The 250 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century So Far

It makes sense that, before he rose to notoriety, Frank Ocean cultivated a rapt audience on Tumblr where he’d share snippets and diary entries written with a literary flair. His breakthrough single “Novacane” is a case study in his penchant for storytelling — the woman he sings about hands him an “ice blue” bong before telling him of her aspirations in dentistry. Heartache, like in many of Frank’s best songs, exists in the firmament of the world he creates. Here, a past love for whom this new encounter can only help him feel numb gives the song its emotional texture. What’s more, he managed to infuse a radio-ready hit with his distinctive headiness. —J.I.

The Hives burst out of Sweden in matching tuxedos worried they’d be dismissed as garage rock’s answer to ZZ Top. Instead, “Hate to Say I Told You So” — two minutes of bratty brilliance built around what guitarist Nik Arson called a “striking gold” riff — conjured comparisons that caught the band off guard. “People started comparing us to bands we had never heard of,” frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist explained. “We couldn’t afford to know about every band. It feels surreal that we had never heard the Stooges and the MC5 until people compared us to them.” When they heard their supposed influences, it all made sense: the repetition, the riffs, the attitude. “We became the band that we should be with Veni Vidi Vicious.” —S.G.

Every good country song needs a bit of drama, and a dose of campy excess doesn’t hurt, either. Carrie Underwood serves both in abundance in “Before He Cheats,” the single that took her from promising American Idol winner to legit superstar. A ferocious, funny saga of a woman taking revenge on her unfaithful boyfriend, “Before He Cheats” was penned by two dudes (Chris Tompkins and Josh Kear) who combined an eerie melody with an instantly memorable hook about a “pretty little souped-up four-wheel-drive” that gets beat to hell. Underwood sings it like she’s on dark-Ann-Wilson mode, a tornado of deliciously petty destruction. It’s an anthem perfect for girls’ night, gays’ night, and karaoke night. —J.F.

Heaven is a place on Earth with Lana Del Rey. Without “Video Games,” Lizzy Grant wouldn’t have become the enigmatic pop star that she is today. Her first breakthrough, “Video Games” laid the blueprint for her landmark debut, Born to Die, and built the foundation for her as the cult star who would go on to inspire a generation of fans and artists alike, including Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. Blending touches of jazz and rap production, Del Rey croons to a boy too busy with his controller to look up and notice, delivering lines like “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you” with a haunting yearning that no one has ever been able to imitate. —T.M.

“I don’t know why people want to be small,” My Chem’s Gerard Way declared in 2006. That was not a problem on the band’s landmark “death-rock Sgt. Pepper” opus Welcome to the Black Parade, or it’s massive title track. Producer Rob Cavallo’s piano chords open the floodgates from confession to catharsis. Horns blaze, choruses soar, and guitars cascade until “We’ll carry on” transforms from lyric to liturgy. Way understood kids coming of age in post-9/11 America needed spectacle scaled to their particular apocalypse. That’s how these New Jersey goths were the ones to hand down rock’s oldest truth: that the best cure for feeling small is acting impossibly large. —S.G.

It was thrilling to see so many of the 21st century’s R&B innovations coming from West Africa — after all, the style’s deepest rootstock reaches back to the region. Burna Boy is head of the Afrobeats class, and this jam may be his best. With its Brazilian-tinged beats and West Indian-tinged flow, it mixes English, Yoruba, and Nigerian pidgin slang in a way that feels irresistible, expanding pop’s vernacular musically and lyrically. The highlight of his 2022 Love, Damiani LP, it’s an anthem of heartbroken struggle that topped Billboard’s newly christened U.S. Afrobeats chart with a universal, time-tested prescription: spark some igbo, raise a cuppa shayo, and dance the pain away. —W.H.

There’s no rulebook for how to write a pop smash, but Dua Lipa’s method sounds close: Get your best friends in a room (helpful if they’re ace songwriters Clarence Coffee Jr., Sarah Hudson, and Stephen Kozmeniuk), scarf doughnuts, pull tarot cards, and aim for Prince. “We were literally levitating from the sugar rush,” said Lipa. “This is about me exploring happy songs and doing something that’s not ‘dance crying’ … It’s about having fun and meeting someone and falling in love.” Released in the spring of 2020 as lockdowns killed nightlife, “Levitating” couldn’t serve its club destiny — which made it more essential, not less. A disco bliss-bomb for dark times, it ruled charts for 77 weeks. No one knew when normal life would return, but it seemed, as the song goes, we met her at the perfect time. —S.G.

Nostalgia has fueled a lot of great songs, but few artists have nailed the way a melody can sound like a memory like North Caroline country artist Eric Church on the breakout hit from his album Chief. With a spare guitar chug and illuminating piano that sound less like a Nashville product than a Wilco reverie (Church is a proud Jeff Tweedy fan), the song nails the way songs from your past (in his case classic Bruce Springsteen bangers) can unlock tattered-yearbook images of high school glory days — “the soundtrack to a July Saturday night” — echoing in your head forever. Deeply pretty and casually daring, “Springsteen” set the table for an ambitious run for Church that’s still going strong. —J.D.

Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” is arguably the most famous use of producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s Diwali Riddim, no small feat given that the dancehall beat inspired hundreds of tracks, including major pop hits by Rihanna (“Pon de Replay”), Lumidee (“Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)”), and Wayne Wonder (“No Letting Go”). It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and remains one of those anthems that serve as a clarion call to the dance floor. “It’s the ignition of those butterflies,” Paul told The New York Times in 2023 when describing how the handclap percussion makes listeners feel, readying them for the excitement of the moment when Paul beckons, “It’s all good girl, turn me on, let’s get it on to the early morn.” —M.R.

You almost can’t talk about “Yonkers,” the gate-crashing single from Tyler, the Creator that solidified him as a cultural force for a generation, without talking about that music video. There he is, rendered a brooding black-and-white, seated at a stool as he raps about the dark torments of his mind. The second single from his album Goblin, “Yonkers,” solidified Tyler’s brand of both vulnerability and youthful provocation. “Threesomes with a fuckin’ triceratops Reptar,” he raps, namedropping a character from Rugrats.  Though, as Tyler tells it, he made the hype that Tyler and his Odd Future compatriots had built at the time would prove to be very much warranted, and “Yonkers” was just the start.–J.I.

The Toronto indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene was formed by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, with a rotating crew of friends and bandmates. When they made their 2002 breakthrough album, You Forgot It In People, they had a dozen comrades on board. “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” is their glorious psychedelic lullaby, with Metric singer Emily Haines chanting “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.” Haines described it as “that pain of having to let go when you’re growing up and you’re moving on from being someone that you were.” It’s lived on ever since, in soundtracks (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), memes, cover versions, and countless lovesick late-night texts. —R.S.

This eight-minute-long opus is two songs in one, both inseparable and adoring. Timberlake proved early in his career that he could do the sweet-talking, infatuated romance well. But after six years away, he’d grown into an artist with more interest in sophisticated sonic expanses where longing eclipses lust. Produced alongside J-Roc and Timbaland, “Mirrors” goes full maximalist with stacked layers of sweet melodies and a masterfully assembled orchestral string section. The first five minutes revel in divine declarations of immutable love. In the final three, through more sparse production with elevated, thumping percussion, he keeps it simple: “You are the love of my life.” The result is his ultimate grand gesture. —L.P.

It originated as a request: Madonna was working on a film (eventually unmade) with director Luc Besson: “Do you have anything that is like ABBA at Studio 54?” she asked British producer Stuart Price. Soon, Price remembered the heavily filtered edit he’d made of ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” for his DJ night in Liverpool, where the crowd went bananas whenever it came on. “I played her the track, she listened intently, then she just opened her mouth and sang: ‘Every little thing that you say or do, I’m hung up, I’m hung up on you.…’ It really happened that quickly.” —M.M.

This intoxicating country-soul ballad wasn’t released as a single, and Chris Stapleton (a revered Nashville songwriter) didn’t write it. But “Tennessee Whiskey” has become his most popular song, and signature hit, with nearly 1.3 billion streams on Spotify. The original was penned by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove in 1980, and since then everyone from George Jones to David Allen Coe to T-Pain and Carín Leon have covered it. “It makes you feel like a drug the first time you hear it,” Leon told Rolling Stone. That’s especially true of Stapleton’s now-definitive version, which borrows the melody from Etta James’ 1967 song “I’d Rather Go Blind.” It’s the perfect pairing of song and vocalist. —J.H.

“Vroom was like an assault,” Charli XCX said. “[It] was us trying not to appease anyone.” She nailed that spirit via a feverish creative partnership with U.K. underground alchemist Sophie. Instead of capitulating to the content beast, the duo followed the song’s titular metaphor and drove straight through it. Sophie approached sound like a sculpture, whittling and welding waveforms until they sounded like plastic, metal, and rubber, and then built an arrangement that revs, downshifts, and uses silence like a gear change. “I think people were confused,” Charli noted. In the process, they ingeniously lifted hyperpop from message boards to main stages. —S.G.

“Do I Wanna Know?” almost single-handedly redefined what Arctic Monkeys could do. The Sheffield, England, wunderkinds had been steadily subverting expectations ever since their frenetic, rambunctious debut, but 2013’s AM was still staggering in its originality. The lead riff on “Do I Wanna Know?” epitomized everything about this new Arctic Monkeys era: Seductive, hypnotic, exhilarating, just a tiny bit evil. Accompanying this mighty sonic leap is Alex Turner’s own evolution a showman. The vocal performance is pure self-assured lothario, but the lyrics are downright devastatingly bad and wracked with self-consciousness. It’s a spiral into the abyss of desire, and anyone who’s yearned knows how terrifying a question “Do I wanna know, if this feeling flows both ways?” really is. —J. Blistein

Bieber’s 2015 album, Purpose, transformed the singer from teenybopper to adult hitmaker. But it was “Sorry,” a song Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter co-wrote in little more than an hour, that defined his remade image and cemented Bieber’s “tropical house” sound as a dance-floor fixture. “Sorry” was classic mid-2010’s post-EDM boom pop record-making, with Skrillex, who provided the breezy drop, pitching up Michaels’ demo vocal to create the vocal riff that kicks off the song. But it was Bieber himself who drove the perfect production home with his smooth-as-silk delivery of his apology: “I don’t really know Justin,” Michaels said when recounting writing the song for him, “but I know that he’s a very emotional person.” —J. Bernstein

The greatest LCD Soundsystem song not actually by LCD Soundsystem, cowbell and all, this pulsing indie-dance masterpiece will, for a microgeneration or two, forever conjure certain regrettable nighttime decisions, outfits, and hairstyle choices. Co-producer James Murphy, teamed here with DFA partner Tim Goldsworthy, went on to take its frantic fusion of squawky guitars and dance beats even further with LCD. But like a smaller-scale “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “House of Jealous Lovers” was ground zero for a whole era of music, kicking the doors open for bands from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party. The track still sounds fresh and dizzying, a musical vein that still hasn’t been fully tapped, the Dare’s recent efforts aside. —B.H.

“Hey Ya!” was OutKast’s big pop moment, the kind of hit that inspired aunties and schoolchildren around the world to sing along to Andre 3000’s riffs on Polaroid pictures and “Lucy Loos.” Initially conceived for an uncompleted romance movie set in Paris, Andre’s performance encompasses a multitude of emotions, from the irrepressible joy of navigating life’s changes to the melancholy of ending a relationship that isn’t quite working. “Why, oh, why, oh, why, oh/Are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here?” he sings. “I’m talking about being an entertainer,” he told The Fader in 2003 when discussing the politics of the music industry. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve just never fit into that.” —M.R.

Once again, Bad Bunny achieved the seemingly impossible: In 2025, he positioned a salsa tune well on its way to 1 billion Spotify streams. Better yet, the self-penned track — about a past romance so powerful that it lingers in his soul as the one, unforgettable dance — is as authentic to the genre’s Caribbean roots as the photo of the white plastic chairs on the cover of Debí Tirar Más Fotos. At six minutes, “Baile Inolvidable” enlists an old-school salsa orchestra, complete with chocolaty trombone riffs and the kind of jazzy piano solo that would make El Gran Combo proud. In his new role as tropical crooner, Benito channels the soft, bitter nostalgia of salsa romántica icons Frankie Ruiz and Víctor Manuelle. —E.L.

It’s hard to think of a stronger thesis for a great indie-rock hit than this confession: “I don’t know why I am the way I am.” And all three members of boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus — get the chance to sing that line on their own during the Grammy-nominated “Not Strong Enough,” the rocking standout of their 2023 album the record. It might be one of the trio’s more jangly upbeat tracks, but there’s a teeming tension in the lyricism as they sing about mental illness and dysfunction in relationships over a propulsive track. Still, it’s a perfect song for weaving through city sidewalks or headbanging with the windows down — just like the band did in the music video. —Leah Lu

It took Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump only 10 minutes to write the melody to one of the catchiest, poppiest emo anthems, a song that would catapult the genre into the mainstream. With the relentless, raucous “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” Fall Out Boy owned the summer of 2005, cracking the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 and topping TRL. It didn’t even matter that listeners often misheard the wordy lyrics Pete Wentz wrote for Stump to sing. In 2006, Stump told Rolling Stone he meant to garble the chorus. “I saw those lyrics and just kind of barked them out. But there was something about the rhythm of it, where I was like, ‘That actually might be too good for just a shitty punk song.’” —M.G.

After breaking into the mainstream with strangely euphoric “astronaut” hits like “Turn Out the Lights” and Rihanna’s “Loveeeeeee Song,” Atlanta rapper Future found his career at an impasse and in danger of being dismissed as a novelty act. His response was a trio of mixtapes, 2014’s Monster and 2015’s Beast Mode and 56 Nights, that almost single-handedly shifted the course of mainstream rap toward a pungent, melodic, and pharmaceutically debauched sound. “March Madness,” a breakout track from 56 Nights, has grown into a touchstone for this memorable, career-defining run. Produced by Southside, it’s a haunting flurry of internet bleeps and trap drums, and Future celebrates his lavish life even as he rues “All these cops shootin’ niggas, it’s tragic.” —M.R.

Folk rock’s golden era was the 1960s and ’70s, but trad styles still power pop hits. Witness the breakout single by Rosalía Vila Tobella, a 25-year-old Barcelona-based prodigy of flamenco, the Arabic-tinged folkloric music of Andalusía. Amping up the style’s signature handclap rhythms and ad libs, with dubby beats and a woozy electric-keyboard melody, she maintains the style’s feverish soul in a fusion that still feels totally fresh. The opening track of El Mal Querer, an album based on a 13th-century novel, Romance of Flamenca, the song signified just fine in the 21st, winning two Latin Grammys (Best Alternative Song and Best Urban Fusion/Performance) and launching an international pop star. ¡Tra tra! —W.H.

Montero Hill was about as far from being a pop star as one can get — literally, he was sleeping on his sister’s couch — when he had the lightning-strike moment of inspiration that created this country-rap breakthrough. Building off a track by an essentially unknown Dutch producer called YoungKio that was based around a banjo sample from a Nine Inch Nails track, he wrote an inescapably catchy hick-hop tune. “Old Town Road” went Number One (as did a remix with country star Billy Ray Cyrus) and became the longest running Number One single of all time — a record tied five years later by Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which was itself very much an echo of Lil Nas X’s paradigm-shifting 1:53 smash. —J.D.

A spiritual rap that took over secular radio, Kanye West made a hip-hop masterpiece by exploring his faith, combining the personal and the political with his most grandiose production effort to that point. West and co-producer Rhymefest borrowed much of the track from a performance by the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Choir, a Harlem-based a capella group composed of musicians in recovery. Serving as both a criticism and a dare to radio — “So here go my single, dawg, radio needs this/They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus” — the track ended up a Top 20 smash, a Grammy winner, and a staple song that West has performed with gospel choirs, marching bands, string ensembles, and Mavis Staples. —C.W.

Only David Bowie could seemingly herald his own death with an opus of a song that is as equal parts gorgeous and strange as “Blackstar.” Mixing and mingling nods and winks to Elvis Presley, Major Tom, and his own mortality (“When a man sees his black star, he knows his time … has come”), the lead single from his final album defied genre, in true Bowie style. Throughout his life, the Thin White Duke refused to stop evolving, and, in the end, it was only his passing that halted that trajectory. Luckily, we are left with a eulogy that was more fantastical than funereal — a star man shining even after cosmic death. —B.E.

“Every bitch that I don’t like came to my head,” Cardi B said of recording the lead single to her genre-shifting debut album, Invasion of Privacy. “And I was picturing me rapping it to them.” Her negative mental imaging summoned lines like, “Said, ‘Lil bitch, you can’t fuck with me if you wanted to’/These expensive, these is red bottoms, these is bloody shoes.” J. White Did It cooks up the most ominous beat of the decade to perfectly complement Cardi’s über-confident leveling up of her new life, with a title and flow nodding to Kodak Black’s “No Flockin’.” “I’m in a good place in my life right now,” she said of the song, “and I want to stunt.” —Jason Newman

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Justin Vernon’s probably rash decision to hole himself up in a Wisconsin cabin in 2007 to write one of the greatest heartbreak songs of his era. “Skinny Love,” with its dejected acoustic guitar strums and doubled vocals, may have become slightly meme-ified over the years, but there’s no denying that an entire generation of somber singer-songwriters were summoned in the track’s wake. The opening lines of the song are the most recognizably iconic, but its true staying power sits in the unflinching earnestness of the final ones: “Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?” —L.L.

The biggest song of 2022 was danceable synth-pop with a sparkling exterior and a heartsick core. Harry Styles’ lyrics feel intensely personal, but the song’s sense of loss and nostalgia was pretty damn universal, especially coming out of a pandemic that reshaped the world. The result was something bittersweet, catchy, and just huge, a track that struck a nerve and captured a moment. Styles himself got a clue just how huge after he delivered an encore performance of the song on Long Island shortly after its release, witnessing a reaction from the crowd unlike any he’d seen. ““We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he told Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos. “Just that the energy felt insane.” —C.H.

In the 2000s, Pharrell was in a creative zone that few producers could comprehend. Just cue up “Ride Around Shining,” from the Clipse’s second album, Hell Hath No Fury. The beat is immersive yet minimalist, resting on a cascading synth and punchy drums. Pusha is the slickest-talking scumbag you know, rhyming, “Fuckin’ with college bitches with innocent looks like Mya/Corrupt they mind, turn ’em to liars,” while Malice is wearing “canary yellow diamonds size of yield signs.” Clipse have proved that “all they rap about is drugs” is cap, but even if that were true, no one talks about the lifestyle with the specificity they do. —A. Gee

In the early 2000s, loads of hipsters were digging into Eighties music, usually post-punk and synth-pop, but only this Canadian collective had the ambition to go for the kind of arms-aloft anthem that could’ve soundtracked a pivotal scene in a John Hughes movie. With its surging bass line, slamming dance-rock beat, beacon-like keyboards, and the band’s impassioned group vocals, “Rebellion (Lies)” sold old-school heroic-rock bombast to a generation that often seemed skeptical of earnest, sweeping gestures. Fittingly, Arcade Fire were soon opening shows for their new fans U2. —J.D.

An elder stateswoman nowadays, Miranda Lambert has built not just a tremendous career, but a gang-plank for a generation of kindred women who want to make smart mainstream country music without pandering to the culture’s systemic sexism. And while she’d had hits before, this was the song that really built her — an aching ode to the house she grew up in that, like a lot of her work, takes a borderline-corny theme and locates its beating heart. Her first Number One on the Hot Country charts, it would be named both the CMA Song of the Year and the ACM Song of the Year; it also earned her a Grammy and, at last check, was four-times platinum. Even more impressive, given her catalog of great songs, is the fact that this is probably her greatest. —W.H.

For any millennial who lived through the peak of ‘NSync, it’s hard to not have a Pavlovian response to the string crescendo that tees up Justin Timberlake’s “Hey, hey” at the beginning of this song. “Bye Bye Bye” was the peak of boy-band mountain, a megahit in an era dominated by groups of cute-but-buff groups of three to five twentysomething guys. Written by Kristian Lundin, Jack Schulze, and Andreas Carlsson, it was the ultimate big-pop breakup song. But the quintet had an edge in their delivery, probably chalked up to their very public and messy separation from pop Svengali Lou Pearlman and label RCA. Add in choreography kids would watch MTV for hours to learn, and ‘NSync had just spun pop gold. —B.S.

Recruiting jazz-guitar maestro Nels Cline into the band was the greatest call Jeff Tweedy ever made, stabilizing Wilco’s lineup after a decade of changes and instantly elevating their sound. There’s no better example of Cline’s impact on the band than this 2007 cut, where Tweedy’s cryptic musings are just the pretext for Cline’s magic-carpet-ride of a solo. “Impossible Germany” has been a live highlight at practically every show Wilco have played since its release, and after each one you’ll find fans comparing notes on how hard Cline hit the breakdown and how far he soared into psychedelic space before that. “I don’t think anybody in the band could have predicted, even for a second, that it would have this kind of resonance,” Cline said. —S.V.L.

One way to frame Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is as the knockout punch in the Compton rapper’s titanic war of words with rival Drake. Another is to observe that the Pulitzer Prize-winning laureate wouldn’t have written his biggest hit to date without the crucible of a career-altering competition. Either way, “Not Like Us” is a rarity in a fractured media landscape where monoculture seems nearly extinct: the type of rap hit that gets played at family cookouts and Juneteenth festivals as well as in the club and on pop radio. In the summer of 2024, it was so omnipresent that folks like Stephen Curry admitted they were sick of hearing it. By 2025, Lamar had the Caesars Superdome chanting “Not Like Us” during the Super Bowl. It was the true definition of an inescapable bop.–M.R.

It was a matter of when, not if: Música mexicana was always poised to become an international sensation on the strength of its lush melodic richness and inordinate amounts of soul. But it was the generation of Peso Pluma — equally comfortable with the corridos of Los Tigres del Norte and the wounded mystique of Drake — that went viral by remaining true to its sound, and “Ella Baila Sola” became the ubiquitous sierreño hymn of the entire movement. It’s snappy, epic, and intoxicating, with Peso displaying his nasal vocal swagger anchored on Eslabon Armado’s wall of sound — a raucous feast of requintos and trombones. —E.L.

Paramore knows that it’s usually the mundane moments in relationships, not the grand gestures, that stand the test of time. The band didn’t set out to enact a striking pivot from emo to pop with “Still Into You,” it just happened that way — just like how the first “I love you” slipped out during a late-night drive home in the song’s second verse, or how Hayley Williams’ voice masterfully crescendos on its impassioned bridge. Its vibrant rhythm, all thick bass and thunderous drums, communicates every word left unsaid (and in the process avoids cheesy wedding-ballad purgatory). Enthralled listeners immediately took — and still take — Paramore’s breakout hit to be a timeless, whole-bodied model of effervescent endearment. —L.P.

Written eight years prior to its release during a period of reflection about Solange’s relationship with the father of her child, “Cranes in the Sky” still resonates as an introspective, elegant, and haunting meditation on pain and escapism. The title’s imagery emerged from watching cranes rise over Miami during a real estate boom — symbols of upheaval that mirrored Solange’s inner turmoil and America’s deeper structural issues. “It felt so indicative of what was going on in my life,” she told her sister Beyoncé for Interview Magazine in 2017 of the Raphael Saadiq co-production. “Eight years later … here we are again, not seeing what’s happening in our country, not wanting to put into perspective all of these ugly things that are staring us in the face.” —J.J.

Three decades after writing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Bob Dylan was asked by director Curtis Hanson to write another song for a movie about a man on the verge of losing everything, The Wonder Boys. In the film, Michael Douglas plays a college professor unable to finish a book who gets entangled with a troubled student. Dylan cut right to the emotional core of the movie with “Things Have Changed,” even though it never refers to the action onscreen. “I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can,” he sings. “Some things are too hot to touch/The human mind can only stand so much.” It won an Oscar for Song of the Year, beating out recent offerings by Randy Newman, Björk, and Sting. —A. Greene

The second single from Tha Carter III transforms a Phife Dawg snippet from a “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” remix into the never-ending vocal bedrock to one of the rapper’s most enduring songs. “That record did something I didn’t know it could. It took on a life of its own,” the song’s producer, Bangladesh, said in 2022. “I don’t think [Wayne] knew what the record was.” What was initially supposed to be just an album interlude featuring other rappers became, as the rapper himself would say later, his “GOAT song.” “‘A Milli’ is just Weezy solo,” Rolling Stone wrote when putting the track on our 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, “blacking out in the booth and dazzling everyone who hears him.” —J.N.

“Motion Sickness,” the breakthrough song from Phoebe Bridgers’ celebrated 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, is a masterpiece breakup song that encapsulates all of her generational songwriting talents. It’s part polemic, part eulogy, rendered with dry humor, plainspoken heartache, and biting fury as she plumbs the turbulent contradictions that defined her time with an older, manipulative man (confirmed to be Ryan Adams). The steady alt-country groove “Motion Sickness” finds can’t ease the queasiness of lines like “I hate you for what you did/And I miss you like a little kid.” But there’s something approaching catharsis when Bridgers twists the knife: “You said when you met me, you were bored/And you, you were in a band when I was born.” —J. Blistein

The gargantuan bass drops of mid-2010s EDM trap upped the ante on getting crunk, matching mosh-pit energy with chest-caving visceral sensation. Thusly, French producer DJ Snake and crunk ambassador Lil Jon were natural collaborators in the expanding field of spilling drinks on things. Snake sent him a version where he wanted the venom-throated club punk to rerecord a Redman sample, but Lil Jon took it upon himself to update the song for the “turn up” era. The song’s legacy would go far beyond its hit catchphrase: The directors of its bonkers, butt-busting music video would go on to win seven Academy Awards for their maximalist masterstroke Everything Everywhere All at Once. —C.W.

By the end of the 1990s, it seemed as if U2 had lost interest in the grand rock gestures of their Joshua Tree era. But when the Edge played the guitar part he’d written for what became “Beautiful Day,” the band’s collective response was, as Bono relayed later, “Oh, my God, that sounds like U2.” Teaming up with their golden-age producers Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Steve Lillywhite, the band reignited its signature mix of soaring studio atmospherics, the Edge’s turbo-charged guitar, and Bono’s vaulting vocal heroism to create an uplifting anthem about pushing past personal entropy by grounding yourself in the elemental joys of life. The result is one of the most exciting return-to-form moments any major band has pulled off. —J.D.

Shakira took a daring swing with her English crossover Laundry Service, but even after it’s boundary-breaking success, she didn’t sit still for long. She quickly dove into what would become her double album Fijacion Oral, and one of the record’s many turns brought her into the studio with the gritty-voiced Spanish crooner Alejandro Sanz. The unlikely pair radiated endless steam and chemistry that seared itself into “La Tortura,” a heated tug-of-war between a fed-up lover and her cheating ex that’s still full of provocation and longing. All of the action unspools over a magnetic blend of flamenco, reggaeton, and pop as Shakira and Sanz go back and forth, tensing each other up and setting the standard for star-powered collabs in Latin music. —J.L.

Katy Perry and co-lyricist Bonnie McKee didn’t know much about what type of song they were about to write when they sat down to compose the lyrics to the title track of her mega-blockbuster 2010 album. “We wanted to do something kind of nostalgic and romantic like ‘new love, young love,’” said McKee, “but we just didn’t have the right words for it.” What they, alongside a team of co-writers lead by Max Martin, came up with was a pop song so perfectly constructed that Canadian composer Owen Pallett would later pen an essay celebrating its use of syncopation and “perfect balance of tension and release.” —J. Bernstein

This omnipresent party anthem was the climax following a crescendo of hype formed around the Queens rapper. “In Da Club” would be not just a huge rap record, but also the biggest pop single of 2003. The track emerged from the very first session that the mixtape sensation had with producer Dr. Dre and co-producer Mike Elizando. Upon hearing the thunderous beat, 50 wrote the entire thing in under an hour and recorded it that night. The celebratory intro “Go shorty, it’s your birthday” has helped make “In Da Club” one of rap’s most enduring songs, officially certified diamond in 2023. “Everyday it’s someone’s birthday,” 50 told HiphopDX. “The song’s relevant all over every day.” —C.W.

Nicki Minaj and 2 Chainz brought some of their best flows and most enviable attitudes to what now feels like an anthem of 2010s pop rap. From Minaj’s candy-coated chorus, where it becomes a matter of fact that “Bitches ain’t shit and they ain’t saying nothin’/A hundred mothafuckas can’t tell me nothin,’” and her roof-rattling cadence about how she moves bars like a kingpin, to 2 Chainz’s impeccable wordplay where he calls his brand new Lexus a “do-hicky” and offers to drop the top of his convertible “so you can see what I been thinkin’,” it’s two of rap’s most cunning innovators at their most fun. —M.C.

In the early 2000s, indie guitar bands set out to boldly go to the last place anyone expected: the dance floor. The tight-trousered Glasgow mod boys of Franz Ferdinand declared they were out to make “music for girls to dance to” — a radical rock agenda at the time, in the aftermath of grunge and nu metal. But they got there with the irresistible global smash “Take Me Out,” mixing glam-punk guitars and disco flash. These handsome devils knew how to work a cheekbone, becoming hipster pinups. Kanye West called them “white crunk music”; later generations dubbed them “indie sleaze.” But “Take Me Out” captures the vibe of a late-night club full of seductive strangers with guns stashed in their garters — a song that explodes with hormonal energy. —R.S.

U.K. electronic duo Disclosure sunk their teeth in deep on “Latch,” their euphoric dance-pop dream starring the then-unknown vocalist Sam Smith. The record is entrancing from the very first second, when a sample of Zed Bias and Jenna G’s “Fairplay” rings out. Smith’s audacious yearning roots itself in their soulful pleas with indomitable romance. When they croon, “I feel we’re close enough, I wanna lock in your love,” a deep tension builds like heat trapped between bodies on a dance floor. Anticipation lingers in the breathing room between its twinkling chorus and sweltering verses, and infatuation has never sounded so intoxicating. —L.P.