The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

The Puerto Rican rapper was in San Juan when he heard a man shout, “Echa, mija, como te gusta la gasolina!” — a playful phrase lobbed at girls who would seek out the sleekest rides to get to parties. The line morphed into a ubiquitous chorus that ignited a global fervor for reggaeton. Veteran producer Luny Tunes drove up the intensity by adding the thrum of motors and the singer Glory’s voltaic call for “mas gasolina,” while Daddy Yankee delivered his breakneck verses with so much power that the song sounds like it could combust at any moment even decades later.

Hill’s debut solo single following the success of the Fugees’ The Score was a bit different from what fans had heard from the young star. “She wanted to bring some of that doo-wop swing essence to the song,” backup singer Lenesha Randolph recalled. Hill and her singers recorded it after dinner one night, channeling a barbershop-quartet style as Hill warns both men and women of being too concerned with sex, power, and appearances. It was a killer entrance for the then-23-year-old rapper-singer: The release became the first Number One single in the U.S. that was written, produced, and performed by one sole woman since Debbie Gibson’s “Foolish Beat” a decade earlier.

“Idioteque” is the foreboding, spellbinding centerpiece of Kid A, a squinting image of dystopia set to a glacially slamming beat. The song began as a 50-minute synth collage by Jonny Greenwood, which Thom Yorke digested, pulling out, as he later put it, “a section of about 40 seconds in the middle of it that was absolute genius.” From there, the band built a quaking glitch-core opus, driven by some of the most genuinely freaked-out vocals Yorke ever delivered. And somehow it still became a monster stadium-rock moment live.

The “seamstress for the band” of the lyrics was a real person: Maxine Feibelman, then the wife of lyricist Bernie Taupin. “I had been into ballet as a little girl, and sewed patches on Elton’s jackets and jeans,” she said. When Taupin and John had arrived in L.A. in late 1970, Feibelman so beguiled Taupin that he wrote the rapturous “Tiny Dancer” for her. John’s skyrocketing melody got a little help from Paul Buckmaster’s strings and from Rick Wakeman, soon to join prog-rockers Yes, who played organ. Nearly 30 years later, Almost Famous revived the song, which at the time wasn’t a hit, failing to reach the Top 40 in its truncated radio edit.

“The other songs on the chart were Katy Perry and the Jonas Brothers,” said M.I.A. “Then you saw ‘Paper Planes,’ and it’s cool because there’s hope: ‘Thank God the future’s here.’” With its gunshot and cash-register sound effects, producer Diplo’s brilliantly flipped sample of the Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” and M.I.A.’s gleeful boasts about running drugs and taking your money, “Paper Planes” sure didn’t sound like Katy Perry. “[I was] thinking that really the worst thing that anyone can say [to someone these days] is some shit like, ‘What I wanna do is come and get your money,’” M.I.A. said. “America is so obsessed with money, I’m sure they’ll get it.” Sure enough, it became a surprise hit.

Kendrick Lamar dropped “Alright” in the spring of 2015 — a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was just starting to gather momentum. The song instantly became part of that movement — a jazzy political protest, but also a statement of rage and hope in the face of oppression. “Alright” was a standout on his epochal album To Pimp a Butterfly, but it has just gained resonance over the years. “It was a lot goin’ on, and still to this day, there’s a lot going on,” Lamar said. “I wanted to approach it as more uplifting — but aggressive. Not playing the victim, but still having that ‘We strong,’ you know?” That “we strong” spirit is at the heart of “Alright.”

Sinuous, paranoid, and omnipresent: The single that made Jackson the biggest star since Elvis Presley was a denial of a paternity suit, and it spent seven weeks at Number One on the pop charts. Jackson came up with the irresistible rhythm track on his home drum machine, and he nailed the vocals in one take. “I knew the song was going to be big,” Jackson said. “I was really absorbed in writing it.” How absorbed? Jackson said he was thinking about “Billie Jean” while riding in his Rolls-Royce down the Ventura Freeway in California — and didn’t notice the car was on fire.

The Temptations were sharing a bill with Smokey Robinson and his group the Miracles at Harlem’s Apollo Theater when Robinson took time out to cut the rhythm track for a new song. After they heard it, the Tempts begged him to let them record the song rather than the Miracles, as he had been planning. Robinson relented and chose the throaty tenor David Ruffin to sing lead, the first time he had done so with the group. The Tempts rehearsed the song that week at the Apollo, then recorded it back home in Detroit on December 21st, 1964.

Marley had already recorded a version of this freedom hymn with his band when Island Records chief Chris Blackwell suggested he try it as an acoustic-style folk tune. Inspired by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Marley’s lyrics offer up music as an antidote to slavery, both mental and physical. “I would love to do more like that,” Marley said a few months before his death from cancer in 1981, at age 36. As the final track on his final album, “Redemption Song” stands as his epitaph.

The pinnacle of Joy Division’s gloom-ridden Mancunian post-punk vision still hits like an ice pick aimed at your soul. Depressed over his collapsing marriage, singer Ian Curtis actually came up with the title as a sardonic response to Captain and Tenille’s 1975 pop hit “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and, in a fittingly creepy gesture, even cut it in the same studio where “Love Will Keep Us Together” had been recorded. “Ian’s influence seemed to be madness and insanity,” said guitarist Bernard Sumner. The song would be Joy Division’s last single, released weeks after Curtis’ death by suicide, a fact that makes the haunting chorus even more affecting.

“All Along the Watchtower” had just been released on Dylan’s John Wesley Harding when Hendrix began tinkering with the song at Electric Lady Studios in New York on January 21st, 1968. Using the line “And the wind began to howl” as a springboard, Hendrix constructed a tumultuous four-part solo that transformed Dylan’s concise foreboding into an electric hurricane. Dylan acknowledged Hendrix’s masterstroke: Dylan’s subsequent versions of “All Along the Watchtower,” including the treatment on his 1974 reunion tour with the Band and the live LP Before the Flood, emulated Hendrix’s cover.

The ATLien hip-hop visionaries dropped “B.O.B.” when the world was still reeling from the innovations of Aquemini. But André 3000 and Big Boi were not standing still. “Everybody’s been doing music like they all have the same formula: E = MC2,” Big Boi said at the time. So Outkast made sure nobody could fit “B.O.B.” into any formula — manic drums, headbanging rock guitar, DJ scratches, a gospel chorus. “It was an idea before it was a song,” said André, who was inspired by the frenetic beats of U.K. drum-and-bass, which he and Big Boi heard at a party in London. “It was the tempo I was looking for, so I thought about how to Americanize it.”

A few days after his star-making set at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Redding stayed on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, while he played the Fillmore in San Francisco. He wrote the first verse to “Dock of the Bay” on that boat, then completed the song with guitarist Steve Cropper in Memphis. Just a few days later, Redding was on tour with the Bar-Kays when his private plane crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, Wisconsin. While divers searched for Redding’s body, Cropper kept his mind busy by mixing “Dock of the Bay.” On December 11th, 1967, the plane was pulled out of the lake, with Redding’s body still strapped into the co-pilot’s seat.

The Purple Rain soundtrack album was completed, and so was the movie. But Prince just couldn’t stop making music. And at the very last minute, he added a brand-new song: “When Doves Cry.” Even by Prince standards, it’s eccentric; after single-handedly recording the stark, brokenhearted song in the studio, he decided to erase the bass track from the final mix. According to the engineer, Prince said, “Nobody would have the balls to do this. You just wait — they’ll be freaking.” He was right. Prince made it the soundtrack’s first single — and 1984’s most avant-garde pop record became his first American Number One hit, keeping Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” out of the top spot.

Jack White was futzing about on his guitar during soundcheck on one of the White Stripes’ Australian tours when he stumbled upon the weightiest hard-rock riff this side of Jimmy Page. “I didn’t have lyrics for it until later on, and I was just calling it ‘Seven Nation Army’ — that’s what I called the Salvation Army when I was a kid,” White once said. “So that was just a way for me to remember which [riff] I was talking about.” By the time he finished the lyrics, which addressed people gossiping about who he and his ex-wife, White Stripes drummer Meg White, were dating, he gave the term new life: “I’m gonna fight ’em all/A seven nation army couldn’t hold me back.” Same goes for the riff.

“I’d been singing ‘Tutti-Frutti’ for years,” said Richard, “but it never struck me as a song you’d record.” Producer Robert Blackwell asked Dorothy LaBostrie, a young songwriter who had been pestering him for work, to clean up the filthy original lyrics (“Tutti-Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it/You can grease it, make it easy”). “Fifteen minutes before the session was to end, the chick comes in and puts these little trite lyrics in front of me,” said Blackwell. Richard cleaned up his own “Awop-bop-a-loo-mop a-good-goddamn” and loaded LaBostrie’s doggerel with sexual dynamite.

In mid-1965, Brown was locked in a contract struggle with King Records, but when he learned King was nearly bankrupt, he threw the label a bone: a song he’d recorded a few months earlier, yelling “This is a hit!” as the tape rolled. Arguably the first funk record, it’s driven by the empty space between beats as much as by Brown’s bellow and guitarist Jimmy Nolen’s ice-chipper scratch. In a stroke of postproduction genius (you can hear the original recording on the Grammy-winning Star Time box set), Brown sliced off the intro to have the song start with a face-smashing horn blast, and sped it up just enough so it sounded like an urgent bulletin from the future.

“Johnny B. Goode” was the first rock & roll hit about rock & roll stardom. The title character is Chuck Berry — “more or less,” as he told Rolling Stone in 1972. “The original words [were], of course, ‘That little colored boy could play.’ I changed it to ‘country boy’ — or else it wouldn’t get on the radio.” “Johnny B. Goode” is the supreme example of Berry’s poetry in motion. The rhythm section rolls with freight-train momentum, while Berry’s stabbing, single-note lick in the chorus sounds, as he put it, “like a-ringin’ a bell” — a perfect description of how rock & roll guitar can make you feel on top of the world.

“If you don’t know, now you know,” Biggie announces in “Juicy” — and this was the hit that guaranteed everyone around the world would know. The Notorious B.I.G. made “Juicy” his first pop shot, from his 1994 debut, Ready to Die, repping Brooklyn over a sample of Mtume’s lush Eighties oral-sex jam “Juicy Fruit.” At a time when East Coast hip-hop was too busy playing D against the West, Biggie’s lyrical confidence was a game-changer, revitalizing New York rap. He boasts about going from dreaming of stardom to rocking sold-out shows, and dressing his mom up in mink — the first rush of “mo’ money” before the “mo’ problems” kicked in. “I told him, ‘No landlord dissed us!’” said Voletta Wallace. “He said, ‘Mom, I was just writing a rags-to-riches kinda story.’”

The riff came to Keith Richards in a dream one night in May 1965, in his motel room in Clearwater, Florida, on the Rolling Stones’ third U.S. tour. He woke up and grabbed a guitar and a cassette machine. Richards played the run of notes once, then fell back to sleep. “On the tape,” he said later, “you can hear me drop the pick, and the rest is snoring.” Jagger later said that “Satisfaction” was “my view of the world, my frustration with everything.” Inspired by that riff and the title line, also Richards’ idea, Jagger wrote the words — a litany of disgust with “America, its advertising syndrome, the constant barrage” — in 10 minutes, by the motel pool the day after Richards’ dream.

“I’ve always been fascinated with aristocracy,” Lorde told Rolling Stone around the time “Royals” came out of nowhere to take the Number One spot on the U.S. charts. Written “in like half an hour” by a 15-year-old New Zealander taking influence from the diamond-encrusted swagger of Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne as well as the muted electronic work of artists like James Blake, “Royals” was maximal minimalism, a mumbled thunderbolt of playful resistance against rap and pop’s obsession with wealth and status. As Lorde said later, “I was definitely poking fun at a lot of things people take to be normal.”

At the intersection of past and future West Coast hip-hop sits Dre’s debut solo single, a smooth and inimitable kickback classic that would help define his career following the demise of N.W.A. In a radio interview, the producer and rapper revealed that the song originally sampled a track by Boz Scaggs before he settled on the bass line from Leon Haywood’s 1975 hit “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You.” Snoop was in jail while Dre was recording, so he had to originally record his parts over the phone. “I really wanted this demo done, so he called in and I taped the receiver of the phone to the mic,” Dre recalled. “You can hear jail sounds in the back.”

Talking Heads had a difficult time bringing “Once in a Lifetime” to life. The song began during jams at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas as the band worked on its groundbreaking Afro-funk influenced album Remain in Light. Producer and co-writer Brian Eno wanted to ditch the tune altogether until David Byrne started performing his “Same as it ever was” monologue like an evangelical preacher, which somehow sharpened his message about questioning identity and reality. “We’re largely unconscious,” the singer once said. “You know, we operate half-awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven’t really stopped to ask ourselves, ‘How did I get here?’”

This song’s four and a half minutes took three and a half months to cut. Aiming for the impact of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, Springsteen included strings, glockenspiel, multiple keyboards — and more than a dozen guitar tracks. “I had enormous ambitions for it,” said Springsteen. “I wanted to make the greatest rock record I’d ever heard.” Springsteen’s lyrics told a story of young lovers on the highways of New Jersey. “I don’t know how important the settings are,” Springsteen said. “It’s the idea behind the settings. It could be New Jersey, it could be California, it could be Alaska.”

One of the many searing moments on Mitchell’s landmark Blue, “A Case of You” unsparingly grapples with conflicted feelings and entangled identities. The male character in the song is apparently a composite of several men in her life during that time, notably Leonard Cohen, and her partner at the time of its recording, James Taylor, who joins in on guitar, with Mitchell herself on dulcimer. She later dismissed “A Case of You” as “a doormat song,” yet it remains one of her most beloved. Prince, who once said that “Joni’s music should be taught in school, if just from a literature standpoint,” covered it several times during his career.

West had always generated controversy and criticism, but after he interrupted Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs, his public image was at an all-time low. So he took off for a self-imposed exile in Hawaii and recorded his nine-minute masterpiece — a toast to the “douchebags” and an unguarded reflection on his image and intimacy issues. “The song sounds like it’s talking about a girl — could also be talking about my relationship with society or my relationship with the fans or anyone who I let down or people who had to defend me that really love me,” West said. He was so impressed with Pusha T’s guest verse that he signed him to his GOOD Music label and eventually made the Clipse member president of the label.

“A Day in the Life” was one of the last true Lennon-McCartney collaborations: John Lennon wrote the opening and closing sections, and Paul McCartney contributed the “Woke up/Fell out of bed” middle. For the climax, they hired 40 musicians, dressed them in tuxedos and funny hats, and told them they had 15 bars to ascend from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest. “Listen to those trumpets — they’re freaking out,” McCartney said. The final piano chord concluded Sgt. Pepper and made rock’s possibilities seem infinite.

After a coke-fried spell in Los Angeles, Bowie was detoxing in Berlin when he spied two lovers having a rendezvous by the Berlin Wall. Said Bowie, “I thought, of all the places to meet in Berlin, why pick a bench underneath a guard turret on the wall?” Imagining the story behind their affair, Bowie wrote his most compassionate song ever. The song builds for six minutes, with Bowie setting his ragged, impassioned croon over a throbbing groove consisting of Eno’s humming synths, Robert Fripp’s guitar, and producer Tony Visconti banging on a metal ashtray that was lying around the studio. Bowie wails with crazed soul about two doomed lovers finding a moment of redemption together — just for one day.

Phil Spector rehearsed this song with Ronnie Bennett (the only Ronette to sing on it) for weeks, but that didn’t stop him from doing 42 takes before he was satisfied. Aided by a full orchestra (as well as a young Cher, who sang backup vocals), Spector created a lush, echo-laden sound that was the Rosetta Stone for studio pioneers such as the Beatles and Brian Wilson, who calls this his favorite song. “The things Phil was doing were crazy and exhausting,” said Larry Levine, Spector’s engineer. “But that’s not the sign of a nut. That’s genius.”

One of pop’s first protest songs is also one of its most profoundly disturbing. Written by a Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, its lyrics evoke the horrors of a lynching (“Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”), and its languid melody conjures the unsettling quiet of a Southern backwoods night. The song was so controversial in the late Thirties that Holiday, a Columbia Records artist, had to find another label to release it (an indie owned by Billy Crystal’s uncle). “‘Strange Fruit’ is still relevant, because Black people are still being lynched,” Andra Day, who sang it in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, told Rolling Stone last year. “It’s not just a Southern breeze. We’re seeing that everywhere.”

Swedish disco queen Robyn captured all the agony and ecstasy of twirling alone in a corner of the dance floor, spinning around in circles, and losing yourself in the beat for a moment of solitary triumph. “I think ‘Dancing on My Own’ is totally from me just being in clubs and going out and dancing a lot, and seeing people and thinking, ‘What are they doing here?’” she said later. Written with Stockholm producer Patrik Berger, the song made Robyn an iconic cult hero. But it also became the template for a whole generation of young songwriters, from Taylor Swift to Lorde, looking for the ideal glitter-and-sobs cocktail. “This song, to me, is perfect,” Lorde wrote. “Joyous even when a heart is breaking.”

John Lennon wrote “Imagine” in his bedroom at Tittenhurst Park, his estate in Ascot, England, early one morning in 1971. “It’s not like he thought, ‘Oh, this can be an anthem,’” Yoko Ono recalled years later. “Imagine” was “just what John believed: that we are all one country, one world, one people. He wanted to get that idea out.” Lennon admitted that “Imagine” was “virtually the Communist Manifesto.” But the elementary beauty of his melody, the warm composure in his voice, and the poetic touch of co-producer Phil Spector — who bathed Lennon’s performance in gentle strings and summer-breeze echo — emphasized the song’s fundamental humanity. Lennon knew he had written something special. In one of his last interviews, he declared “Imagine” to be as good as anything he had written with the Beatles.

On the 1999 tour in 1983, Prince found himself sharing arenas with Bob Seger, and he challenged himself to write a Seger-like ballad, but instead of “Night Moves,” he channeled a heartrending meditation on love, trust, God, and purple rain. “It was so different,” the Revolution’s Bobby Z. said. “It was almost country. It was almost rock. It was almost gospel.” The version of the song on the Purple Rain soundtrack is actually a live recording from 1983 that Prince later polished into a transcendent anthem worthy of a movie title. After the film came out, the song and its jaw-dropping guitar solo got only bigger: The performance on the 1985 home video Prince and the Revolution: Live stretches to almost 19 minutes — and it is stunning.

The 1970s, rock’s most grandiose decade, never got more grandiose than here. “Bohemian Rhapsody” contains a reported 180 vocal parts and spans rock, opera, heavy metal, and pop — all in six minutes. But for as elegant as it sounds, recording it was a literal mess. Freddie Mercury taped scraps of paper containing his own bizarre musical notations to his piano and simply started pounding out chords for his bandmates to follow. Somehow he pieced it all together beautifully, singing about killing a man (possibly a metaphor for obliterating the heterosexual image of himself) and commedia dell’arte characters like Scaramouche. Recording technology was so taxed by the song that some tapes became virtually transparent from so many overdubs, but Queen had created something that embodied the absurd tragedy and humor of human existence.

Producer Rich Harrison had trouble convincing friends and peers that the beat to “Crazy in Love” had much potential. So he added a five-alarm horn blast taken from Seventies soulsters the Chi-Lites’ “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So),” as well as his own instrumental flourishes, and kept it at the ready for the right moment and the right artist — “Until I got the call from B,” he later said. As the single that inaugurated Beyoncé’s solo career, the song emphatically announced her arrival as the era’s dominant pop power. Jay-Z’s killer verse was added at the last minute. Bey and Jay had just started dating at the time, and the song’s lyrics and head-over-heels delivery reflected what she described as “the first step of a relationship right before you let go.”

In 1963, the Beatles gave themselves an ultimatum: “We’re not going to America till we’ve got a Number One record,” Paul McCartney declared. So he and John Lennon went to the home of the parents of Jane Asher, McCartney’s girlfriend, where — “one on one, eyeball to eyeball,” as Lennon later put it — they wrote “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” an irresistibly erotic come-on framed as a chaste, bashful request. The lightning-bolt energy of their collaboration ran through the band’s performance. Rush-released in America the day after Christmas, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit Number One in the states on February 1st, 1964. When the bandmates got the news in Paris, during a three-week stand there, they partied all night.

After the Kinks’ first burst of British Invasion pop success fizzled, Ray Davies really needed to write another hit. But instead, he wrote “Waterloo Sunset.” It’s a delicate guitar ballad about a solitary man who watches the world from his window, gazing on a couple of lovers who meet at a dismal London train station. For Davies, it was so personal he didn’t even dare show the lyrics to the other Kinks until he recorded his vocal. As he said, “It was like an extract from a diary nobody was allowed to read.” Yet it became his most beloved creation. You’d never know from the song what a dump Waterloo Station is — a tribute to Davies’ power to find beauty in the mundane.

The Stones channeled the emotional wreckage of the late Sixties on a song that Keith Richards wrote in 20 minutes. The intro, strummed on an electric-acoustic guitar modeled on a Chuck Berry favorite, conjures an unparalleled aura of dread. Singer Merry Clayton brings down Armageddon with a soul-wracked wail: “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.” The song surfaced days after Meredith Hunter’s murder at the Altamont music festival. “That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really,” Mick Jagger said in 1995. “It’s apocalypse.” Richards later said that his guitar fell apart on the last take, “as if by design.”

Stevie Wonder debuted this hard blast of funk live while opening for the Rolling Stones in the summer of 1972, intent on expanding his audience. The 22-year-old former child star had written it at a drum set, humming the other parts to himself. Wonder had initially intended for Jeff Beck to record the song, but Berry Gordy wouldn’t let him give it away. It became the first single from Talking Book — and Wonder’s first Number One hit in nearly a decade. “A lot of people, especially Black folks, let superstition rule their lives,” Wonder said. “This is crazy. The worst thing is, the more you believe in it, the more bad things happen to you.”

“It’s very emotional, always a bit of a choker with me,” said Paul McCartney of this Pet Sounds ballad. The night McCartney and John Lennon first heard Pet Sounds, at a London party, they wrote “Here, There and Everywhere,” which is influenced by “God Only Knows.” Carl Wilson’s understated lead vocal is note-perfect, but it’s the arrangement of horns, sleigh bells, strings, and accordion that gives “God” its heavenly feel. Brian Wilson was fascinated by spirituality and said this song came out of prayer sessions in the studio. “We made it a religious ceremony,” he said of recording Pet Sounds. The only problem: The use of the word “God” in the title scared off some radio programmers.