis – "Supersonic"
"She did it with a doctor on a helicopter / she sniffs in her tissue / sellin 'the big issue."
There is a shameless revisionism and then it is claimed that Noel Gallagher is a great lyricist. And yet, it is the triumphant enchantment of the greatest successes of Oasis that makes them so agreeable.
Making "Elsa" rhyme with "Alka Seltzer", as Christmas does in this Morning Glory blast, is a gesture of the highest bbadity – but there is no genius in its lack of sophistication. Blur astute waxing, a nod to Martin's friends, etc., could never hold a candle to Oasis being happily stupid. EP
Rex
23/40 Underworld – "Born Slippy"
"You had boy chemicals / I got so close to you / boy and you just boyfriend."
The ironic song "lager, lager, lager" has somehow become one of the bitterest bitters of pop of the 90's. Underworld has never wanted to be a star and has actively campaigned against the publication of their contribution to the Trainspotting score as a single. However, one can not deny the glorious sorrow of this sweet-and-sour singer – or the punch of Karl Hyde's sad and devastating pun. It's this rare dance title that reveals hidden depths when you sit down with the lyrics. EP
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24/40 Fleetwood Mac – "landslide"
"And I saw my reflection in the snowy hills / until the landslide brought me back"
Stevie Nicks was only 27 years old when she wrote one of the most poignant and clever meditations on how people change over time and the fear of having to give up everything for what you worked. RO
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25/40 Paul Simon – "Graceland"
"She comes back to tell me that she's gone / As if I did not know / As if I did not know my own bed."
With the contributions of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Boyoyo Boys, the 1986 album Simon is considered today as a historical blend of pop music and world music. But it was also a break-up record that cried the end of her eleven-month marriage with Carrie Fisher. The pain of the separation is exposed naked on the track title, where he tells without flinching the dissolution of the relationship. EP
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26/40 Lou Reed – "Walk on the wild side"
"Candy had just come out of the island / In the back shop, she was everyone's darling / But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head / She said, hey baby, go for a walk on the wild side. "
Reed's most famous song paid tribute to all the colorful characters he knew in New York. Published three years after the Stonewall riots, "Walk on the Wild Side" embraces and celebrates "the other" in simple and affectionate terms. The Seventies represented a huge change in visibility for LGBT + people, and with this title, Reed was a proud ally. RO
AFP / Getty Images
27/40 Sharon Van Etten – "Every time the sun comes up"
"People say I'm a marvel / But what happens when I have two? / I washed your dishes, but I shit in your bathroom."
The break-up of a 10-year relationship has illuminated some of the most difficult songs of the New York composer's fourth album. Are we here? She does not make any more prisoner on the last piece – a story of rent rents rage, precisely because of the eye of Van Etten for a bbad detail, even dirty. EP
Ryan Pfluger
28/40 Patti Smith – "Gloria"
"Jesus died for the sins of someone but not mine / Meltin 'in a pot of thieves / The card stays in my sleeve / Thick heart of stone / My sins are mine / They belong to me "
The song that launched a thousand punk bands. It takes three minutes to go to Van Morrison's choir on Patti Smith's redesign of "Gloria," where she covets a girl she sees through the window at a party. Before that, there is poetry. She growls and screams as if her vocal cords could tear. The ostentation of the lyrics owes as much to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Baudelaire as to Jim Morrison. RO
Samir Hussein / Redferns
29/40 The Eagles – "Hotel California"
"She was standing in the doorway / I heard the mission bell / And I was thinking about myself / It could be heaven or it could be hell."
A cry of existential despair of the great goliath of the seventies. Towards the end of the decade, the Eagles were fed up with one and the other and were jaundiced. The California Hotel, titular and fictional, is a metaphor for life in a successful rock band: "You can leave anytime and anytime, but you can never leave." Hallucinatory images have been inspired by a night walk in Los Angeles. , the streets are empty, a disturbing silence reigns. EP
Rick Diamond / Getty Images
30/40 Thin Lizzy – "The boys are back in town"
"Guess who just came in today / The crazy-eyed boys who had gone / have not changed so much that's to say / But dude, I still think cats are crazy."
A bit of self-confidence captured in a musical form – and a celebration of returning to your roots and reconnecting with the people who matter. The biggest success of Thin Lizzy is partly inspired by the childhood memories of Manchester crime group Phil Lynott. The gang members were constantly in the prison and the song imagines one of their meetings – even checking the name of their favorite Dino's Bar and Grill, where "the drink will flow and the blood will flow". EP
REX
31/40 Nina Simone – "Four women"
"I'm going to kill the first mother I see / My life has been too harsh / I'm terribly bitter nowadays / Because my parents were slaves."
In her 1966 album, Wild is the Wind, Simone describes four characters – Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches – that represent different elements of the lasting legacy of slavery. Some critics have accused her of racial stereotypes, but for Simone, it is the freedom of these women to define themselves that has conferred their power. RO
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32/40 St Vincent – "Digital Witness"
"Digital tellers / what's the point of sleeping? / If I can not show it, if you can not see me / What's the point of doing something?"
One of the best songs written about illusory intimacy has favored the internet. St Vincent – alias composer in Texas, Annie Clark – sang how social media fed our narcissism and gave us a false sense of our place in the world. EP
Anthony Harvey / Getty Images
33/40 Frank Ocean – "Pink + White"
"Suck into the pool / You kneel on dry land / Embrace the land that gave birth to you Gives you tools just to stay alive / And do it when the sun is in ruins."
Co-written with Pharrell and Tyler, the creator, "Pink + White" stands out even on an album like Frank Ocean's Blonde. He sings – with a slightly balanced, almost resigned performance – surrealist lyrics that compare a past relationship to a brief rise, from the standpoint of comedown that follows. RO
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34/40 Rufus Wainwright – "Dinner at eight"
"If I want to see the tears in your eyes / Then I know it had to be / A long time ago, actually in drifting white snow / You loved me."
Pianist Wainwright may be too ornate for his own good. But how does he land here in this foolish narrative of a violent disagreement with his father. Loudon III, a folk cult himself, went into the family when Rufus was a child and the simmering resentment persisted.
They overflowed during a joint Rolling Stone photo shoot during which Rufus had joked about the fact that his father needed him to enter Rolling Stone and that his father had not suffered the pain. Lying insult. The dispute is here taken up by the youngest Wainwright as a raging row at the dinner table. EP
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35/40 Bob Dylan – "All right, mom (I'm just bleeding)"
"Sharp threats, they bluff with contempt / Suicide remarks are torn / From the gold mouth of the fool / The hollow horn plays wasted words / Proves warning that it is not necessary Is not busy being born / Is dying. "
"It's good, Ma" is the cornerstone of Dylan's career. He is now moving from political study to sardonic exposition of all the hypocrisy of Western culture. It refers to the book of Ecclesiastes, but also to Elvis Presley, and offers the dark perspective of a man whose views do not fit with the world around him. RO
(Photo by Express Newspapers / Getty Images)
36/40 ABBA – "The winner takes everything"
"I do not want to talk / about what we've lived / Although it hurts me / Now, that's the story."
The first and last word of breaking ballads. The consensus is that it was written by Björn Ulvaeus about his divorce with his group mate Agnetha Fältskog, although he always denied it, saying that "it is the only thing I have ever seen. experience of a divorce, but it's a fiction. " Whether or not he protests too much, the impact is great, while Fältskog anxiously tells a separation from the point of view of the other party. EP
AFP / Getty Images
37/40 Nas – "The world is yours"
"I am a sweet and generating style of money, a rolling fault / The versatile wild gold kid sticking to honey / Dwelling in the Rotten Apple, you are attacked / or caught by the devil lbado, it's a problem "
Nas addresses himself and his future offspring on one of the best tracks of his Illmatic-free debut. Inspired by the scene of Scarface in which Tony Montana sees an airship with the message "The world belongs to you" during a visit to the cinema, the rapper believes that some signs will appear to convince you that you are on the right track. RO
38/40 The Stone Roses – "I want to be loved"
"I do not have to sell my soul / it's already in me / I do not need to sell my soul / it's already in me."
A statement of intent, a Zen enigma, a perfect accompaniment to one of the biggest riffs of independence – the opening title of Stone Roses' first album in 1989 was all that and more.
The lyrics are extremely economical – just the repeated chorus again and again, really. But these are nevertheless among the most hypnotic lines of pop. La rumeur selon laquelle les Roses l’auraient écrite serait une excuse pour les premiers fans qui s’étonneraient apparemment que le groupe ait signé un gros contrat avec un disque. EP
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39/40 Les Beatles – "Quand j'ai soixante ans"
"Quand je serai plus vieux, je perdrai mes cheveux / Dans bien des années / Voulez-vous toujours m'envoyer une bouteille de vin pour la Saint-Valentin / Anniversaire?"
Il existe des centaines d'excellentes chansons sur l'amour épique et romantique, et des centaines d'autres chansons des Beatles qui auraient pu figurer sur cette liste. Mais cette piste du Sgt. Le Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, écrit par Paul McCartney, âgé de 16 ans, est l’un des plus grands artistes qui incarne une sorte d’amour moins apprécié dans sa forme musicale. C’est moins «je te prendrais une balle» et plus «mets la bouilloire, chérie». C’est adorable, plein de fantaisie et juste badez idiot. RO
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40/40 Beck – "perdant"
"À l'époque des chimpanzés, j'étais un singe / butane dans les veines, je suis donc partit pour couper le junkie."
"Mec, je suis le pire rappeur du monde – je suis un perdant", aurait déclaré Beck en écoutant une première démo de son succès (avant qu'il ne prenne son choeur emblématique). Cela lui donna une idée du crochet et il ne se retourna jamais. Le flot de paroles de conscience jette un sort même s’ils n’ont pas beaucoup de sens – ironique alors que Beck exposait l’émulation de Chuck D. EP, un hyper-alphabète, EP
1/40 Nirvana – "Toutes mes excuses"
"J'aimerais être comme toi / Facilement amusé / Trouver mon nid de sel / Tout est de ma faute."
En tant que headbangers au cœur de poètes ensanglantés, Nirvana était singulier. Pourtant, leurs chansons plus lentes ont été obscurcies injustement au fil des décennies. Kurt Cobain a-t-il encore articulé son angoisse et sa colère de manière plus émouvante que sur la meilleure chanson de leur album de chansons de cygnes, In Utero de 1993?
Toutes les excuses – un mea culpa hurlé du précipice – ont été dirigées vers sa femme, Courtney Love, et leur petite fille, Frances Bean. Six mois plus tard, Cobain se suiciderait. Aucune autre composition n'articule de manière plus émouvante le désespoir qui devait le dévorer tout entier et la poitrine débordante d'amour qu'il éprouvait pour sa famille. Ses circonstances sont tragiques, mais son message – que l’amour persiste après notre départ – est édifiant. EP
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2/40 Nine Inch Nails – "Blessé"
"Et tu pourrais tout avoir / Mon empire de terre / Je te laisserai tomber / Je te ferai mal."
Le diagnostic déchirant de Trent Reznor sur son penchant pour l’autodestruction – il n’a jamais confirmé si la chanson faisait référence à la consommation d’héroïne – aurait une renaissance improbable avec la couverture de Johnny Cash en 2002. Mais toute cette douleur, ce lyrisme torride et cette terrible beauté sont déjà présents et corrects dans l’original de Reznor. EP
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3/40 Joy Division – "L'amour va nous déchirer"
«Pourquoi la chambre si froide est-elle détournée de ton côté? / Mon timing est-il imparfait, notre respect est-il si sec?
Profitant de son statut officieux d’hymne disco étudiant, le plus gros succès de Joy Division a sans doute souffert d’une trop grande familiarité. Pourtant, approché avec de nouvelles oreilles, l’humanité douloureuse des paroles de Ian Curtis scintille d’une voix sombre. Son mariage était en train de s'effondrer lorsqu'il écrivit les paroles et il se suiciderait peu de temps après. Mais loin d’une dépêche macabre du début, «L’amour nous déchirera» se déroule comme un sonnet de guitare cinglant – triste et brûlante. EP
Paul Slattery / Retna
4/40 Arcade Fire – "Étalement II (Montagnes Au-delà Des Montagnes)"
"Ils m'ont entendu chanter et m'ont dit d'arrêter / de quitter ces choses prétentieuses et de frapper la pendule."
Localiser le dessous rêveur de l'ennui des banlieues était peut-être le couronnement d'Arcade Fire et de leur plus bel album, The Suburbs. De nombreux artistes ont essayé de parler de la conformité asphyxiante de la vie au milieu des pelouses impeccables et du purgatoire à deux voitures dans le lecteur de la vie dans les bâtons.
But Arcade Fire articulated the frustrations and sense of something better just over the horizon that will be instantly familiar to anyone who grew up far away from the bright lights, “Sprawl II”’s keening synths gorgeous counterpointed by Régine Chbadagne who sings like Bjork if Bjork stocked shelves in a supermarket while studying for her degree by night. EP
AFP / Getty Images
5/40 Beyonce – "Formation"
"I like my baby hair, with baby hair and afros / I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils / Earned all this money but they'll never take the country out me / I got hot sauce in my bag, swag."
Beyonce had made politically charged statements before this, but “Formation” felt like her most explicit. The lyrics reclaim the power in her identity as a black woman from the deep south and have her bragging about her wealth and refusing to forget her roots. In a society that still judges women for boasting about their success, Beyonce owns it, and makes a point of baderting her power, including over men. “You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making,” she muses, but then decides, actually: “I might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.” RO
(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella)
6/40 Laura Marling – “Ghosts”
“Lover, please do not / Fall to your knees / It’s not Like I believe in / Everlasting love.”
Haunted folkie Marling was 16 when she wrote her break-out ballad – a divination of teenage heartache with a streak of flinty maturity that punches the listener in the gut. It’s one of the most coruscating anti-love songs of recent history – and a reminder that, Mumford and Sons notwithstanding – the mid 2000s nu-folk scene wasn’t quite the hellish fandango posterity has deemed it. EP
Alan McAteer
7/40 LCD Soundsystem – "Losing My Edge"
“I’m losing my edge / To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin / I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties.”
One of the best songs ever written about ageing and being forced to make peace with the person you are becoming. Long before the concept of the “hipster” had gone mainstream, the 30-something James Murphy was lamenting the cool kids – with their beards and their trucker hats – snapping at his heels.
Coming out of his experiences as a too-cool-for school DJ in New York, the song functions perfectly well as a satire of Nathan Barley-type trendies. But, as Murphy desperately reels off all his cutting-edge influences, it’s the seam of genuine pain running through the lyrics that give it its universality. EP
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8/40 Leonard Cohen – "So Long, Marianne"
“Well you know that I love to live with you/ but you make me forget so very much / I forget to pray for the angels / and then the angels forget to pray for us.”
You could fill an entire ledger with unforgettable Cohen lyrics – couplets that cut you in half like a samurai blade so that you don’t even notice what’s happened until you suddenly slide into pieces.
“So Long, Marianne” was devoted to his lover, Marianne Jensen, whom he met on the Greek Island of Hydra in 1960. As the lyrics attest, they ultimately pbaded like ships in a long, sad night.
She died three months before Cohen, in July 2016. Shortly beforehand he wrote to her his final farewell – a coda to the ballad that had come to define her in the wider world. “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine… Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.” EP
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9/40 The Libertines – "Can't Stand Me Now"
"An end fitting for the start / you twist and tore our love apart."
The great pop bromance of our times came crashing down shortly after Carl Barât and Pete Doherty slung their arms around each others shoulders and delivered this incredible platonic love song. Has a break-up dirge ever stung so bitterly as when the Libertines duo counted the ways in which each had betrayed the other?
Shortly afterwards, Doherty’s spiralling chemical habit would see him booted out of the group and he would become a national mascot for druggy excess – a sort of Danny Dyer with track-marks along his arm. But he and Barât – and the rest of us – would always have “Can’t Stand Me Now”, a laundry list of petty betrayals that gets you right in the chest. EP
Rex Features
10/40 Kate Bush – "Cloudbusting"
"You're like my yo-yo/ That glowed in the dark/ What made it special/ Made it dangerous/ So I bury it/ And forget."
Few artists use surrealism as successfully as Kate Bush – or draw inspiration from such unusual places. So you have “Cloudbusting”, about the relationship between psychobadyst Wilhelm Reich and his son, Peter, the latter of whom Bush inhabits with disarming tenderness. The way Peter’s father is compared to such a vivid childhood memory is a perfect, haunting testimony to the ways we are affected by loss as adults. RO
Rex
11/40 Nick Cave – "Into my Arms"
“I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do / But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him / Not to intervene when it came to you."
True, the lyrics spew and coo and, written down, resemble something Robbie Williams might croon on his way back from the tattoo parlour (“And I don't believe in the existence of angels /But looking at you I wonder if that's true”).
Yet they are delivered with a straight-from-the-pulpit ferocity from Cave as he lays out his feelings for a significant other (opinions are divided whether it is directed to the mother of his eldest son Luke, Viviane Carneiro, or to PJ Harvey, with whom he was briefly involved). He’s gushing all right, but like lava from a volcano, about to burn all before it. EP
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12/40 Sisters of Mercy – "This Corrosion"
“On days like this/ In times like these/I feel an animal deep inside/ Heel to haunch on bended knees.”
Andrew Eldritch is the great forgotten lyricist of his generation. Dominion/Mother Russia was a rumination on the apocalypse and also a critique of efforts to meaningfully engage with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
Ever better, and from the same Floodlands album was “This Corrosion” – a track more epic than watching all three Lord the Rings movies from the top of Mount Everest. Amid the choirs and the primordial guitars, what gives the nine-minute belter its real power are the lyrics – which may (or may not) allude to the not-at-all amicable departure from the Sisters of Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams.
Either way, Eldritch paints forceful pictures in the listener’s head, especially during the stream of consciousness outro, unspooling like an excerpt from HP Lovecraft’s The Necronomicon or the Book of Revelations: The Musical. EP
Rex
13/40 Sultans of Ping FC – "Where's Me Jumper?"
“It's alright to say things can only get better/ You haven't lost your brand new sweater/ Pure new wool, and perfect stitches/ Not the type of jumper that makes you itches.”
Received as a novelty ditty on its debut in – pauses to feel old – January 1992, the Sultans’ lament for a missing item of woollen-wear has, with time, been revealed as something deeper. It’s obviously playful and parodying of angst-filled indie lyrics (of which there was no shortage in the shoe-gazy early Nineties). But there’s a howl of pain woven deep into the song’s fabric, so that the larking is underpinned with a lingering unease. EP
Flickr/Ian Oliver
14/40 The Smiths – "There is a Light that Never Goes Out"
“Take me out tonight/Take me anywhere, I don't care/I don't care, I don't care.”
As with Leonard Cohen, you could spend the rest of your days debating the greatest Morrissey lyrics. But surely there has never been a more perfect collection of couplets than that contained in their 1982 opus. It’s hysterically witty, with the narrator painting death by ten-ton truck as the last word in romantic demises. But the trademark Moz sardonic wit is elsewhere eclipsed by a blinding light of spiritual torment, resulting in a song that functions both as cosmic joke and howl into the abyss. EP
Rex
15/40 Bruce Springsteen – "I'm on Fire"
“At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet/ And a freight train running through the/ Middle of my head /Only you can cool my desire.”
Written down, Springsteen lyrics can – stops to ensure reinforced steel helmet is strapped on – read like a fever-dream Bud Light commercial. It’s the delivery, husky, hokey, all-believing that brings them to life.
And he has never written more perfectly couched verse than this tone-poem about forbidden desire from 1984’s Born in the USA. Springsteen was at that time engaged to actress/model Julianne Phillips though he had already experienced a connection to his future wife Patti Scialfa, recently joined the E-Street Band as a backing singer. Thus the portents of the song do not require deep scrutiny, as lust and yearning are blended into one of the most combustible badtails in mainstream rock. EP
(Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for Bob Woodruff Foundation)
16/40 Tori Amos – "Father Lucifer"
“He says he reckons I'm a watercolour stain/ He says I run and then I run from him and then I run/ He didn't see me watching from the aeroplane/ He wiped a tear and then he threw away our apple seed.”
The daughter of a strict baptist preacher, Amos constantly wrote about her daddy issues. Father Lucifer was further inspired by visions she had received whilst taking peyote with a South American shaman.
The result was a feverish delving into familial angst, framed by a prism of nightmarish hallucination. It’s about love, death, God and the dark things in our life we daren’t confront – the rush of words delivered with riveting understatement. EP
AFP / Getty
17/40 Public Enemy – "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos"
“I got a letter from the government/ The other day/I opened and read it/It said they were suckers/ They wanted me for their army or whatever/ Picture me given' a damn, I said never.”
Decades before Black Lives Matter, Chuck D and Public Enemy were articulating the under siege reality of daily existence for millions of African-Americans. Black Steel, later covered by trip-hopper Tricky, is a pummelling refusal to be co-opted into American’s Land of the Free mythology – a message arguably as pertinent today as when it kicked down the doors 30 years ago. EP
Secret Garden Party
18/40 Kendrick Lamar –" Swimming Pool (Drank)"
“First you get a swimming pool full of liquor, then you dive in it/ Pool full of liquor, then you dive in it/ I wave a few bottles, then I watch 'em all flock”.
Lamar is widely acknowledged as one of contemporary hip-hop’s greatest lyricists. He was never more searing than on this early confessional – a rumination on his poverty-wracked childhood and the addictions that ripped like wildfire through his extended family in Compton and Chicago. There is also an early warning about the destructive temptations of fame as the young Kendrick is invited to join hip hop’s tradition of riotous excess and lose himself in an acid bath of liquor and oblivion. EP
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19/40 Prince – "Sign O' the Times"
“A skinny man died of a big disease with a little name/ By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same.”
Prince’s lyrics had always felt like an extension of his dreamily pervy persona and, even as the African-American community bore the brunt of Reagan-era reactionary politics, Prince was living in his own world. He crashed back to earth with his 1987 masterpiece – and its title track, a stunning meditation on gang violence, Aids, political instability and natural disaster. EP
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20/40 Rolling Stones – "Gimme Shelter"
"War, children, it's just a shot away/ It's just a shot away."
Nobody captured the violent tumult of the end of the Sixties better than Mick, Keith and co. Their one masterpiece to rule them all was, of course, “Gimme Shelter”. Today, the credit for its uncanny power largely goes to Merry Clayton’s gale-force backing vocals.
But the Satanic majesty also flows from the lyrics – which spoke to the pandemonium of the era and the sense that civilisation could come crashing in at any moment. EP
Redferns
21/40 David Bowie – "Station to Station"
“Once there were mountains on mountains/ And once there were sun birds to soar with/ And once I could never be down/Got to keep searching and searching.”
Which Bowie lyrics to single out? The gordian mystery of Bewlay Brothers? The meta horror movie of Ashes to Ashes? The uncanny last will and testament that was the entirety of Blackstar – a ticking clock of a record that shape-shifted into something else entirely when Bowie pbaded away three days after its release?
You could stay up all night arguing so let’s just pick on one of the greats – the trans-Continental odyssey comprising the title track to Station to Station. Recorded, goes the myth, in the darkest days of Bowie’s LA drug phase, the track is a magisterial eulogy for the Europe he had abandoned and which he would soon return to for his Berlin period.
All of that and Bowie makes the line “it’s not the side effects of the cocaine…” feel like a proclamation of ancient wisdom. EP
Express/Getty
22/40 Oasis – "Supersonic"
“She done it with a doctor on a helicopter/ She's sniffin in her tissue/ Sellin' the Big Issue.”
There is shameless revisionism and then there is claiming that Noel Gallagher is a great lyricist. And yet, it’s the sheer, triumphant dunder-headedness of Oasis’ biggest hits that makes them so enjoyable.
Rhyming “Elsa” with “Alka Seltzer”, as Noel does on this Morning Glory smash, is a gesture of towering vapidity – but there’s a genius in its lack of sophistication. Blur waxing clever, winking at Martin Amis etc, could never hold a candle to Oasis being gleefully boneheaded. EP
Rex
23/40 Underworld – "Born Slippy"
“You had chemicals boy/ I've grown so close to you/ Boy and you just groan boy.”
The ironic “lager, lager, lager” chant somehow became one the most bittersweet moments in Nineties pop. Underworld never wanted to be stars and actively campaigned against the release of their contribution to the Trainspotting score as a single. Yet there is no denying the glorious ache of this bittersweet groover – or the punch of Karl Hyde’s sad raver stream-of-consciousness wordplay. It’s that rare dance track which reveals hidden depths when you sit down with the lyrics. EP
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24/40 Fleetwood Mac – "Landslide"
"And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills/ Till the landslide brought me down"
Stevie Nicks was only 27 when she wrote one of the most poignant and astute meditations on how people change with time, and the fear of having to give up everything you’ve worked for. RO
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25/40 Paul Simon – "Graceland"
“She comes back to tell me she's gone/ As if I didn't know that/ As if I didn't know my own bed.”
With contributions from Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Boyoyo Boys, Simon’s 1986 masterpiece album is regarded nowadays as a landmark interweaving of world music and pop. But it was also a break-up record mourning the end of his marriage of 11 months to Carrie Fisher. The pain of the separation is laid out nakedly on the title track, where he unflinchingly chronicles the dissolution of the relationship. EP
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26/40 Lou Reed – "Walk on the Wild Side"
"Candy came from out on the island/ In the backroom she was everybody's darling/ But she never lost her head/ Even when she was giving head/ She says, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side."
Reed’s most famous song paid tribute to all the colourful characters he knew in New York City. Released three years after the Stonewall Riots, “Walk on the Wild Side” embraced and celebrated the “other” in simple, affectionate terms. The Seventies represented a huge shift in visibility for LGBT+ people, and with this track, Reed baderted himself as a proud ally. RO
AFP / Getty Images
27/40 Sharon Van Etten – "Every Time the Sun Comes Up"
“People say I'm a one-hit wonder/ But what happens when I have two?/ I washed your dishes, but I shit in your bathroom.”
The breakdown of a 10 year relationship informed some of the hardest hitting songs on the New Jersey songwriter’s fourth album. Are We There. She takes no prisoner on the closing track – a tale of domesticity rent asunder that lands its punches precisely because of Van Etten’s eye for a mundane, even grubby, detail. EP
Ryan Pfluger
28/40 Patti Smith – “Gloria”
“Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine/ Meltin’ in a pot of thieves/ Wild card up my sleeve/ Thick heart of stone/ My sins my own/ They belong to me”
The song that launched a thousand punk bands. It takes three minutes to get to Van Morrison’s chorus on Patti Smith’s overhaul of “Gloria”, where she lusts after a girl she spots through the window at a party. Before that, there is poetry. She snarls and shrieks as though her vocal chords might rip. The ostentatiousness of the lyrics owes as much to poets Arthur Rimbaud and Baudelaire as it does to Jim Morrison. RO
Samir Hussein/Redferns
29/40 The Eagles – "Hotel California"
“There she stood in the doorway/ I heard the mission bell/ And I was thinking to myself/ This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”
A cry of existential despair from the great soft-rock goliath of the Seventies. By the tail-end of the decade the Eagles were thoroughly fed up of one another and jaundiced by fame. The titular – and fictional – Hotel California is a metaphor for life in a successful rock band: “You can check-out any time you like / But you can never leave.” The hallucinatory imagery was meanwhile inspired by a late night drive through LA, the streets empty, an eerie hush holding sway. EP
Rick Diamond/Getty Images
30/40 Thin Lizzy – "The Boys are Back in Town"
“Guess who just got back today/ Them wild-eyed boys that had been away/ Haven't changed that much to say/But man, I still think them cats are crazy.”
A strut of swaggering confidence captured in musical form – and a celebration of going back to your roots and reconnecting with the people who matter. Thin Lizzy’s biggest hit was in part inspired by Phil Lynott’s childhood memories of a Manchester criminal gang. The gang members were constantly in and out of prison and the song imagines one of their reunions – even name-checking their favourite hangout of Dino’s Bar and Grill where “the drink will flow and the blood will spill”. EP
REX
31/40 Nina Simone – "Four Women"
"I’ll kill the first mother I see/ My life has been too rough/ I’m awfully bitter these days/ Because my parents were slaves."
Included on her 1966 album Wild is the Wind, Simone depicts four characters – Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches – who represent different parts of the lasting legacy of slavery. Some critics accused her of racial stereotyping, but for Simone, it was these women’s freedom to define themselves that gave them their power. RO
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32/40 St Vincent – "Digital Witness"
“Digital witnesses/ what’s the point of even sleeping?/ If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me/ What’s the point of doing anything?”
One of the best songs written about the illusory intimacy fostered the internet. St Vincent – aka Texas songwriter Annie Clark – was singing about how social media fed our narcissism and gave us a fake sense of our place in the world. EP
Anthony Harvey/Getty Images
33/40 Frank Ocean – "Pink + White"
"Up for air from the swimming pool/ You kneel down to the dry land/ Kiss the Earth that birthed you Gave you tools just to stay alive/ And make it up when the sun is ruined."
Co-written with Pharrell and Tyler, the Creator, “Pink + White” stands out even on an album like Frank Ocean’s Blonde. He sings – with a gently swaying, almost resigned delivery – surrealist lyrics that likens a past relationship to a brief high, from the perspective of the comedown that follows. RO
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34/40 Rufus Wainwright – "Dinner at Eight"
“If I want to see the tears in your eyes/ Then I know it had to be/ Long ago, actually in the drifting white snow/You loved me.”
Piano-man Wainwright can be too ornate for his own good. But how he lands his blows here in this soul-baring recounting of a violent disagreement with his father. Loudon III, a cult folkie in his own right walked out on the family when Rufus was a child and the simmering resentments had lingered on.
They boiled over at a joint Rolling Stone photoshoot during which Rufus had joked that his dad needed him to get into Rolling Stone and his father had not taken the insult lying down. The dispute is here restaged by Wainwright the younger as a raging row at the dinner table. EP
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35/40 Bob Dylan – "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
"Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn/ Suicide remarks are torn/ From the fool's gold mouthpiece/ The hollow horn plays wasted words/ Proves to warn that he not busy being born/ Is busy dying."
“It’s Alright Ma” is a cornerstone in Dylan’s career that marks his shift from scrutinising politics to sardonically exposing all the hypocrisy in Western culture. He references the Book of Ecclesiastes but also Elvis Presley, and offers up the grim perspective of a man whose views do not fit in with the world around him. RO
(Photo by Express Newspapers/Getty Images)
36/40 ABBA – "The Winner Takes it All"
“I don't wanna talk/ About the things we've gone through/ Though it's hurting me/ Now it's history.”
The first and last word in break-up ballads. The consensus is that it was written by Björn Ulvaeus about his divorce from band-mate Agnetha Fältskog, though he has always denied this, saying “is the experience of a divorce, but it's fiction”. Whether or not he protests too much the impact is searing as Fältskog wrenchingly chronicles a separation from the perspective of the other party. EP
AFP / Getty Images
37/40 Nas – "The World is Yours"
"I'm the mild, money-getting style, rolling foul/ The versatile, honey-sticking wild golden child/ Dwelling in the Rotten Apple, you get tackled/ Or caught by the devil's lbado, s*** is a hbadle"
Nas addresses both himself and his future progeny on one of the best tracks from his faultless debut Illmatic. Inspired by the scene from Scarface in which Tony Montana sees a blimp with the message “The World is Yours” during a visit to the movie theatre, it feeds back to the rapper’s own belief that certain signs will appear to convince you that you’re on the right track. RO
38/40 The Stone Roses – "I Wanna Be Adored"
“I don’t have to sell my soul/ He’s already in me/ I don’t need to sell my soul/ He’s already in me.”
A statement of intent, a zen riddle, a perfect accompaniment to one of the greatest riffs in indie-dom – the opening track of the Stone Roses’s 1989 debut album was all of this and much more.
The lyrics are supremely economical – just the chorus repeated over and over, really. But these are nonetheless amongst the most hypnotic lines in pop. Adding poignancy is the rumour that the Roses wrote it as an apology to early fans reportedly aghast that the group had signed a big fat record deal. EP
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39/40 The Beatles – "When I'm Sixty Four"
"When I get older losing my hair/ Many years from now/ Will you still be sending me a Valentine/ Birthday greetings bottle of wine?"
There are hundreds of great songs about epic, romantic love, and there are hundreds of other Beatles songs that could have made this list. But this track from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – written by a 16-year-old Paul McCartney – is one of the greats for how it encapsulates a kind of love that is less appreciated in musical form. It’s less “I’d take a bullet for you” and more “put the kettle on, love”. It’s adorable, full of whimsy, and just the right amount of silly. RO
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40/40 Beck – "Loser"
“In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey / Butane in my veins so I'm out to cut the junkie.”
“Man I’m the worst rapper in the world – I’m a loser,” Beck is reported to have said upon listening back to an early demo of his break-out hit (before it had acquired its iconic chorus) . This gave him an idea for the hook and he never looked back. The stream of consciousness lyrics cast a spell even though they don’t make much sense – ironic as Beck was setting out the emulate the hyper-literate Chuck D. EP
You can find a full list of all the collaborations featured on the singer’s latest record here.
Sheeran most recently played himself in Danny Boyle film Yesterday, alongside Himish Patel and Lily James.
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