Hedwig and the Angry Inch

The opening number, in which Hedwig takes a shabby seafood-restaurant stage and compares herself to the Berlin Wall.

• Hedwig compares herself to a wall dividing East from West, man from woman. The metaphor is the first statement of a theme that runs to the end of the film.
• Midway there is a recitation (spoken word) passage in which Yitzhak (Miriam Shor) narrates the history of the Wall, while the band builds tension with a riff repeating a short guitar phrase.
• It was the opening number on stage as well, but the film sets it before indifferent diners, contrasting rock-star gestures with a shabby reality.
• Meat Loaf covered it in 2003, and on the band Spoon's cover, Stephen Colbert took the spoken part.

A song adapting the myth of human origins from Plato's Symposium, it poses the film's overarching question of the search for a lost other half.

• Mitchell handed Trask the Symposium and asked for this song. Its source is the myth, in Aristophanes' speech, of humans split in two.
• Trask has said the aim was to write it like turning the pages of a picture book. It sounds built to start quietly and grow larger as instruments are added one by one.
• In the film, hand-drawn animation by Emily Hubley, daughter of animators Faith and John Hubley, flows alongside the song. This animated sequence is said to rank among the film's most striking scenes.
• The film also includes an excerpted version sung by Tommy Gnosis. The dissonance of hearing the same song in the voice of the one who took it touches the heart of the story.

The song that howls most fiercely, from the restaurant stage, the story of the 'angry inch' left by a failed operation.

• A short, fast punk rock number. Its way of driving a painful story forward with rage and black humor rather than sentiment distills the character of Hedwig.
• The film puts the song on the restaurant stage, letting it spill over into a ruckus between uneasy diners and the band. The song itself becomes the scene's event.
• Bob Mould, formerly of Hüsker Dü, played guitar on the film soundtrack. Its thicker, rawer guitar sound is worth comparing with the stage cast album.
• The heavy metal band Type O Negative covered it in 2003, and on the tribute album Wig in a Box, Sleater-Kinney and Fred Schneider sang it together.

The song in which Hedwig, abandoned in a Kansas trailer, puts on a wig, becomes someone else, and rises again.

• It starts quietly, like talking to oneself, as instruments join one by one until it finally swells into a song everyone sings together. The shift of heart from despair to self-invention shows directly in the arrangement.
• The wig is portrayed not as a way to hide but as a way to build and put on a new self. It also connects to the 1970s glam rock tradition of changing identity through makeup and costume.
• The film stages it as a scene made for singing along, drawing the audience into the song. That is also why it became the number audiences sing together at cult screenings.
• The title of a 2003 tribute album released to benefit the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an organization for LGBTQ youth, came from this very song.

A modest folk ballad Hedwig offers the boy Tommy, it is sung again in another setting late in the film, and its meaning shifts.

• A simple folk ballad over a single guitar. Among the raw rock numbers, it is a rare moment when Hedwig sets aside all artifice.
• The soundtrack includes separate Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis versions. It is a fine example of a reprise, in which the same melody takes on different meanings depending on who sings it.
• According to the album credits, Tommy Gnosis's songs were recorded by Trask, Miriam Shor, Bob Mould and others. The film's scenes and the album are worth comparing.
• Where in the story the second version is sung, and by whom, is best discovered in the film itself. In that moment the song sounds like both a farewell and a reply.

Bursting straight out of the brief lament “Hedwig's Lament,” it depicts the climactic moment when Hedwig's very being shatters and scatters.

• The preceding “Hedwig's Lament” is a brief lament sung almost with the bare voice.
• The title comes from the Surrealists' game “exquisite corpse,” in which several people took turns adding to a drawing or a sentence. It points to Hedwig herself, a being pieced together from fragments.
• Fractured rhythms and guitar close to noise pour out. It is punk's way: instead of a finely polished melody, rupture itself is made into music.
• With this song as the threshold, the film blurs the distinction between reality and fantasy. The scenes that follow are more naturally read by the logic of dreams than as plot.

The final song, mirroring the scene of the boy listening to the radio inside an oven, closes the whole film as an anthem of liberation.

• It begins low and slow, builds gradually, and then bursts with every instrument at once. It follows the form of an anthem sung by the whole hall together.
• The song pays tribute to the voices that sustained Hedwig, calling the names of women musicians such as Aretha Franklin, Yoko Ono and Patti Smith.
• The radio of the title calls back the East Berlin scene. The boy who once eavesdropped on the outside world now becomes the one speaking to the misfits beyond the radio.
• The ending the screen shows while this song plays is left for you to see. The wall of the first song and the half-myth of the second are tied together here.
• On the tribute album “Wig in a Box,” Cyndi Lauper sang this song.