The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Never has geek been so chic as in Weezer’s 1994 breakout single, “Buddy Holly.” Written for frontman Rivers Cuomo’s girlfriend, the poppy ode to nerdy romance was almost left off the band’s self-titled debut, also known as the Blue Album, due to Cuomo and now-ex-member Matt Sharp’s reticence. “We had the sense that it could be taken as a novelty song, and people aren’t going to take the album seriously,” Sharp told Rolling Stone. After producer Ric Ocasek heard the receptionist at the recording studio humming it, he insisted they keep it in.

One of Motown’s most rousing anthems, “I Can’t Help Myself” was inspired by songwriter Lamont Dozier’s grandfather, who’d call the women his hairdresser wife fixed up “sugar pie” and “honey bunch.” During the recording, engineer Harold Taylor recalled, “People were banging on the door of the studio; they were so ecstatic about what they heard.” Nevertheless, Levi Stubbs asked Brian Holland if he could do another take. Holland promised him they’d do it soon — and Stubbs’ first pass hit Number One.

Shortly after Gaga had established herself as a star, she catapulted to a next level of weirdness with this Nadir “RedOne” Khayat production, which drew upon the electronic music Gaga had been inundated with while touring Europe. “I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much” is how she summed up the idea behind the song. Fittingly, she debuted the hit-to-be at Alexander McQueen’s show at Paris Fashion Week.

The primal terror in the Mississippi bluesman’s voice, and his mystifying slide guitar playing, transfixed the Sixties generation of British rockers: “I could take the music only in very small measures because it was so intense,” said Eric Clapton. Recorded during a session at a San Antonio hotel room in 1936, two years before Johnson was murdered at 27, “Cross Road Blues” is a mythmaking statement of spiritual desolation and scorched-earth betrayal — even if the legend that it’s about Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his monster guitar chops is, as far as we know, apocryphal.

Nobody beats the Biz (1964-2021), an impossibly good-natured DJ, rapper, producer, human beatboxer, and hip-hop personality who broke big with this ode to the friend zone off his second album. Built on a fat beat, plinking piano, and his charmingly off-key singing, “Just a Friend” interpolates Freddie Scott’s 1968 song “(You) Got What I Need” as Biz warbles about a love that will never come to pass. It was based on real life. As he told Rolling Stone in 2000, “I was talking to this girl from L.A., and every time I called her, this dude was at her house, and she’d say, ‘Oh, he’s just a friend.’ I hated that.”

Growing up in San Francisco, Carlos Santana was shaped by the city’s psychedelic explosion. “You cannot take LSD and not find your voice,” he once claimed, “because there is nowhere to hide.” And while his early heroes were bluesmen, he changed history with this foundational Latin-rock reworking of a 1962 salsa number by Cuban percussionist Tito Puente. Santana kept the original’s cha-cha pulse but replaced its horns with Greg Rolie’s organ and Carlos’ lysergic guitar flares. Said Puente years later, “He put our music, Latin rock, around the world, man.”

In the late Nineties, Mannie Fresh’s diamond-sharp productions for Cash Money Records helped put New Orleans in the center of the hip-hop map. The title of this hit was so reminiscent of local artist DJ Jubilee’s single “Back That Thang Up” that Jubilee sued (unsuccessfully) for infringement, and the beat rode the “Triggerman” rhythm that is foundational to New Orleans bounce. Juvenile freestyled his best shit-talking bounce rhymes, and Lil Wayne shut it down with a “drop it like it’s hot” hook. As Mannie said, “[He] immediately was just like, ‘Shit, I’m getting a piece of this.’”

The radiant first hit of the Go-Go’s was influenced, according to writer Jane Wiedlin, by “the Buzzcocks and Sixties girl-group stuff.” It was also inspired by a clandestine relationship she was having with Terry Hall, of U.K. ska group the Specials, who got a co-writing credit because Wiedlin based the lyrics on some poetry he’d written her in a letter. “It was pretty personal,” Wiedlin recalled. “I mean he had a fiancee at the time — nowadays I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole, but I was 19, and I was like ‘fiancee shmiancee.’”

The desolation of spirit in Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” is so heavy, so apparent, that it’s almost hard to listen to. But that despair is exactly what drew Johnny Cash to sing it on his TV variety show in 1970. Kristofferson cut his own stunning studio version that same year for his debut album, Kristofferson. Cash’s interpretation, more shuffling and accessible, is the one most listeners turn to, but listen to them back-to-back if you can, and marvel at how Kristofferson’s lyrics about being hung over, alone, and desperate shake your soul.

Jackson’s socially conscious Number Two hit came together late in the sessions for her blockbuster LP Rhythm Nation 1814. Co-producer Jimmy Jam recalled being in the studio and “switching between MTV and CNN. Watching music videos on one side and watching atrocities on the other. Somehow they all merged together. The idea for ‘Rhythm Nation’ was you can dance, but we can also do something more intelligent.” When Jam heard Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” at a restaurant, he raced to the studio to sample it.

Mayfield’s irresistible “Move On Up” was politically empowering, morally demanding, and effortlessly propulsive, powered by swinging horns and tangy congas — the nine-minute LP version, with its powerful drum break, laid a foundation for disco and hip-hop alike. Mayfield’s message was just as steadfast: that pride and dignity were paramount for Black America to rise. “I’m not trying to say anything to make you think, ‘Well, this is the way, this is the only way,’” Mayfield said. “I’m trying to cover the whole subject.”

From the start, this pledge of wifely devotion, the first song Wynette ever co-wrote, was a cultural lightning rod. Feminists recoiled from its pledge of unquestioning fidelity in the Seventies, and Hillary Clinton defined herself a modern woman by slamming the song during Bill Clinton’s first presidential run. But the recording itself steamrolls over ideological objections, as the catch in Wynette’s voice on the verses gives way to a vocal swell that rises to meet the epic sweep of Billy Sherrill’s production.

Shortly after Gabriel quit Genesis in 1975, he climbed to the top of Little Solsbury Hill in Somerset, England, to reflect on his life-changing decision. It inspired his debut solo song, in which he explained to fans why he felt the need to go out on his own. Musically, it was a departure too, a pastoral tune with a 12-string acoustic guitar lead that was pointedly different from Genesis’ prog-rock. The song has since become ubiquitous in movies and film trailers. “Maybe I’ve let it go too much,” he admitted to Rolling Stone in 2011.

“We were looking for a song that would grab people’s attention,” said Animals singer Eric Burdon. They found it with the old American folk ballad “The House of the Rising Sun.” In 1962, Bob Dylan had sung this grim tale of a Southern girl trapped in a New Orleans whorehouse. The Animals, from the English coal town of Newcastle, changed the gender in the lyrics, and keyboardist Alan Price created the new arrangement (and grabbed a composer’s credit). Price also added an organ solo inspired by Jimmy Smith’s hit “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Songwriter Jim Weatherly originally composed this as “Midnight Plane to Houston,” only to change it for Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mom) to something “more R&B … in order to get it onto Black radio.” Weatherly had already penned “Neither One of Us,” Knight and the Pips’ Number Two hit, and when they heard “Midnight Train,” they took it to the top. “I never really imagined writing R&B songs,” Weatherly admitted. “I really thought I was writing country songs.” It reflected the times; the 1970s were the first decade since after World War I in which more African Americans were moving to the South than leaving it.

A murder ballad with a modern, feminist twist, this jaunty song about poisoning an abusive husband spawned disparate reactions. Some stations banned it, apparently concerned that it would spawn a rash of hubby offings; others shared the number for domestic-abuse hotlines. When the label reps listened to the Chicks’ Fly album, though, they were more concerned with another song: “Sin Wagon,” with its reference to “mattress dancing.” “You can’t say [that],” Natalie Maines recalls their manager’s relayed message from the execs, “but they love the song about premeditated first-degree murder.”

Singer Hope Sandoval and guitarist Dave Roback, the prime movers behind Mazzy Star, were active in the 1980s neo-psychedelic Paisley Underground scene in Los Angeles. After Sandoval replaced singer Kendra Smith in the band Opal, David Roback and Sandoval reconstituted the band under the name Mazzy Star. Their second album yielded this spaced-out hit, perhaps dream pop’s ultimate statement of blurry desire. “We’re not so concerned about the outside world,” said Roback. “[Each song] is its own world unto itself.”

“It’s just about people and what they’re expected to act like,” Kurt Cobain said. “The lines in the song are really contradictory. They’re kind of a rebuttal to each other.” The song is driven by a simple riff that Butch Vig goosed with a flanged, subaquatic guitar effect. Cobain apparently lifted it from a 1984 song by U.K. art-metal band Killing Joke, who Dave Grohl paid back 12 years later by drumming on their 2003 album. In the wake of Cobain’s suicide, though, the most haunting lyric would become, “And I swear that I don’t have a gun.”

The Eighties’ major male R&B balladeer’s solo debut was financed in part from money he made singing jingles for KFC and 7UP. Vandross had been pushed to do his own thing by Roberta Flack, for whom he’d sung background. Said Vandross: “She said, ‘Luther, you’re too comfortable sitting on that stool singing “ooh and aaah.”‘ Roberta was single-handedly responsible for me starting my own career.” What pushed her was hearing the demo of “Never Too Much” — one of the most buoyant love songs of the Eighties, with Vandross’ high notes as delicate as soap bubbles.

When Pharrell Williams volunteered to appear on Daft Punk’s fourth album, he told them he’d been thinking about Chic legend Nile Rodgers musically; fortuitously, the French dance producers could play him a track they had on hand that they’d made with Rodgers himself. The result was “Get Lucky,” which, as the lead single from their disco-flavored album Random Access Memories, rose like a phoenix to become the song that defined its year. “I think the robots are leading,” Williams told Rolling Stone. “Daft Punk, they’re definitely leading.”

Mitchell’s 1974 album, Court and Spark, her biggest-selling ever, was also the one that she held the tightest amount of musical control over to date. “I guided everything into place on Court and Spark — even though I didn’t play it, I sang it, and then they played it from that, and it was pretty much as writ,” she said. (Her next album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, was looser and more jazz-oriented.) “Help Me,” recorded with the jazz group Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, features one of Mitchell’s sultriest vocals and most brocaded arrangements, inspiring Prince, 13 years later, to pay the song lyrical tribute in his “Ballad of Dorothy Parker.”

Hooker, whose canny blues boogie became a root integer for early rock & roll, said this swinging, swaggering bit of primal thump was inspired by his inability to get to a regular gig on time. “There was a young lady named Luilla,” Hooker said. “She was a bartender [at the Apex Bar in Detroit]. I’d always be late, and whenever I’d come in she’d point at me and say, ‘Boom Boom, you’re late again.’ One night she said, ‘Boom boom, I’m gonna shoot you down.’ She gave me a song, but she didn’t know it.” Keith Richards said of Hooker, “Even Muddy Waters was sophisticated next to him.” That was a compliment.

Delectably arranged, transportingly sung, this may be the definitive Morrison song — an evocation of “the days of old” that feels like a lover’s whisper. The highlight of 1970’s classic Moondance, “Into the Mystic” benefited from a new, more organic way of recording for him: “It was more like working with an actual band rather than a bunch of session guys,” Morrison said. As for the lyrics, he’d admit, “So many of my songs from that Seventies period, I haven’t a clue what they’re about. A lot of the time, I was just picking up on a vibe.”

Orbison said he wrote this lush, dreamy ballad after an encounter with an old flame: “Whether I was physically crying or just crying inside is the same thing.” His near-operatic performance culminated in a high, wailing note, which Orbison never lost the capacity to hit before his death, in 1988. “He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business,” Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles. “He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.”

The first great British reggae band — and some of the style’s finest songwriters — made their Island Records debut with this incendiary look at the rising tide of racist violence in late-Seventies Britain: “The Ku Klux Klan/Here to stamp out Black man.” They underlined the lyric by actually performing the song live — including a memorable BBC appearance — wearing white Klan headgear. “The hoods seemed extreme at the time, but that’s what we are in a way,” vocalist Michael Riley said. “When we wore them, people started questioning what the song was about instead of just dancing to it.”

Helen Adu’s small but fully inhabited range has been her secret weapon from the beginning. “I decided that if I was gonna sing, I would sing how I speak, because it’s important to be yourself,” she said. Her voice cracks before she reaches the first chorus of this 1992 hit, playing up the romantic drama of the lyric. Even better, so does Stuart Matthewman’s guitar; in the middle of this otherwise mellow groove, he overdubs a seriously moody and low-key noisy part that gives the whole thing a welcome edge. Sade — it’s not just the singer’s name, it’s also a band.

In 1992, 22-year-old Beck Hansen was scraping by as a video-store clerk while performing bizarro folk songs at L.A. coffeehouses. After friends offered to record some songs, Beck cut “Loser” in his producer’s kitchen. It became the centerpiece of the album Mellow Gold. At first people took “Loser” to be a mere novelty hit, but Beck knew better. “You’d have to be a total idiot to say, ‘I’m the slacker-generation guy. This is my generation.… we’re not gonna fuckin’ show up,’” he said. “I’d be laughed out of the room in an instant.”

Like his New Jersey model Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi concentrates on working-class heroes and heroines. “Livin’ on a Prayer,” co-written with guitarist Richie Sambora, pumped the everyday struggles of Tommy and Gina full of grandeur — guitar-pick slides, dramatic pauses, the inevitable key change — and continues to resonate today. “It’s great that we wrote songs so long ago that people can still relate to,” Bon Jovi said in 2005. “When I hear ‘Livin’ on a Prayer,’ I think to myself, ‘We wrote that. That song has really made its mark. I guess that works.’”

For her second album, Del Rey went for a sound even more lush than on her debut, and the relentless strings of “Summertime Sadness” recall the soundtracks Angelo Badalamenti composed for David Lynch’s films. She wrote the song in Santa Monica. “I would sit under the telephone wires and listen to them sizzle in the warm air,” she recalled. “I felt happy in the warm weather, and started writing about how sad and gorgeous the summertime felt to me.” A year after its first release, Cedric Gervais’ dance remix turned the song into a Top 10 hit.

The song that brought acid rock to Middle America was a heady rock bolero written by vocalist Slick, reportedly after taking LSD and listening to Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. She first recorded it with her earlier band, the Great Society, before rebooting it with the Airplane. “Our parents read us stories like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz,” Slick said. “They all have a place where children get drugs, and are able to fly or see an Emerald City or experience extraordinary animals and people.… And our parents are suddenly saying, ‘Why are you taking drugs?’ Well, hello!”

Nancy (a.k.a. Ophlin Russell) was the DJ (mic controller) for Kingston’s Stereophonic sound system when she met reggae producer Winston Riley in the late Seventies. “I really admired how he took recording serious,” Nancy said. “You couldn’t go into his studio and do any foolishness.” Their peak, “Bam Bam,” is one of the great early dancehall anthems, booming but bright, tough but playful — and it’s been sampled extensively by everyone from Lauryn Hill to Kanye West.

As producers, Elliott and Timbaland had already made their rhythmic impact on hip-hop and R&B before Missy’s first single. And some high-profile features had even introduced Elliott’s bobbing, whizzing rap style to audiences. But still, no one could have predicted “The Rain,” with its ghostly sample of Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” memorable Beenie Man misquote (“Who got the keys to the jeep?”), and twitchy yet sleek beat. It made Elliott a star, and she and Tim the producers to beat.

“It’s funny,” Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro said in 1985. “We thought ‘Africa’ was bold, and it did pretty good, but lyrically it didn’t make a dime of sense.” No matter — that instantly calming synthesizer riff, played on a Yamaha GS-1 “dialed in [to] those kalimba, marimba kind of sounds,” as Porcaro described it, does most of the talking, along with that soaring chorus. It hit Number One and has lived on as a yacht-rock touchstone; in 2019, Weezer’s affectionate cover made it ubiquitous all over again — a favor Toto returned by covering Weezer’s “Hash Pipe.”

If cellphones gave rise to ringtone rap, social media gave us meme rap. The Atlanta trio Migos’ opus “Bad and Boujee” has become the latter’s keynote anthem, its “Raindrop, drop-top” hook inspiring scores of Twitter memes and Vine clips, and even showing up at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, D.C. The trio’s Offset wrote the song’s hook, he told Rolling Stone, while “I had some little situations going on with life, family stuff going down, so I went downstairs to record. Sometimes that’s the best time to get music off — you might be mad, make some crazy shit.”