Songs about rhythm...
Not really about musical rhythm per se - but rhythm as a mystic-materialist principle pervading everything at every scale. Riddim runnin' tings - all tings.
In that sense, not music-about-music but music-about-reality-(and-reality-as-fundamentally-musical)
Got into all of that in Rip It Up, but I didn't go on nearly as much as I should about what an amazing piece of music "In The Beginning There Was Rhythm" is - what the guitar and the bass in particular are doing. And Ari's vocal (inspired by hearing the early rap records). The total effect is disjointed but On the One.
Again, not just music under discussion here. Like "In the Beginning", a cosmological statement, but less of a celebration - fatalistic. (A sister-song perhaps to Siouxsie's "Circle", about cycles natural and abusive - "the circle has an empty sound").
The full album of Slave To The Rhythm - whizz ahead to 20.36 for some mad mouth-music - Grace concrete.
The Ian McShane "annihilating rhythm" bit crops up sampled in many a house record over the years, but check out this sample of GJ from that mad-concrete track on Slave
The same era of junglizm produced this rhythm song...
And also this one - "rhythm" isn't in the title but it is in the sample lick
Many many more rhythm candidates I'm sure - but I'm gonna wind it up with this one....
Now that one, that's not about music at all.
.... Ian Dury does have a bunch of music-music candidates, though - I'll be coming back to them later...