200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time

Detroit producer Carl Craig may be the most respected techno artist of the past 30 years, a true feat for a low-key aesthete who specializes in subtle revelation rather than headbanging epiphany. “Throw” is his signature classic, 15 minutes of subterranean bass bump, swirling organ, and a wonderful disco vocal sample bouncing around the track like it’s lost in a hall of mirrors. At once engulfing, enormous, and coolly introspective, the song became one of the most beloved tracks of the Nineties, and it also inspired an admirably faithful LCD Soundsystem cover that underscored the song’s organic feel, and remains one of the rare great techno remakes by a rock band. —J.D.

“Voguing was spreading a lot in 2012,” Zebra Katz recalled, “from being on So You Think You Can Dance to America’s Next Dance Crew to having vogue segments in Pepsi commercials — you name it.” Also spreading that year was Jersey club music, one of whose signal DJs and producers was MikeQ. He’d first seen competitive ballroom dancing done to Jersey club tracks at the Newark club the Vogue. Working with B. Ames, MikeQ crushed out the definitive version of Katz’s shady anthem “Ima Read.” Their remix chops apart the lyrics (“Ima take that bitch to college/Ima give that bitch some knowledge”), making them step even harder than the drums. —M.M.

House music is Black music, full stop — and no one has argued that fact more sharply than Moodymann, the Detroit house artist with a fiercely DIY ethos. He has nevertheless snaked through pop culture sufficiently to land an appearance in a Grand Theft Auto video game, and Drake has even sampled him (some of Moody’s DJ-set banter made it onto the More Life mixtape). But even when Moody borrows overtly, he makes it over into his own brand of groove: viscous, sweet, and salty. “Don’t You Want My Love” is Exhibit A: It flips a laid-back Crusaders groove until it teems with sexy tension. It’s not merely danceable, it’s also compulsively listenable. —M.M.

Kieran Hebden’s early work as Four Tet seemed to presage an artistically rewarding career just on the margins of electronic music’s festival-ready mainstream. Instead, he’s become the rare dance producer whose music has grown catchier, more popular, and better all at the same time, and his tunes have become anthems that can move big crowds. “Only Human,” wherein Hebden combines a sped-up loop from Nelly Furtado’s “Afraid” with layers of sticky percussion, is the biggest so far — the up-and-down melody takes on a new playfulness that ignites a crowd. —M.M.

More than 10 years since native New Yorker Azealia Banks rapped over a track by Belgian DJ duo Lazy Jay, “212” is still most people’s dictionary definition when they think of house music combined with hip-hop. While the song may forever be in a race against Banks’ own tweets to be called her best known work, no one can deny Banks’ singular talent in both her raunchy bars and her effortless cadence, displaying an ability to keep up with house’s fast tempo that few rappers alive can claim to share. —C.S.

When Diana Ross asked Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards if “I’m Coming Out” was, in fact, pro-gay, the two of them said no: “She brought it up and we denied it,” Rodgers said, adding: “I always say I’m hired to give you the record you want, not the one that I want … even if you don’t know this is the record you want!” But nothing could have been more tailor-made for Miss Ross than this boisterous anthem, inspired when Rodgers “went out to this transvestite club one night, the Gilded Grape, I’m at the urinal, and there are three or four Diana Rosses around me.” —M.M.

Of Detroit’s techno originators, Kevin Saunderson was the most commercially minded. “My philosophy is I want everybody in the world to know our music and hear our songs,” he said of his group Inner City in 1997. “We feel like they make people happy, they inspire people. So why not touch everyone you can touch?” With the sultry-voiced Paris Grey promising that “The sun will chase the clouds away” over beckoning, blipping synths, Inner City’s second hit, “Good Life,” is one of the most purely celebratory records ever made. It reached the U.K. top five and topped the Billboard dance charts early in 1989. —M.M.

“Sure, I knew it was a hit when I read the lyrics,” Gloria Gaynor said in 1979 of this breakup salvo. “I knew it was an international and a ‘now’ lyric — one that people could get into.” The timing of “I Will Survive” was perfect — it capped a decade of increasingly vocal pop-music feminism. “I feel really good that women have accepted me for saying what was said in the song — it’s nice to know that I’ve lent some strength and self-reliance to the whole concept of women being able to continue on without being treated wrongly and without respect,” Gaynor added. And yes, this warhorse’s public life was prompted by a DJ — Richie Kaczor made it a hit from his booth at (where else?) Studio 54.

By his own admission, Joe Ray of Nero used to be a metalhead — and the British dubstep duo’s hard-buzzing riffs and bludgeoning dynamics make it plain. Take the anthem “Promises,” Nero’s catchiest and most ubiquitous song (81 million Spotify plays and counting). The double-time drums at the top evoke Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” more than drum-and-bass. The verses are a speeding gallop that crash into a half-time refrain that’s perfect for a circle pit. And every line of the lyrics is calibrated to be shouted along with. —M.M.

“I just let the machine go and started talking into the tape,” Jamie Principle explained of the free-associative lyric of “Baby Wants to Ride,” his simultaneous call to consciousness and the dance floor. Over a classic Frankie Knuckles groove — reminiscent of 1999-era Prince, but also bedrock Chicago house —Principle preaches against South African apartheid and for both God and Eros. “I love God, but I have my own way of telling him,” Principle explained. “Everyone has morals, and I think that everyday people are fighting a battle with themselves and God. I think ‘Baby Wants to Ride’ shows a tiny bit of that struggle.” —M.M.

Of all the innovative, hyperreal dance-pop tracks that SOPHIE left the world, “Immaterial” was arguably her most joyful, skewering the perceived value of “authenticity” with rubbery beats and chipmunk vocals from singer Cecile Believe: “Without my legs or my hair/Without my genes or my blood/With no name and with no type of story/Where do I live?/Tell me, where do I exist?” In beautifully simple terms, “Immaterial” celebrates bodily transcendence and possibility in a way that only the best pop tracks can. —C.S.

The first-ever out gay pop star, in gospel-disco mode, Sylvester’s breakout hit was revolutionary in every way. Initially, he had trouble convincing his studio band to play “Mighty Real” as a dance song: “And Sylvester and I kept saying, ‘No, you have to do that because that’s what’s on the radio,’” guitarist James Wirrick, the song’s co-writer, said. The song’s utter euphoria, and Sylvester’s stratospheric falsetto, were perfectly tailored to his flamboyant persona, and so was the musical style. “A lot of artists I know don’t like to be classified as disco artists, but I don’t mind because disco has been good to me,” Sylvester said. —M.M.

The most soulful self-help manual in techno, “Transition” is a master class in motivation both verbal — with Cornelius Harris offering a spoken challenge to “Point yourself in the direction of your dreams/Find your strength in the sound/And make your transition” — and musical. Serrated keyboard riffs crisscross unto the stratosphere, hardly a new idea for Underground Resistance, but never so positively charged. As the track fades, the synths slide under a church organ, revealing the song’s foundation: It’s space-age gospel. —M.M.

“It’s weird, but Elektra initially didn’t even want to put out ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ because they didn’t like it,” Lady Miss Keir, the wildly dressed frontwoman of Deee-Lite said in 1992. But the label gave the group “complete creative control,” and it relented — the song was just too infectious and the eye-popping video too rich to deny. The guest rap by Q-Tip came about after Deee-Lite had opened for his friends the Jungle Brothers. “We were playing that song live and he asked if he could do 16 bars on it,” said Keir. —M.M.

“We’re interested in creating surreal juxtapositions,” Matt Black of the London duo Coldcut said. “One sample should follow the previous one with a kind of sideways or dream logic.” Hence Black and partner Jonathan More’s melding of Eric B. & Rakim’s moneymaking rap anthem with samples of drums from British kids’ TV and vocals from the Israeli diva Ofra Haza. “They were trying to make us look like a bunch of clowns,” Eric B. complained of the remix. But Rakim, and nearly everyone else, loved it — a U.S. club and European chart hit, this remix helped to bridge increasingly factionalized rap and dance fans. —M.M.

Originally the B side of a single the Cameroonian artist released to commemorate that country’s success in an African soccer tournament, “Soul Makossa” got picked up by DJ David Mancuso, who worked it into his sets at the New York proto-disco club the Loft, setting the song on a course to become a Top 40 hit in the U.S. With its chanted vocals, biting sax solo, and a stuttered groove that moved like a car working its way through dense city traffic, the song became a landmark moment in the history of African pop finding an American audience. And of course, it helped kick off the biggest pop album ever made, when Michael Jackson quoted its refrain on “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” from Thriller. —J.D.

When Chic’s “Le Freak” sold 6 million singles, Atlantic Records gave the band’s writer-producers Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers carte blanche to produce anyone on the roster they wanted. When an exec described the R&B sibling group Sister Sledge, Rodgers began taking notes, then took them home: “The words were literally the foundation to the song ‘We Are Family,’” he said. “We actually conceived the whole Sister Sledge concept, all the songs, everything, and we’d never met them.” The youngest of the four Sledge sisters, Kathy, lit the song up with a vocal that’s both sly and irrepressible — and her ad-libs on the long version take everything in it to church. —M.M.

Derrick May didn’t record a ton of music, but in many ways he was the intellectual architect of Detroit techno, and he gave the then-infant sound an almost heavenly sense of grandeur and optimism with this 1987 single. Its salsa-informed groove, heraldic keyboard line, and stabbing strings came together to feel at once refined and ecstatic, making the song a radical statement of technological soulfulness. “Strings of Life” became one of the signature anthems of the U.K.’s initial rave explosion, turning May into a reluctant superstar DJ. —J.D.

Skeptics griped that techno could never have the scope, dynamics or power of old-school rock & roll. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons blew out of Manchester, England, with an answer on their revelatory debut album, Exit Planet Dust. “Chemical Beats” was the standout throwdown, combining techno squelch and hip-hop breaks to inaugurate a new era of arena electronic music that would get aptly called “big beat” and become one of the transformative sounds in Nineties music. —J.D.

When Michael Viner, the MGM Records producer who had produced Richard Nixon’s 1973 inaugural ball, had a small hit that year with a goofy, modernized instrumental cover of Preston Epps’ 1959 hit, “Bongo Rock,” he went ahead and cut a whole album of covers. Arranger Perry Botkin Jr. brought in rock drummer Jim Gordon of Derek & the Dominos and percussionist King Errisson from the Bahamas. “I don’t recall any instructions as far as structure,” Botkin later said. “He just wanted a loooot of drums.” He got ’em — especially on the Shadows’ 1960 hit, “Apache,” which turned into a percussion duel, which turned into one of hip-hop’s cornerstones — the outlandishly funky record with which Kool Herc codified hip-hop DJ’ing, and one of the most sampled breaks of all time. —M.M.

In 2015, Haitian-born Canadian producer Kaytranada took a break from the nonstop touring he had done on the back of a Janet Jackson remix he had released to SoundCloud. “I felt like there were two people inside me,” he says of the time period. “I was trying to be somebody I was not, and I was frustrated that people didn’t know who I was.” He released his album 99.9% the following year, featuring “Lite Spots,” a playfully unpredictable, brightly-hued house track hidden among an otherwise understated album. Its music video, featuring Kaytranada hanging out around L.A. with a dancing robot, feels like his proper reintroduction into the world. —C.S.

After leaving her Icelandic band the Sugarcubes, Björk hit the dance floor running. “Big Time Sensuality” remains her bellwether — a song, she told Jon Savage, that she wrote “about when I first met Nellee Hooper,” the song’s co-producer, previously of Soul II Soul, likening their chemistry to “when you meet someone who’s your other half jobwise and enables you to do what you completely want.” That smitten quality comes through vividly — urged forward by church-organ licks and bright hi-hats, Björk sounds ready to burst from joy. And as usual with her, the album version was only the beginning: Remixes of “Sensuality” by Fluke and David Morales also ruled club floors.

Brooklyn producer-DJ AceMo has made some of the loosest, sharpest house tracks of the past half-decade. But this one is the anthem. “Where They At???” is an all-inclusive singalong (“Where the Mongolian girls at?/Australian girls at?/Filipina girls at?/Moroccan girls at?/Egyptian girls at?/Eritrean girls at?”) that detonated in clubs a year before the pandemic, shouting out every minority, identification, and underclass group you and they could think of. When the bubbling keyboards from, where else, Robin S’s “Show Me Love” pop into the picture, it’s impossible not to feel the bonhomie. —M.M.

“Because I was in a group with guys all the time, I had to overwork a lot to prove I could carry my bucket of water,” Chaka Khan told Rolling Stone in 1979, after releasing her debut album away from the band Rufus. Her first solo single, “I’m Every Woman,” laid down the law with a thrilling four-to-the-floor track that underlined every commanding word. “This is not your basic Helen Reddy song,” Khan once told a concert audience while introducing the song, then added, “But it does celebrate womanhood.” —M.M.

In the span of just a few years, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads went from never having picked up a bass to writing one of hip-hop and dance music’s most enduring bass line samples. “Genius of Love” resulted from a one-of-a-kind melting pot in Manhattan during the turn of the decade, as the New Wave and post-punk kids caught wind of the emerging rap and DJ collectives from uptown, who in turn were laying down their own renditions of disco. To say that “Genius of Love” transcends that time period would be an understatement: From Mariah Carey to Latto, artists of multiple generations now have channeled the “maven of funk mutation” in their own music. —C.S.

1977 was the year of the synthesizer’s permanent incursion into pop, from Space’s “Magic Fly” to Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” to this volcanic track. “Flash Light” was Parliament’s most Godzilla-size groove, thanks in large part to its bass line — played not by resident four-string genius Bootsy Collins, but by keyboardist Bernie Worrell, on a Moog synthesizer, which allowed him to stack multiple bass tones on each key, thus creating the heaviest bass sound anybody had heard. Ironically, Collins had worked it up for a Bootsy’s Rubber Band album only for P-Funk majordomo George Clinton to claim it for Parliament. Worrell said, “There was only drums and guitars when I heard it. I listened to what was there and I came up with that Moog bass line. I just said ‘Roll the tape!’ and I played what God sends through me.”

Juan Atkins made this track first after going solo in 1985 under the name Model 500, but held off releasing it until after “No UFOs,” because, quite frankly, people weren’t ready yet. Decades later, “Night Drive (Time, Space, Transmat)” still slithers out of the speakers with commanding swagger. You could merely call it electro, but Atkins’ groove was too full-bodied and his tone too quizzical — its refrain, the subtitle, now conjures the global techno community for which Atkins is the cornerstone. —M.M.

Other Daft Punk songs may be catchier but none are more significant. Issued on a 12-inch with a 2,000-copy run on a small dance label in 1994, “Da Funk” set off a yearlong major-label signing frenzy (Virgin won) and gained instant favor with DJs far and wide: First the Chemical Brothers, then Supa DJ Dimitry of Deee-Lite, then Richie Hawtin, then everyone. As the title indicates, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo were tipping their hats to hip-hop’s cresting G-funk sound. “Tracks like Warren G’s ‘Regulate’ and some Dr. Dre stuff were playing on the radio,” Bangalter said. “The original riff was originally a siren. But we wanted to make it more of a gangsta-rap thing, more dirty, so we changed the sound a little bit.” The result was a siren sounding dance music’s future.–M.M.