The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

In 1975, looking for a new change, Bowie fired his manager and moved to L.A., where he let his cocaine habit flourish and made Station to Station, exploring ideas in what he called “sound as texture.” The 10-minute title track, a Kraut-rock disco opus referencing drugs and Kabbalah mysticism, and somehow turning “The European canon is here!” into a get-down dance-floor salvo, introduced his Thin White Duke persona. Bowie later said he didn’t remember much about the recording, but it’s one of the funkiest experiments of his career.

Though San Francisco singer and queer icon Sylvester had explored rock and soul on earlier recordings, he soon adapted to the disco that was then blanketing his neighborhood, the defiantly out and gay Castro. Sylvester co-wrote “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” with guitarist James Wirrick, its over-the-top exuberance a match for the singer’s persona. “At first the band didn’t wanna play it as a dance tune,” Wirrick said. “And Sylvester and I kept saying, ‘No, you have to do that because that’s what’s on the radio.’”

It took Duran Duran many tries to crack U.S. radio. “But MTV had a more open mind, and they wanted to show new bands,” said singer Simon Le Bon. “Hungry Like the Wolf” has a deeply glammy mix of electronics and guitars (its riff was inspired by Marc Bolan of T. Rex), and was remixed until Americans could hear its charms. The action-packed video, shot in Sri Lanka, became a sensation. “MTV got so many requests that people started requesting it on the radio,” said Nick Rhodes, Duran’s keyboardist. “So it sort of quickly turned around.”

When PE recorded “Bring the Noise” for the 1987 movie version of Brett Easton Ellis’ novel Less Than Zero, Chuck D wasn’t much of a fan — “I practically threw it out the window,” he said. Then they started playing it live, and “people went berserk.” Jittery with screeching samples and cranked-up BPM, it answered critics dismissing the crew for their stridency with more of everything: more speed, more sound, and more proud references to their Blackness. “If they’re calling my music ‘noise,’ if they’re saying that I’m really getting out of character being a Black person in America, then fine,” Chuck D told Rolling Stone. “I’m bringing more noise.”

Inspired, according to his 2015 memoir, by a “beautiful checkout girl” whose dreams he imagined “would soon be squandered to a ruffian,” this deceptively tender ballad on Costello’s debut album helped enshrine him as post-punk’s most gifted melodist. In 1977, Costello credited his hard-bitten lyrical style to the fact that “there’s nothing glamorous or romantic about the world at the moment.… Nobody’s got the time or the money.” Nevertheless, Costello’s attempt at “a beautiful sound” on “Alison” was inspired in part by Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”: They share a similarly crackling guitar tone.

This seminal 12-inch single is the sum of South Bronx DJ Afrika Bambaataa’s polyglot inspirations. There was Kraftwerk, Ennio Morricone’s theme music for Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars trilogy, Captain Sky’s “Super Sporm,” and,more subtly, the pinging delights of Eighties arcade games. John Robie added keyboards, Boston producer Arthur Baker rendered it all through the Roland TR-808 and PCM, and rappers Soulsonic Force brought a unique stop-start, call-and-response party-rocking style they called “MC poppin.” It made for the first definitive hip-hop sound on wax: electro-funk.

Describing himself as, among other things, “the warped lovechild of Nina Simone and all four members of Led Zeppelin,” singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley was a uniquely promising talent who released only one album, 1994’s Grace, before he died by drowning in the Mississippi River. Buckley wrote the lyrics to the album’s incandescent title track after saying goodbye to his girlfriend at the airport; his close collaborator Gary Lucas came up with the searing, spiraling guitar line. The impact was like hearing Chet Baker reborn in the Nineties, playing a cool Lower East Side bar.

In 1968, as protests against the Vietnam War raged, the Godfather of Soul put out a patriotic track called, “America Is My Home.” Not long after, activists placed a fake bomb in Brown’s hotel room. One of the singer’s next singles took on a markedly different tone, both politically — “We’d rather die on our feet, than be livin’ on our knees” — and musically, replacing the easy lope of “America Is My Home” with an agitated funk missile. “Say It Loud” was a bigger hit than its predecessor, reaching Number One on the R&B chart, in addition to becoming a Black Power anthem.

From the frayed ends of his falsetto to his heart-on-sleeve lyrics, Chris Martin’s unironic earnestness is his gift; he reaches for the biggest emotions he can, and when he connects, the results can feel colossal. What gives “Fix You” its special charge is that it starts as a simple ballad (for his then-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow) and then the drums crash in, cueing harmonies that cross the cheese of Journey with the astringency of Bowie’s “Heroes,” and elevating the song into an instant standard. Just this year, BTS covered it on MTV Unplugged.

Over his career, country firebrand Church has proved he can write great songs about great songs (see 2015’s “Record Year”), but he may never top this 2011 ballad, in which Springtseen’s music unlocks a flood of teenage memories. “I went to a concert when I was younger with a girl, and to this day, when I hear that artist, it’s the soundtrack to that girl,” Church recalled. “I never think about her any other time, except when that song is on. That’s where the ‘Springsteen’ came from, and he seemed to be the perfect guy to craft that story around because of my love for him.”

Metallica felt their sprawling 1988 LP, …And Justice for All, had been an epic end point, and wanted to go for something more concise. ​​“Writing a simple song is way fucking harder than writing a crazy-busy, sideways, 10-minute song,” drummer Lars Ulrich said. With AC/DC and Mötley Crüe producer Bob Rock pushing them to streamline their sound, they made 1991’s Metallica and its career-changing hit, “Enter Sandman.” Guitarist Kirk Hammett came up with the song’s riff while jamming alone late one night, and Ulrich helped him arrange it into a radio-ready mammoth.

“Brass in Pocket” is the first Number One U.K. hit of the Eighties, the eighth video played on MTV, and the song that launched the Pretenders into pop stardom. But when Chrissie Hynde first heard the finished version, which she was built around a riff by guitarist James Honeymoon-Scott, she hated it. “I said that would go out over my dead body,” the singer recalled in 2020. “I thought it sounded like it was trying to be a Motown song, but it didn’t quite get it. But now I like that song because it’s one of those songs that served me well.”

“People believe you can only catch the Holy Ghost in church,” DMX said in 1998. “I get it onstage.” Indeed, few artists in any genre could match the late, great Yonkers rapper’s raw, contagious intensity. The commercial peak of his fruitful collaboration with producer Swizz Beatz had everyone from street-corner hustlers to suburban soccer mom’s hollering its avalanche of a refrain. But along with his rib-cage-rattling growl, X’s harried energy proved universal. Who among us hasn’t had the feeling of “Y’all gon’ make me lose my mind/Up in here, up in here.”

“We were very raw,” singer David Johansen recalled. “We were really into confronting the audience: ‘Hey, you stupid bastards. Get up and dance.’” No song better captured the New York Dolls’ glammed-out R&B than “Personality Crisis,” the opening track on the group’s debut. Produced by Todd Rundgren during an eight-day session, “Crisis” was the trashy sound of a meltdown (“Frustration and heartache is what you got”); soon after, the Dolls fell victim to one themselves and dissolved amid a haze of drugs.

Kinks frontman Ray Davies was inspired to write “Lola” after hearing about a member of his Kinks’ crew who met a beautiful blonde at a Paris club and took her back to his hotel room. “In the morning, he saw the stubble growing on her chin,” Davies said in 2020. “So, he got a surprise!” The little anecdote grew into a romantic tale of a man that falls for a trans woman (or perhaps a cross-dresser) named Lola. This was radical stuff for the Brady Bunch era, but somehow the theme of the song slipped past many radio programmers and it became a worldwide hit.

While working on the album that would become Diana, guitarist-producer-writer Nile Rodgers said, “I went out to this [trans] club one night, the Gilded Grape. I’m at the urinal, and there are three or four Diana Rosses around me. The next day I told Bernard [Edwards, his partner], ‘Man, you won’t believe what happened last night,’ and he said, ‘Great, let’s write that.’” When Ross asked the producers if the song was as pro-gay as it sounded, Rodgers said, “We denied it.”

The idea for “I Like It” came from Atlantic CEO (and former DJ) Craig Kallman, who wanted a cut for Cardi’s debut, Invasion of Privacy, that emphasized her Puerto Rican roots. While he and producer J. White developed the backing track, Atlantic A&R rep Edgar Machuca recruited Latin urbano heroes J Balvin and Bad Bunny. The seven-month development process drew others, too, but it was Cardi B who turned “I Like It” into a one-of-a-kind spectacle. “I remember when I was six months pregnant doing the music video for the song,” she told Billboard. “But the outcome of it all was beautiful.”

For his third album as Childish Gambino, actor-writer-comedian-musician Donald Glover set aside the backpack rap of his early releases and attained the Seventies funk grail. Glover and Swedish co-producer Ludwig Göransson built the track atop a drumbeat of Glover’s and interpolated a bit of “I’d Rather Be With You” by P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins, making loads of space for Glover to debut a freakishly high falsetto many assumed must’ve been pitch-shifted. To be sure he’d nailed the right vibe, Glover debuted the track for customers in an Atlanta hair salon.

On an album of high emotional and musical drama — When the Pawn…, Apple’s knotty initial collaboration with producer Jon Brion — “Paper Bag” blows in on a warm breeze of swingy brushed drums and swelling horns, inspired, Apple has said, by a bag (actually plastic) she saw floating in the air and mistook for a dove. The song won Apple her second Grammy nomination in the Female Rock Performance category, and its public profile boomed when it was used in the movie hit Bridesmaids.

Inspired by the first flash of U.K. punk but uninterested in any of its clichés, London’s the Slits laid out their feminist vision on “Typical Girls,” a salvo against received gender tropes that caroms between peppy pop, punk, reggae, and even a bit of boogie-woogie jazz; “I used to say to the girls, ‘Sing in the same register of voice that you would use if you were shouting across a playground at school to someone,’” recalled guitarist Viv Albertine, whose boyfriend at the time, Mick Jones of the Clash, urged her to make the song more straightforward. Thankfully, the Slits didn’t listen.

Schlesinger and Collingwood met at Williams College in Massachusetts. “We played albums by bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. and had long conversations about what their daily lives must be like,” Collingwood told Rolling Stone in early 2020, after Schlesinger died due to complications related to Covid-19. They reconnected in New York in the mid-Nineties and made their debut “bouncy and sloppy and full of spirit,” as Collingwood recalled. It opened with “Radiation Vibe,” power-pop perfection for a post-Nirvana world, and one of the most charming minor hits of the alt-rock era.

“Untitled (How Does It Feel)” emerged during the three years of jam sessions for D’Angelo’s second album, Voodoo, channeling the Virginia R&B innovator’s love for Prince’s ballads. It inspired an iconic video that found him bare-chested, muscles rippling with sweat as he crooned sweet falsetto nothings directly into the camera. “He seemed like a very shy guy,” recalled director Paul Hunter, but “once he got in front of the camera, he was a very different person.”

This tale of jealousy and paranoia has become a millennial “Don’t Stop Believin’,” an anthem belted at karaoke parties and by 100,000-strong football-game crowds at Michigan Stadium. Singer Brandon Flowers drew on real-life romantic angst (at one point a jealous Flowers tracked down his paramour and found her with another man at a Vegas bar), while the Killers worked up the grand sweep of U2 and Oasis songs they were referencing in their music at the time. “It was a real rough thing,” Flowers said of the ex in question. “But we got ‘Mr. Brightside’ outta her.”

Robert Smith, who’s admitted to fudging the truth in interviews to keep himself interested while doing press, has shared several origin stories for “Pictures of You.” In one, he was inspired to write it after choosing to destroy all his personal photos; in another, he wrote it after finding a picture of his wife in the wreckage of a fire. The real story, however, hardly seems to matter when the end result is a masterclass of windblown goth-pop ecstasy like this, brimming with nostalgia, heartache, destruction, and desire.

Haggard started out imitating “Lefty” Frizzell and Jimmie Rodgers. But he found his own voice telling his own story; “Mama Tried” began by invoking his own fatherless childhood, eternally loving mother, and the actual time he’d done in jail (though his bid was three to 15 on a robbery charge, not “life without parole,” as he sang). For the recording, Haggard wanted to mix his hard-driving Bakersfield country sound with folk music — “Somewhere in between Peter, Paul, and Mary and Johnny Cash,” he later said. He ended up with the greatest fugitive anthem in country history.

“Up on the Roof” — a summertime song for city dwellers whose only getaways were the tar beaches at the top of their buildings — was written by the husband-and-wife team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, rising stars in New York’s Tin Pan Alley scene who had broken through with the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and had already written one Drifters hit (“Some Kind of Wonderful”). It was sung by Rudy Lewis, the third in the Drifters’ cavalcade of great lead voices; in 1970, King reclaimed the song as a recording artist with a wistful, downtempo version.

William DeVaughn was living in Washington, D.C., when he brought his composition to Omega Sound, a pay-to-play production studio in Philadelphia. When the company realized DeVaughn was talented, they hired producer John Davis to arrange a professional session — with excellent MSFB musicians like drummer Earl Young and guitarist Norman Harris — and sold it to independent label Chelsea Records. DeVaughn’s one-hit wonder has epitomized Seventies-hustle mentality ever since, thanks to his Curtis Mayfield-like croon and the evocative chorus, “Diamond in the back, sunroof top, diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean.”