Albert Camus once wrote, "Maybe Christ died for somebody but not for me." The inherent punk musicology of the French philosopher’s quote became apparent when Patti Smith borrowed heavily from it for the first line she would ever present to the world: "Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine." This touchstone between the two worlds typifies how the expressive potential of music is often the most existentially questioning medium of any art form.

There is a deft beauty to being able to probe at the greatest questions man has ever mused upon in three sweet minutes that can float by without ever scathing your psyche if your mood doesn’t much care to grapple with the wherefores of the human comedy. However, that same song can catch you on a window-gazing day, and it seems to encapsulate the purpose of life somewhere in its sweet refrain.

The ability for songs to snag a semblance of life’s elusive meaning is, in part, tied to the very essence of music’s playfulness itself. Sweet tunes seem to quietly assert the answer to any lyrical confusion: as the great Kurt Vonnegut summed it up, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different." Nothing asserts that quite like a man in a giant suit yelling, "This is not my beautiful wife!" while a sequencer blares out Afrobeat-inspired disco.

Below, I’ve curated a list of ten songs that typify existentialism within music. As it turns out, I found many of the greatest songs ever written focused on philosophy. You might wonder why the likes of Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want It Darker’, Angel Olsen’s ‘Spring’, John Lennon’s ‘Mother’, or Ebo Taylor’s ‘Love and Death’ don’t make the list. However, you simply have to deploy the same mental gymnastics I had to justify the measly list of ten and ascribe the other masterful off-cuts to another school of philosophical thought.

The 10 best philosophical songs of all time:

‘Atmosphere’ – Joy Division

In order to fully understand the mystic beast of ‘Atmosphere’, you must first understand that this hymnal masterpiece was originally titled ‘Chance’. Chance is a key facet of any existential thought. This alone helps to clear up the apparent contradictions in the lyrics. "Silence" and "endless talking" sit side by side in the song, illuminating Ian Curtis‘ own tortured disposition. This is highlighted further, given the fact that the song was originally put out on an EP with the title Licht Und Bleindheit.

Whether your disposition falls in the latter or the former has little to do with choice and much more to do with chance. This ties into the nettlesome school of thought that has haunted the legacy of the band: that they somehow wallowed in morbidity. In truth, Curtis found himself in a hopeless position, so his writing followed suit, but he also always strived for the light. Here, he muses upon that battle: he wants to talk of choice, but he is stricken by the unfortunate chance of silencing depression.

‘All My Friends’ – LCD Soundsystem

We wouldn’t think about time for a second if our own share of it wasn’t finite. Alas, in your youth, it doesn’t always seem that way, and 365 days is as good as eternity. But there comes a point in everyone’s life, usually around 23/24, when your mortality looms for the first time, your sentiments shift, and you see a second chapter of your life that colours the halcyon days that came before it a little naive. You suddenly identify with all the adults who urged you to appreciate your youth and said things you thought were daft, like, ‘Eeh, hasn’t April come around so quickly!’

‘All My Friends’ perfectly captures the euphoria of impermanence. It gratefully clings to the simple gift of a great night and the affirmation it brings. ‘Juice life down the pith’, it says while remaining cognisant of the fact even that sentiment needs to be tailored to the common sense of morning that issues a statement in support of moderation. With this masterpiece, LCD Soundsystem turn an existential crisis into existential gratitude.

‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ – The Verve

While there are times when philosophy can feel troubled and twisting, there are other moments when meaning and purpose imbue existence with a grandiosity, transfiguring it from a march to the grave to the walk of life with a necessary end. ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ by The Verve might borrow heavily from The Rolling Stones, but when you catch it in the right light, the soaring originality of its strutting sentiment lands with a wallop.

Therein lies a meta-message within the song too: Allen Klein owned the publishing rights to the Stones song that The Verve sampled, and while they had permission from Decca Records already, they didn’t realise they needed his approval too. Everything was already in place for the release of Urban Hymns with ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ as the lead single until this impasse was revealed. This meant Klein’s bargaining power was enormous.

He refused to budge on his insistence of 100% of the publishing rights, which meant Ashcroft got a flat fee of $1000, and that was that. He later commented, "I was put under duress to sign away one of the greatest songs of all time." However, the song asserts that doing what you love is the only thing that can emancipate you from being a slave to money, but the inverse of that is equally true: Ashcroft mightn’t have made much money from this masterpiece, but the art sustains.

‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ – Bob Dylan

There was a time in my youth, before I fully dove into Bob Dylan, that I thought this was a silly nonsense song littered with pretence. But as you get older and Dylan’s mastery reveals itself, the whole song fails to clear itself up sufficiently and begins to feel like a fair facsimile of life as a result. The dust has never settled on this windy anthem. In the years since 1963, it has become firmly fixed among the ranks of the most important tracks ever written.

However, its meaning still remains elusive. That’s just the point. Morally obvious notions about equality stand firm amid Dylan’s verses. Still, the rest remains obfuscated, leaving behind the sentiment that the breeze of life is to be enjoyed and answers are hard to find within it. At a time when a great many preachers were purporting to have the answers, Dylan was blowing those away and making it clear that a deeper sense of spiritualism is to sort in the transient spirit of life rather than fixed beliefs that fail the test of human experience. In a way, the wind is a secular existential allegory for the Holy Spirit concept found in many religions.

‘Both Sides Now’ – Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell sings the masterpiece ‘Both Sides Now’ with a world-weary sigh, adding to the sense of experiential wisdom in its welter. In the process, she showcases how our views are often purely the product of our own experiences. In the grips of romance, we might see ice cream cones in the clouds and quote Sappho in the original Greek, but heartbreak doesn’t just change our census response to ‘single’. It shifts the landscape of the Earth.

At the crux of existentialism is the study of existentialism; it is a thought process that can’t get away from itself. Now bear with me because this is about to get wordy, but part of the wonder of life is the wonder of wondering about the wonder of life. Few songwriters have conveyed as beautifully and succinctly that scratching your head over the mystery of life often leads to nothing but an irritated scalp.

‘Don’t Let the Kids Win’ – Julia Jacklin

Aside from Nietzsche’s reassessment, Albert Einstein also made it scientifically clear in the 20th century that every action has repercussions. This has had a tendency to tip our feeble modern minds towards overthinking. We don’t trust the universe anymore. We wonder, ‘If I let my niece beat me at basketball, will I be complicit in raising a loser?’ We can no longer enjoy holidays without torturing ourselves over what responsibilities we’re shunning while we’re away and so on.

So, when Julia Jacklin released ‘Don’t Let the Kids Win’, it made many of us ‘feel seen’ to use the horrid parlance of our time. The track grapples with an age where everything is both causal and consequential. Thankfully, Jacklin ensures that the enterprise of life doesn’t have to be so fraught if you do things with kindness and see the logic in your decisions. There are many probing problems in life, but it’s a certainty that there’s no harm in telling your friends they did a great job and telling those you love what they mean to you.

‘Life on Mars?’ – David Bowie

One of David Bowie‘s main muses was the topic of existentialism. The Nietzschean concept of ‘God is dead’ is a topic that ties his albums together. As Bowie said himself regarding the culmination of rampant industrial progress: "We are now the Gods. And the greatest thing we could do as God during that century was create the bomb. That is what we were good at doing." We were sent reeling and confused by this.

"We’re still living through that chaos right now," Bowie continued on the French talk show. "We have no spiritual lives to speak of. […] There is no direct sense of one our purpose anymore." So, we looked for purpose in our new cultural idols. ‘Life on Mars?’ roves through this conundrum as a child searches for meaning beyond the circumstances of her own troubled upbringing on the silver screen.

‘Once in a Lifetime’ – Talking Heads

One of the scariest things in life is how little control we have over it. In an interview with NPR, music’s most whimsical frontman, David Byrne, elucidated a semblance of meaning behind the surrealist lyrics by stating, "We operate half-awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven’t really stopped to ask ourselves, ‘How did I get here?'"

Talking Heads‘ avant-pop masterpiece asks that without an ounce of cynicism and oodles of fun. Life simply unspools whichever way it pleases, and we rarely have autonomy over the driving force of circumstance. So, as the song says, we might not be able to dictate our life’s direction firmly, but we can stop and take stock every once in a while. ‘Once in a Lifetime’ makes that point in an exhilarating manner that never feels daunting, even for a moment.

‘Outdoor Miner’ – Wire

Trust old Wire to suddenly look at existentialism through the lens of a Serpentine Leaf Miner. It’s a long-held philosophical belief that the plight of animals can tell us a lot about our own, but few people other than Colin Newman and Graham Lewis have ever thought to apply that to a sub-three-minute post-punk song back in 1979.

"He lies on his side. Is he trying to hide?" the chorus asks, "In fact, it’s the earth, which he’s known since birth." Set to a gorgeous pop melody, the question whirrs: does an insect know of existentialism? Do these leaf critters even know that their evolutionary behaviours aid survival, or do they just habitually perform them because they know nothing else? We can’t tell, but thankfully, the sanguine melody makes us not really care, and that seems like a fitting place to leave things.

‘Where is my Mind?’ – Pixies

Life is full of random oddities. One of its many strange occurrences befell Frank Black while he was scuba diving in the Caribbean – a funny thought in itself – and a small, harmless tropical fish attacked him. While swimming away in a panicked frenzy, the floating nature of seafaring left him discombobulated. He didn’t know which way was up to the surface or down the depths, and he didn’t know which way was out to sea or back to shore. This got him thinking about life in general.

Curveballs are a common part of our existence. We can map things out all we like, but capricious tropical fish attacks, figuratively speaking, can pop out of the blew and send our best-laid plans awry. This sets off a ricochet of thought, twisting our own understandings of meaning and purpose in something that is inherently chaotic. So, Pixies decide to offer up an abstract take on existentialism with ‘Where is my Mind?’, a song that doesn’t seem to make sense until it makes sense of its own waywardness with the titular question.

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