The best songs called 'Sisyphus,' ranked

Today’s advertiser is Fisher Investments. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.68.

Picture Tartarus. This is the bad part of Hades, the underworld. In the ancient Greeks’ conception, the universe was egg-shaped, and Tartarus was literally the pits, lying at the very bottom at a distance defined by how far a bronze anvil would fall over the course of 10 days. That’s 2,274,412,771 miles, or about 24.46 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It’s a long way from anywhere good. In classical literature, we read of its rocks and its mists, the clouds that darken it, the boisterous winds that emanate from its depths thanks to Typhon, one of the monstrous Titans imprisoned in this hell. The artists who have rendered it in paintings and prints over the centuries tend to show it as a bare, hilly land devoid of color, though Jan Brueghel the Younger gave it scrublike vegetation:

Somewhere in the pit of Tartarus, we know, lay Mount Tartarus, the underworld’s only named mountain (as far as I can tell) and the locus of punishment for the patron saint of Trying!, Sisyphus. It is here that the former king of Corinth spends eternity ascending its slopes, either pushing or carrying the boulder that is his fate. How tall is it? How steep? Unknown. All we know is that once he reaches its summit — likely as gray and damp and bare as all of Tartarus — he must relinquish the rock and watch it tumble back down to the base, where he will soon rejoin it to begin the climb again.

The underworld’s bleached murk is easy to imagine, but the aural landscape must be just as desolate. On his daily hikes, Sisyphus must have heard, if faintly, the whirling hurricanes of Typhon, the pecks and slurps of the vultures chewing at the liver of Tityos, the distant trickle of the river Styx and the drip-drip-drip of the leaking vat the Danaids were cursed to attempt to fill. But Tartarus must have been a quiet place overall; the Greeks’ punishments were psychological torture, not physical — the air would not have echoed with screams. Instead, Sisyphus would have noticed the crunch of gravel and sand beneath his feet, and his own heavy breaths, and beyond that — silence.

Did Sisyphus ever sing to fill the emptiness? With eternity ahead of him, he must at least have hummed a tune — perhaps “The Seikilos Song,” which dates to 100 BCE and is the oldest known number from ancient Greece? It isn’t exactly a Cornfield Holler–type work song, but the lyrics seem apt:

Even if Sisyphus himself did not sing, he is a man about whom much is sung. On Spotify, I compiled a playlist of three dozen different songs with “Sisyphus” in the title, and I only stopped there because it seemed like it could go on forever. Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to them all, and they’re a surprising group, ranging from the expected indie folk and shoegaze dirges to classical, hip-hop, country, and metal. In fact, the songs of Sisyphus are in many ways more inventive (and enjoyable) than the visual artwork produced from his story, which tends to focus too narrowly on the dude and his boulder, with little thought to the possibilities of his experience. But the songs, that’s what they’re all about — what it might be like to be Sisyphus, to see the (under)world through his eyes, and to understand what that might mean for the rest of us.

So, herewith, a countdown of my Top 11 12 favorite songs about Sisyphus. I was going to do them all, but honestly that would be both crazy and boring. Hoist your boulders, here we go!

More after the ad…

Adam Guettel’s Myths and Hymns song cycle is sort of like a Broadway show without an actual story, a collection of tunes and tales that span religion and mythology — oh, and also stars: Mandy Patinkin, Renée Fleming, Kristin Chenoweth, John Lithgow, and so many, many more. This is fascinatingly weird stuff for such a high-end production! “Sisyphus” (which begins at 35:40 in the embed above) cleverly twists the myth so that Sisyphus’s curse is not purely the work — it’s that he must also draw a crowd of onlookers. The boulder-pushing is a performance, such an enthusiastic one that Sisyphus’s Greek chorus comments: “Hell is not what he imagines it is / It’s watching while he’s going through his.”

A driving, relentless beat frames this first-person plaint, in clear, soaring vocals, that strikes at the balance between the awfulness of Sisyphus’s punishment and his endless struggle to rise above it:

Plus, the full-court-press bridge, rife with horns, that leads into (and kinda smothers) the third verse totally rocks.

A slow-moving, depression-filled rap that imagines selling drugs as a Sisyphean endeavor — and occasionally breaks into Japanese? Sure, why not!

Post-grunge indie rockers Garbage start this song in a simple place: “I’m stuck at the bottom of everythin’, and I’m lookin’ up,” sings Shirley Manson. Can she keep going? Again and again? “Can I push that boulder up the hill again, just like Sisyphus?”

But from there on, his name is never mentioned again, and Sisyphus transmutes into all manner of inspiration: “Saint of love, Saint of pain, Saint of joy and sufferin’, Saint of fear, Saint of rest, Saint of lockdown, Saint of health.” I don’t know if I buy all of those, but with its insistently dance-y beats (drum machine?) and Manson’s urgent but ethereal voice declaring, “I snagged a boy who ate the moon / I loved a dog with the heart of a wolf,” I’m here for the ride.

Why aren’t there more blues songs about Sisyphus? What subject matter could be more suited to plaintive repetition? These are mysteries that Teardrop City attempts to resolve with this energetic rockabilly number:

Hell yeah!

Of all these songs, none immerses itself so deeply in the lore than Big Fear’s warm-but-spooky “Sisyphus.” Right off the bat, they ask, “What makes a man intelligent? What keeps him as a king?” They name-drop xenia, the Greek concept of hospitality and friendship that Sisyphus, as king of Corinth, betrayed by murdering travelers, thus angering the gods and earning his fate. His death, his return from the Stygian shore, his promise to return to the underworld — Big Fear know their myths.

But this is no Ph.D. dissertation: It’s a buoyant celebration of the man and his fate, whose refrain, as sweetly sung by Alice Edwards, looks “Up, and up, and up, and up / Up and up and up.” May it echo in your head as it does in mine.

Like work and the blues, the search for love in an imperfect world is a modern take on Sisyphus — one that the Irish indie rockers hotgirl embraces without being overly literal about any of the mythology. A mother’s pain is born upon singer Ashley Abbedeen’s shoulders, her father’s shame is like a boulder: “It gets heavier as I am getting older.” Elsewhere, she wonders if Sisyphus “had himself a lady” who cheated on him while he was out with his boulder. And amid all this, it’s time for Abbedeen to move on from a disappointing lover — disappointing and clingy enough that she must ask in the chorus, “Why you always so unhappy? / You should try getting over yourself.” A very Trying! concept, I must say.

Haunting and dirgelike, Have a Nice Life’s “Sisyphus” drones on for eight increasingly gloomy minutes that culminate in the line “You’ve been pushing all day (I know)” repeated a dozen times. But it’s not awful. Honestly! There’s a snugness to its miasma; this is not punishment but fate, wrapping itself around your brain with an inevitability to which you must submit.

Loud and messy and vampy and drone-y and angry and oh god, this is how I imagine the music would be in Tartarus itself: dark and weird and somehow royal.

The final verse calls on us, again and again, to “Hail Sisyphus.” So: Hail Sisyphus! Hail Foie Gras!

Once upon a time, we would have labeled this song “nerdcore” for the facility with which it drops references to wormholes and horcruxes, Baphomet and Nyarlathotep, Cenozoic ice and Rolling Rock beer. But today we’re all nerds, and ibrahim’s hip-hop wander through allusive underworlds — with a sad and elegant piano sample — is a beautiful, brilliant confrontation with fate. The cadence of the chorus, along with its internal rhymes and repetitions, gets to the heart of the Sisyphean endeavor:

Easily the most famous Sisyphus song, indie rocker Andrew Bird’s is genius from the first whistled melody that launches it on its propulsive four minutes and seven seconds. Every line rings with invention and internal rhyme:

The insight, too, is unique: Bird’s Sisyphus is grappling not just with his fate but with the choices that brought him to Tartarus and with the prospect of millennia to come. Does he regret? If he could go back, would he change things? For Bird’s Sisyphus, the answers are no. “I'd rather fail like a mortal than flail like a god on a lightning rod,” he declares. And yet there’s the barest hint of nostalgia — in Greek, literally the pain of homecoming — in the soaring chorus that sees him let loose his boulder:

I love this image of a Sisyphus who’s moved on, who remembers his old life, his mortal joys, and is trying, with every day’s unleashing of the rock, to let it all go.

I know nothing about the folk singer Blue Jay Walker, and I think that’s how he wants it. His Internet trail is thin, and his Spotify bio describes him only as a “Traveling hobo for hire” who can be contacted by “whistling at a passing a rail car.” He’s released only a few albums and a handful of singles over the past five years, but his “Sisyphus Trudge” almost brings me to tears every time I listen to it.

Unlike the other songs on this list, “Sisyphus Trudge” is pure joy, forward-looking and unabashedly hopeful. Blue Jay plays guitar and sings in a precise and clear voice as a Sisyphus who has more than accepted his fate — he’s embraced it. He’s not at the bottom of the mountain looking up, as so many other writers imagine it, but nearing the peak and anticipating a future of days unchanging until, well, until it ends, as it must:

Sung a different way, in a different key, this could all be mournful — but Blue Jay Walker brings the sun of Elysium to Tartarus. He’s triumphant, not resigned but resolved. He’s aware of what it will take, what must be sacrificed along the journey (“My only friend” he calls the boulder as it rolls away again), and still that journey is worth it — more than worth it. There’s an enormous strength here, to find such consistent happiness in a story — the human story — that can depress the best of us at times. Like him, I want to swear that today will be my lucky day, the day I reach the top of the mountain. But until then, I will, as he sings, “try again, try again, try again.” 🪨🪨🪨