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The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

For the first time in 17 years, we’ve completely remade our list of the best songs ever. More than 250 artists, writers, and industry figures helped us choose a brand-new list full of historic favourites, world-changing anthems, and new classics

Photo Illustration by Sean McCabe. Photographs used within illustration by Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images, 3; Paul Natkin/WireImage; Val Wilmer/Redferns/Getty Images; Theo Wargo/Getty Images; Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; C Flanigan/Getty Images; Scott Dudelson/Getty Images; Gie Knaeps/Getty Images; Emma McIntyre/Getty Images; Steven Nunez; STILLZ

In 2004, Rolling Stone published its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It’s one of the most widely read stories in our history, viewed hundreds of millions of times on this site. But a lot has changed since 2004; back then the iPod was relatively new, and Billie Eilish was three years old. So we’ve decided to give the list a total reboot. To create the new version of the RS 500 we convened a poll of more than 250 artists, musicians, and producers — from Angelique Kidjo to Zedd, Sam Smith to Megan Thee Stallion, M. Ward to Bill Ward — as well as figures from the music industry and leading critics and journalists. They each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs, and we tabulated the results.

How We Made the List and Who Voted

Nearly 4,000 songs received votes. Where the 2004 version of the list was dominated by early rock and soul, the new edition contains more hip-hop, modern country, indie rock, Latin pop, reggae, and R&B. More than half the songs here — 254 in all — weren’t present on the old list, including a third of the Top 100. The result is a more expansive, inclusive vision of pop, music that keeps rewriting its history with every beat.

From Rolling Stone US

156

The Kingsmen, ‘Louie Louie’

A blast of raw guitars and half-intelligible shouting recorded for $52, the Kingsmen’s cover of Richard Berry’s R&B song hit Number Two in 1963 — thanks in part to supposedly pornographic lyrics that drew the attention of the FBI. The Portland, Oregon, group accidentally rendered the decidedly noncontroversial lyrics (about a sailor trying to get home to see his lady) indecipherable by crowding around a single microphone. “I was yelling at a mic far away,” singer Jack Ely told Rolling Stone. “I always thought the controversy was record-company hype.”

155

The Strokes, ‘Last Nite’

Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas was inspired to come up with “Last Nite” after gorging himself on the music of the Velvet Underground, giving the band an anthem that brought them from the clubs of New York to enormous festival sites all over the world. Many critics pointed out that it borrowed generously from Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” but it hardly mattered. “People would say, ‘You know that song “American Girl” by Tom Petty?’” Casablancas said. “‘Don’t you think it sounds a little like that?’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, we ripped it off. Where you been?’”

154

Howlin’ Wolf, ‘Spoonful’

Though this earthy Chicago-blues classic has been covered plenty, no one has sunk their teeth as deeply into it and as hungrily as Wolf did in 1960. While some thought the spoon might have been a drug reference, songwriter Willie Dixon, Chess Records’ in-house jack of all trades, has disavowed that notion, saying, “People who think ‘Spoonful’ was about heroin are mostly people with heroin ideas.” What’s more, Wolf often waved an oversize cooking spoon in front of his crotch while performing the song, in case anyone wondered what he hoped to provide a heaping helping of.

153

Rick James, ‘Super Freak’

James was nearly done with his 1981 LP, Street Songs, when one day in the studio, he started noodling around on the bass and singing random lines like “She’s a very kinky girl.” He didn’t give it a second thought, until a bandmate told him to keep going. “Made it up on the spot,” James recalled in his memoir, Glow. “It just kinda grew out of me.” He called in the Temptations to help him sing the harmonies. “It’s not as funky as my usual stuff,” he told them. “But maybe that’ll mean white people will dance to it.” It also meant the biggest hit of his career, a Grammy winner for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, and a huge payday when MC Hammer sampled it for “U Can’t Touch This.”

152

Creedence Clearwater Revival, ‘Proud Mary’

“Proud Mary” began as a phrase in Fogerty’s three-ring-binder notebook. He didn’t know what to do with it until the day in 1968 when his honorable-discharge papers came in the mail from the Army, meaning he wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam. He then ran into his apartment, picked up his Rickenbacker, and the song poured out of him in a state of euphoria over the course of just one hour. “I knew I had entered the land of greatness,” Fogerty wrote in his memoir, Fortunate Son. “Far above anything I had even thought about.” Two years later, Ike and Tina Turner completely reinvented the song as a funk epic.

151

The Shirelles, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’

After a few minor Shirelles hits, Scepter Records founder Florence Greenberg asked King and Goffin to write the group a song. On the piano in Greenberg’s office, King finished a song the team had been working on. “I remember giving her baby a bottle while Carole was writing the song,” Greenberg said. Lead singer Shirley Owens initially found “Tomorrow” too countryish for the group, but Luther Dixon’s production changed her mind. King’s devotion to the song was so strong that she replaced a subpar percussionist and played kettledrum herself. With its forthright depiction of a sexual relationship, it became the first girl-group record to go Number One.