200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time

The nucleus of KC and the Sunshine Band — keyboardist and white soul belter Harry Wayne Casey, bassist Richard Finch, guitarist Jerome Smith, and drummer Robert Johnson — were regular players around the TK Records studio in Hialeah, Florida, who could hit a groove together with ease. “I felt that there was something between us that would really amount to something,” Casey said. With “Get Down Tonight,” the band shot to Number One on the pop and R&B charts. It crystallized their formula: pliant rhythms decorated by party chants. “My songs intentionally have simplicity,” Casey said. “You can add a million gimmicks in there, but we aim for simplicity and reality.” —M.M.

Though the song didn’t chart the way its label, Elektra, had hoped it would — going Top Ten R&B but missing the Top 40 — Patrice Rushen’s “Haven’t You Heard” was a long-game kind of hit. One big reason it lasted: Frankie Knuckles turned it into an early house perennial. And no wonder. Rushen’s ebullient, high-stepping track, the tempo nearly a march, is defiantly hopeful, and her central piano riff is an all-time dance-floor earworm. —M.M.

“I remember when ‘Spastik’ came out, people were like, ‘It’s fucking just snares,’” Richie Hawtin reminisced five years after the epic 12-inch that sealed his name. “And then others thought it was the best thing they’d ever heard.” What makes this nine-minute track’s skirling, off-kilter, chopped-and-filtered snare attack resonate is the way it methodically squeezes every possible variation out of a simple machine paradiddle. Hawtin made “Spastik” as a long improvisation and then edited it down, and it still thrills for that sense of in-the-moment performance. —M.M.

At the end of the Eighties, with Chicago house producers moving in other directions, the tweaked “acid” sound of a TB-303 machine was in remission — but in the early Nineties, European producers picked up on it with renewed vigor. The most important were the Düsseldorf duo Hardfloor, whose early work also helped define the then-nascent sound of trance. But their most iconic track was their remix of Chicagoan Robert Armani’s “Circus Bells” — the titular instruments are fogged and smeared over 303s that gibber like loons. —M.M.

“We always keep our ears open for little things,” Gap Band vocalist Charlie Wilson said. “We go down to the clubs like it was homework and watch out for what the kids are getting off on. It might be a run of notes or a sense of breakdown in the rhythm that makes ’em holler. We want that kind of excitement.” And what the kids were going for in droves in 1982 was sound effects, from the orchestral hits of “Planet Rock” to the werewolves of “Thriller” to the air-raid sirens of the Gap Band’s most atomic-in-every-way jam — Ronnie Wilson’s bass line didn’t hurt either. —M.M.

“I’m so in love with dance music,” said U.K. soul singer Jessie Ware. “You’ll find me at the dance tent with all my friends at any festival.” No surprise, then, that Ware’s music is at its best when it’s most danceable (see her 2020 neo-disco classic What’s Your Pleasure) or that she has collaborated with fellow Londoners Disclosure, who turned in a U.K. garage rinse of her debut’s standout, “Running,” that decisively sharpens its contours. The beats click and shudder, the bass zooms, and Ware’s clipped phrasing is rendered even more exciting over all the syncopation. “One of my most joyful moments,” she later said, “was singing the ‘Running’ remix with Disclosure at Coachella.” —M.M.

Juan Atkins invented techno, full stop — he conceived it and named it — and one of its many aspects that he pioneered was the use of multiple aliases for different types of work. “I always felt that if I was going to have a hit record, it would be as Model 500,” he said in 2012 of his first and best-known alias. Lush and insistent, “No UFO’s,” the first Model 500 12-inch, set the template for the Detroit approach. “They make these synthesizers and keyboards with functions that allow you to get as close to a human feel as they possibly can,” he said in 1997. “I think this is the beauty of Detroit, we were able to put that emotion into our music.” —M.M.

Enter Arthur Russell — cellist, classical composer, disco heathen, and total dreamy weirdo who tore up the pop and disco rulebooks. His short-lived team-up with DJ Steve D’Acquisto, Loose Joints, kicked off with what may be disco’s most hypnotic record. With its muddy groove and its very different female and male vocals on either side of the 12-inch, “Is It All Over My Face” is like Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On after a long night at Xenon, full of dark corners and flickering shadows, seeming to follow nothing so much as its own deeply idiosyncratic internal logic. —M.M.

“It could be about dancing, the bedroom, whatever. You’re cleaning your house? Get your freak on!” Missy Elliott said of her most head-turning hit in 2001. The tempo was a brisk 178 BPM, the speed of drum-and-bass, while the instrumentation — a head-knocking riff played on a one-string Punjabi tumbi, a tabla coming hard on the downbeat — came from South Asian bhangra. Missy rides the swerving rhythms expertly — her verve and the track’s sheer newness shot it into all kinds of DJs’ playlists, most memorably DJ /rupture’s shattering 2001 set Gold Teeth Thief. —M.M.

Madonna was fond of describing her love of the dance floor with her usual provocation: “I always thought of it as a magical place — even if you’re not taking ecstasy.” On “Into the Groove,” her single purest tribute to dance, Madge paints the dance floor as a place of liberation and transgression. “At night, I lock the doors so no one else can see/I’m tired of dancing here all by myself,” she sings, before asking the boy dancing across from her to “live out your fantasy here with me.” —C.S.

“‘Blind’ was about growing up a gay kid, my immediate family and social group rejecting me, and asking why I was born into this situation,” Andy Butler of Hercules and Love Affair told The New York Times. “But knowing that as soon as I could escape, I would, and that I would find freedom and solace.” After writing it in 2004, Butler spent three years re-making the track until it was a romping, biting club anthem, sealed with a vocal from Anhoni (then Antony), who belted it out in true diva fashion. “Blind” became a U.K. hit in 2007, and in 2008, Frankie Knuckles’ remix, his first new work all decade, became an instant entry into his canon as well. —M.M.

One of the great film climaxes of the Nineties came during the heist sequence of Trainspotting, set to Underworld’s pounding, epic 10-minute ode to “Shouting, lager! Lager! Lager!” The song had taken “over two years to finish writing,” Karl Hyde, the group’s frontman, said. “The lyrics are pretty close to home. It’s about feeling like a slab of meat … coming out of the Ship in Wardour Street, which is an old haunt of ours. The track is highly ironic in the sense that I’m not praising lager at all. Well, not entirely.” —M.M.

The whole disco story in one song: Black women, Eurodisco gay men, gospel, sex, the apocalypse. A hit, too — also part of the disco story. The writers are Paul Jabara, who’d penned Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” and session keyboardist Paul Shaffer, David Letterman’s late-night bandleader; the singers are Izora Armstead and Martha Wash, previously known as Two Tons o’ Fun, and sometimes backing singers for the fabulous Sylvester. “We walked out laughin’ at the song,” Armstead told David Fricke. “I totally fell out over the song. My husband, who’s one of our managers, brought the tape home that night. … Next morning, he told me, ‘That song is gonna be a hit.’ I told him he was crazy. Who’d want a silly song like that?” The answer: everyone. —M.M.

Not to be confused with Corona, the Eurodance group responsible for “The Rhythm of the Night” four years later, Corina was the native New Yorker who played Frida Kahlo in the Tim Robbins film Cradle Will Rock in 1999 — eight years after scoring a Top 10 hit with this bright, hard-as-a-pinball freestyle banger. Freestyle would be outmoded soon, and you can hear the differences here from the Eighties stuff — it’s breakbeat-driven, rather than by a drum-machine pulse. Moreover, “Temptation” features a coolly equanimous lyric (“Temptation is a part of life/It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong or right”) that the singer handles expertly. —M.M.

The Quad City DJ’s were a production team from Jacksonville, Florida — Jay Ski, C.C. Lemonhead, and JeLana LaFleur — who defined the Florida bass sound with hits for 69 Boyz, 95 South (they produced “Whoot, There It Is”), and Dis-n-Dat. But their all-time dance-floor bomb was “C’mon N’ Ride It (The Train),” which reached Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100. Built on a down-and-up bass line and driven by subtle but pervasive percussion, not to mention many repetitions of the word “choo-choo,” “C’Mon” remains a universal tonic — if you can’t get a crowd moving to this one, you’re hopeless. —M.M.

The classic lineup of Detroit’s Underground Resistance — “Mad” Mike Banks, Jeff Mills, and Robert Hood — was together only a short time, but they were the most explosive techno combo ever, with Banks continuing the project with other collaborators. Hood would describe the UR side project X-101 as “Jeff at the 909, me at a Juno 106 [synth], Mike at the 303, just going for it,” and you can hear that unmitigated glee in the way they attack the strafing synth riffs of “Sonic Destroyer.” Over in Europe, a whole lot of producers copied the hell out of it. —M.M.

When it comes to vehicular double entendres, “Pull Up to the Bumper” walked so that  “Little Red Corvette” could run. Blending together a who’s who of dance subgenres at the time — New Wave, funk, disco, and reggae — Grace Jones elevated the track with her infectious, angular swagger, winking to the audience even as she was forthcoming about her propositions: “Pull up to the bumper, baby/Drive it in between.” Ironic that a song with such an, ahem, affection for automobiles earned a mainstream radio ban. —C.S.

A military brat, theater kid, and pageant queen (Miss Black Arizona 1989 and 1990) from Phoenix, CeCe Peniston was singing backup on a session for an A&M Records artist when an A&R person invited her to “get [her] own single together.” Peniston grabbed an old poem from a college notebook: “I came up with the melody and the lyrics to ‘Finally’ and then RK [Jackson] and Felipe [Delgado] put the music to it.” The original mix (including a dated rap) was already a giddy, radio-ready house jam, but with David Morales’ “Choice Mix” — adding a prominent new piano line played by Eric Kupper — “Finally” was sealed as a club classic, and his remix became the standard version. —M.M.

The Chemical Brothers’ Godzilla breaks and arena riffs were always a natural bridge from dance music to the rock audience. Noel Gallagher of Oasis jumped on board at the duo’s London club night, the Heavenly Social: “In the middle of, you know, their electronic fucking thing, they used to play [the Beatles’] ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’” he recalled. “They took that thing to another level.” That track was an inspiration for the Chems’ and Gallagher’s collaboration, “Setting Sun,” which keened and careened with swaggering authority. “They’re fucking amazing,” Gallagher said, “and ‘Setting Sun’ is one of the best things that I’ve ever done.” —M.M.

It’s a story nearly as famous as its flickering guitar riff: Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, the bandleaders and songwriters for Chic, were on Grace Jones’ personal guest list for Studio 54 only to be denied entry, so they went home, Rodgers chopped out a riff as nasty as a line of crank, Edwards joined in, and they began yelling, by proxy, at 54’s doorman: “Ah, fuck off!” Soon they modified the title to refer to an au courant dance, and cut Atlantic Records’ biggest-selling single at that time: a cool 6 million sold. —M.M.

In the late Nineties, the London duo Basement Jaxx — Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton — were a breath of fresh air, producing house jams with a rambunctious quality that pushed against an increasingly stolid, super-club-oriented style. The spring-coiled slap-bass line and Y2K-scare lyrics — “It’s all right, don’t panic” — of “Red Alert” tie it to its historical moment without strangling it: The track’s P-Funk squiggles are irresistible and universal. “The underground people we did ‘Red Alert’ for loved it, and it’s just happened to have gone beyond that,” Ratcliffe said of this Top Five U.K. hit. “What more could you ask for?” —M.M.

At the peak of EDM, it was, indeed, Britney bitch. Moreover, it was Kesha, who co-wrote this apocalyptic party anthem (her specialty) with Alexander Kronlund, Dr. Luke, and Max Martin. “I’ve never been more proud of anything in my career,” Kesha said, adding that it was “really, really exciting for me when I hear [Britney] sing it.” The production — by Luke, Martin, Billboard, and Emily Wright — expertly adapts EDM’s build-and-drop dynamics to traditional verse-bridge-chorus song structure. —M.M.

The London graffiti artist Clifford Price (a.k.a. Goldie) took immediately to the music that was first called jungle, then drum-and-bass, quickly becoming one of the style’s figureheads — quite literally, since the logo of his label, Metalheadz, was modeled on his headphone-clad skull. And in 1994, he was ready to shift the music into a more mature gear. “It’s all right taking kids into euphoria, but you have to come back to reality,” he said that year. With its pitch-shifted breakbeats seeming to bend time and haunting vocal by the late Diane Charlemagne, “Inner City Life” remade drum-and-bass into futuristic soul music: a standalone single that heralded Goldie’s hugely ambitious double-CD debut, Timeless (where it became the first of the three-part title suite), and became a firm classic, not only in drum-and-bass, but also in progressive house, thanks to a 1996 remix by Florida’s Rabbit in the Moon. —M.M.

Some tracks stay around forever, and this mid-Nineties monster did so just on its running time — nearly 15 minutes. Producer Kenny Dope, half of Masters at Work, alternates between a pair of wildly different disco loops, one dissonant, the other a swinging horn line cribbed from Seventies soft-rock staple Chicago’s “Street Player” — their sop to the disco trend — and he milks the tension (when are the horns going to come in, already?) so adroitly that on a crowded floor the track flies by. —M.M.

Baltimore club music began in the mid Eighties, when radio DJ Frank Ski began playing only the breaks of house records — just like hip-hop’s godfathers had done with funk records — and the music became intensely breaks-focused. It also tended to focus on lewd topics. But its greatest hit is also its most hopeful, while remaining unflinching about day-to-day reality. Baltimore club godfather Rod Lee’s “Dance My Pain Away” states its maladies plainly: “Now listen to my story/Bill collectors on me/Have to file bankruptcy/Need some help from somebody,” over a looped breakbeat with a constancy that adds poignance to Lee’s felt performance. —M.M.

“If you went to any club on the Jersey shore back in 1998, you would hear Razor N’ Guido, Johnny Vicious — they were all making these records with hard tribal beats and buzzy synths,” Chris Cox of the Canadian production team Thunderpuss recalled of the queer “circuit” sound. His duo’s turn-of-the-century remixes fulfilled that mandate with sheer bombastic nerve, none more so than their epic 11-minute reconstruction of Whitney Houston’s comeback hit. When Cox heard Houston’s unedited vocal, he “found all these nuances and ad-libs that were kind of buried,” and he built the remix’s dramatic stops and starts around her flourishes. Whitney, like everyone else, loved it. —M.M.

Songwriter Latti Kronlund fashioned this reverberant, piano-led house anthem specifically for the London singer Alison Limerick: “He told me that that was my song to sing because it required someone with a big two-octave range, and I had it,” she recalled. Her thrilling testifying (“I’ll take you down, deep down where love lives”) gained even more luster when the track was remixed by Frankie Knuckles and David Morales, then working together as Def Mix Productions. “Probably of all the songs I’ve worked on, this is the most lyrical — musically it says everything,” Knuckles later said, calling it “classic Frankie and David — hard-edged and fused with lush, beautiful orchestral arrangements.” —M.M.

This instant-classic collaboration between producers Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk and Alan Braxe and vocalist Benjamin “Diamond” Cohen “took maybe a week to make,” Bangalter said. “The more people who say ‘Music’ was made in two seconds, the happier I am.” He thought they might “sell only 1,000 copies of it.” Instead, when the white-label vinyl 12-inch promos began hitting DJ turntables during the 1998 Winter Music Conference in Miami, it caused an instant sensation, and everyone from drum-and-bass godfather Grooverider to Detroit techno originator Juan Atkins to geek god Squarepusher played the track as it made its way to becoming a DJ perennial. —M.M.

The Detroit techno futurist Jeff Mills once called his most famous track “a practical DJ tool that’s above all else, effective … something that works instantly.” Sounds kinda dry, except “The Bells” absolutely knocks — Mills has played it in every set since recording it in 1994 (it was released two years later), and it is generally acknowledged as the most frequently-DJ’ed techno track ever. No wonder — that circus-like four-note central riff gooses a crowd like nothing else. “It’s something I can use to say hello to the people,” Mills said. —M.M.

This record is steeped in the teeming London club culture of the late Eighties, when sound systems were coming to the fore of British pop. When Neneh Cherry mentions “hanging with the Wild Bunch” on “Buffalo Stance,” she means the DJ crew that would later become Nineties trip-hop titans Massive Attack. The record was co-produced by Tim Simenon, who’d made sample-driven club hits as Bomb the Bass. But while the track was painstakingly constructed, Cherry’s vocal took only three takes to nail. “It’s that something that sends tingles up your spine,” she said at the time, “that’s the sex in my voice.” —M.M.

A Chicago drummer-for-hire turned house music’s go-to mood-music man, Larry Heard’s early singles as Mr. Fingers set the standard for what would soon be called “deep house” — soulful, jazz-tinged, sometimes plangent, always stirring. One of the first tracks Heard composed, “Mystery of Love,” released as Mr. Fingers, established house as an abstractionist’s realm. The up-and-down bass line stretches like taffy, the kick drum thumps imperturbably, and the keyboard parts crisscross like 3D sculpture. “I don’t think I’m the inventor of ambient house,” Heard once demurred. Wanna bet? —M.M.

“How do I feel about it being a hit? Completely surprised,” Moby told the NME when “Go” hit the U.K. chart, where it peaked at Number 10. “I recorded it in a couple of days in my living room. The budget was about four dollars.” And the version that hit the charts wasn’t even the original — Moby had remixed the song numerous times already before hitting upon the idea of replaying the luminous chords of Angelo Badalamenti’s theme music for Twin Peaks. Decades on, it remains Moby’s signature tune. —M.M.

Although the Eurodance project Corona was formed around Brazilian-born singer-model Olga Souza and producer Francesco Botempi, it was Italian singer Giovanna Bersola, a.k.a. Jenny B, who lent her vocals to the group’s signature hit, “The Rhythm of the Night.” “It’s a beautiful thing, I’m happy to be in so many people’s hearts and beautiful memories about those years when they were going out and dancing,” Bersola said in a 2021 interview. “It’s a happy place for me.” Though Bersola was uncredited for her work on the song, her voice on “The Rhythm of the Night” lives on in clubs around the world, as well as in the iconic ending to Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail. —C.S.

“Even before we’d recorded those vocals, I knew that ‘Planet Rock’ was going to make musical history,” Arthur Baker once said. “It was just so fucking incredible.” Self-interested words, maybe, since Baker co-produced Afrika Bambaataa’s wall-breaking global anthem — but not unwarranted. “Planet Rock” is still like nothing else, even if it is made from easily recognized parts: Baker and Bambaataa both “had the idea of copying the melody from ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and the beat from ‘Numbers,’ another Kraftwerk record,” Baker said. The record featured an early use of the Fairlight CMI, the first digital sampler — the orchestral “hits” come from one of its presets. —M.M.

Some records sneak up on you over time — even when everything about them is right on the surface. That’s the case with Chicagoan Steve Poindexter’s “Work That Muthafucker.” It’s not much of a song, more of a purpose-built DJ tool: mostly just a sample of the title phrase over a pared-down, electro-tom-heavy groove, it’s raw, basic, very mixable — and so deadly effective that its popularity with DJs hasn’t waned a bit over three and a half decades. It jolts any floor it touches. Three cheers for use value. —M.M.