I'll start! for me, it's "Does anyone know/where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours" from The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot.
i think for me any discussion about rlly raw lyrics ultimately comes down to choosing a favorite billy woods line, 'cause he's just such a master at writing lyrics that make u feel like shit. so i think i'd have to go with the line "spliff like a pen, everything i wrote is in the wind / we didn't win, and i can't see doing it all over" from Root Farm (also one of my favorite closing lines to any album)
i'm kind of partial to the "when it all comes down to dust i will kill you if i must i will help you if i can/when it all comes down to dust i will help you if i must i will kill you if i can" from leonard cohen's story of isaac
I'm impressed, I'm impressed / by the Godzilla's flaming breath / I fall to bits / I confess, I admit, I'm impressed / when that tornado from the west / crushes buildings, I'm impressed
(They Might Be Giants, I'm Impressed)
TMBG tend to have some level of detachment in their lyrics, either layers of irony or very extended metaphors or just nonsense fantasy scenarios or all three at once, which I think can keep them from feeling raw. I was torn between this song and Climbing The Walls, which as a song feels more personal, but my favorite lyric from it (The deep end, the deep end / people talk a lot, but they don't know / they pretend, they pretend / they don't really know how deep it goes) is actually weirdly sung with a lot less emotion than the rest of the song? So it doesn't really come across that "raw" when you listen to it.
Anyways, this is all besides the point, because in terms of pure rawness, nothing TMBG writes can stand up to my other favorite band, mewithoutYou. I don't know if I could possibly pick a favorite from them, though.
Maybe this one from their song Red Cow?
In the wells of livestock vans, / with shells and garden sands, / iron mixed with oxygen / as per the laws of chemistry and chance / A shape was roughly human / (IT WAS ONLY ROUGHLY HUMAN) / Apparition eyes, apparition eyes, / Knock apparition, Knock eyes, apparition eyes
God, I can write an essay about I'm impressed, as well as its music video, because the more I look at it the more it's clearly a warning about the rising tide of fascism back then, and TMBG were far from the only musicians screaming about it. Take "forecast fascist future" by Of Montreal, or, idk, the album YEAR ZERO by NiN.
And we know because of songs like "Your Racist Friend" and "The Communists have the music" and a billion other songs that TMBG is very left and self-aware, and once I saw it in the song and the way the music video doubles down I couldn't get that interpetation out of my head. 2007 was a hell of a fucking time to be alive
