The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

“Purple Haze” launched not one but two revolutions: late-Sixties psychedelia and the unprecedented genius of Hendrix. The first chord of its main riff has come to be known among guitarists as the “Hendrix chord.” The Experience recorded “Purple Haze” across a series of sessions in January and February 1967, experimenting with recording techniques such as the blitzed-out distortion on Hendrix’s guitar — when the master tape was sent to their American record label, an enclosed note diligently pointed out that the distorted sound of the song was deliberate.

Saint Joan banged out this three-chord nugget after the collapse of the Runaways, at a time when the music business was trying to write her off as a has-been (Jett’s debut album got rejected by 23 labels before she decided to put it out herself). You can hear her explode with fury every time she yells “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation!” She lived up to the song’s outlaw spirit — not only did she refuse to tame her music or image, she also became a megastar just by being herself. Jett still has her bad reputation, and she still doesn’t give a damn.

N.W.A came in with a bang, kicking off their debut album with this West Coast gangsta attack, changing hip-hop forever. “Straight Outta Compton” cranked up the violence to previously unheard of levels, with DJ Yella and Dr. Dre’s explosive production and Ice Cube boasting “Here’s a murder rap to keep you dancin’/With a crime record like Charles Manson!” It takes only three lines for the first weapon to get fired. “Straight Outta Compton” was an instant sensation, claiming L.A. as rap’s new capital. As Chris Rock said, “It was kind of like the British Invasion for Black people.”

Mitchell joked about writing a song called “Have Yourself a Morbid Little Christmas.” But there’s no holiday tune that feels quite as chilly as “River,” from her 1971 classic, Blue. It’s just Mitchell alone at her piano, playing a variation on “Jingle Bells.” She grieves the end of a love affair, singing, “I’m hard to handle, I’m selfish, and I’m sad/Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had.” “River” evokes the winter blues — as she said, “It’s a Christmas song for people who are lonely at Christmas.”

These rowdy London lads were all-star mates on a bender, with Rod Stewart up front and Ronnie Wood on guitar. But for all their crazy grins and boozy bluster, the Faces made some of the Seventies’ friendliest-sounding rock & roll. Ronnie Lane co-wrote “Ooh La La,” perhaps best known from the final scene of Rushmore; it’s an old man’s pub lament, but you can hear a smile in it — a song that slaps you on the back and welcomes you into the room. When Lane was a kid, his dad said, “Son, learn to play a guitar. You’ll always have a friend.” That’s the spirit of “Ooh La La.”

The Beasties started raising hell as a New York hardcore-punk band before evolving into hip-hop kings. “Sabotage” shows off their mastery in both domains, a rap-rock bombshell from their 1994 hit Ill Communication. The three MCs jam on Yauch’s fuzzed-out bass riff, while Horovitz gets ill on the mic. As he said, “This one called for some old-fashioned screaming, that’s for sure.” “Sabotage” also inspired one of the coolest videos ever, a Seventies trip full of bad wigs and cheap suits — as big an influence on comedy as it was on music.

Pavement dropped the last thing anyone expected from indie rock in 1991 — a wistful ballad about a summer crush. Malkmus and Kannberg, two guitar dudes from Northern California, cut “Summer Babe” in the garage studio of their hippie drummer, Gary Young. “We didn’t know how to record,” Malkmus confessed. “We used reverb on the drums — the cheapest, worst reverb ever.” (They released “Summer Babe” as a single on the tiny Drag City label in 1991, and a year later it opened their classic Matador debut, Slanted and Enchanted.) According to Malkmus, he was trying to imitate Lou Reed, singing about “sad-boy stuff.” It evokes the levees and houseboats of their youth — as Malkmus said, “That’s definitely the suburban California summer.”

“Eleanor Rigby” was one of the Beatles’ most radical shifts, both musically and emotionally. McCartney was still just 23 when he wrote this empathetic portrait of old age. He fumbled with the story until he hit on the image “picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.” As he said, “So this became a song about lonely people.” None of the Beatles play on it — George Martin conducted an eight-man classical-string section. “Father McKenzie” was originally “Father McCartney”; Lennon and McCartney flipped through a phone book until they found the name they wanted.

With Lewis pounding the piano and leering, “Great Balls of Fire” was full of Southern Baptist hellfire turned into a near-blasphemous ode to pure lust. Lewis, a Bible-college dropout and cousin to Jimmy Swaggart, refused to sing it at first and got into a theological argument with producer Sam Phillips that concluded with Lewis asking, “How can the devil save souls?” But as the session wore on, Lewis’ mood changed considerably — on bootleg tapes, he can be heard saying, “I would like to eat a little pussy if I had some.”

Humpty Hump taught the world how to do “The Humpty Dance” in 1990, making party animals shout along to “I get stupid! I shoot an arrow like Cupid! I use a word that don’t mean nothing, like ‘loopid!’” Bay Area crew Digital Underground infused hip-hop with the crazed spirit of George Clinton and Prince, lecherous without any of the era’s usual sexist clichés. As the late Shock G said, “I brought the perv tone.” “The Humpty Dance” still drops enough bass to make anyone get busy in a Burger King bathroom.

The Backstreet Boys sang a boy-band standard with their 1999 smash “I Want It That Way.” It defined the MTV Total Request Live era, when BSB and ‘NSync battled it out for the hearts of young America. It came from Swedish songwriters Carlsson and Martin, who were still just learning English. “The lyric doesn’t really mean anything,” Carlsson admitted. “The record company was like, ‘We need to bring in maybe another lyricist to help work on this.’” But Brian, Howie, A.J., Nick, and Kevin make every line soar like pure poetry.

Chilton and his band Big Star got totally ignored in the early Seventies, but “September Gurls” remains the stuff of legend. It’s the sound of Memphis boys schooled in Stax soul, but reaching for Byrds-Beatles songcraft, with guitar chime and Chilton’s yearning voice. “I guess I was one of those kind of maudlin, young, early-twenties sort of people at that time,” Chilton recalled later. “There were a lot of youthful questions on my mind I wanted to answer.” Big Star became hugely influential, inspiring kindred spirits like R.E.M., the Replacements, and Elliott Smith.

The world deserved a lot more of Aaliyah, and “Are You That Somebody” is the jewel of her tragically brief yet amazing career. Timbaland came up with one of his most sonically audacious productions, with a stop-and-start stutter of Dirty South future-shock funk. It was created in just one night on an 11 a.m. deadline for the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack –“The spirit of the moment,” Timbaland recalled later. The bigger this song got on the radio, the more bizarre it sounded. Yet Aaliyah held it all together with her seductive, smoothed-out vocals. She died far too young in 2001, but she will always be that somebody, and this will always be her song.

No country singer could write an alone-and-forsaken lament like Williams. He recorded “Your Cheatin’ Heart” at his final session, on September 23rd, 1952. He told a friend, “It’s the best heart song I ever wrote.” But Williams didn’t live to hear it become one of the greatest country standards of all time. A few weeks before it was released, he died in the back seat of his car, on New Years Day 1953, during an all-night drive from one gig to the next. He was only 29, but you can hear a lonesome lifetime in “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

Withers was a soul singer who wrote plainspoken-language songs on acoustic guitar. But because he was a Black man whose career began in the R&B era, record labels “didn’t want me to do anything quiet.” He kept his factory day job, making toilets for 747 planes, even after his first album came out, to retain his independence. A man who did as he pleased, Withers mixed folk with R&B, sang a love song about his grandmother, dressed square, and wrote “Lean on Me,” a quiet pledge of friendship and strength, and his only Number One hit.

Using a variety of then-next-gen technology, including a drum machine, samples, and a sequencer he built from a kit and programmed in binary code, New Order singer Bernard Sumner created this instant club classic — officially the bestselling 12-inch single of all time. “Blue Monday” took its cue from the frenetic disco joy of Donna Summer: The beat is swiped from her song “Our Love.” “When we started the sequencer, it fired up slightly out of time, which, although unintentional, sounded really nice and funky,” Sumner wrote.

“Get out my life, why don’t ya, baby?” is one of the nicest, nastiest ways in recorded music to tell an ex-lover to scram. Holland-Dozier-Holland intended “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” to be a rock song (check out that searing S.O.S. guitar intro), but it turned into so much more: The angst of rock is married with the angelic trills of pop, the rhythm of soul, and the urgency of disco 10 years before disco existed. When “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” was released, seven Supremes songs had seen the top of the pop chart. This became their eighth, and one of their most memorable.

Deee-Lite, a multiethnic New York trio, grew out of New York’s pansexual club culture and spread the ecstatic ethos of hot spots like Paradise Garage and the Saint onto MTV, and into international consciousness. The song plucks Ron Carter’s elastic bass line from Herbie Hancock’s 1967 jazz-funk track “Bring Down the Birds,” Bootsy Collins adds background vocals, Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker from James Brown’s band play the horns, and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest drops by to rap a verse. It all creates a collage across different generations of funkateers.

“My Generation” wasn’t intended as a youth-mutiny anthem at first. It was a Jimmy Reed-style blues, reflecting Pete Townshend’s fears about the impending strictures of adult life. “‘My Generation’ was very much about trying to find a place in society,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “I was very, very lost. The band was young then. It was believed that its career would be incredibly brief.” Instead, “My Generation” became the Who’s ticket to legend. The October 1965 session that created it was so intense that bassist John Entwistle had to buy three new basses to finish the recording because he kept breaking strings and couldn’t find replacements.

Songwriters George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, who’d helped make Whitney Houston a superstar by contributing the bubbly “How Will I Know?” to her smash debut, thought they had a sure-shot song for her follow-up. But Houston’s producer, Narada Michael Walden, wasn’t so convinced. “The song reminded me of a rodeo song with Olivia Newton-John singing,” he recalls. The funky pop groove he fashioned changed all that, and once Houston ad-libbed, “Don’t you wanna dance, say you wanna dance,” over the coda, the ebullience was undeniable.

The only Byrd to play on the band’s first hit was Roger McGuinn, whose chiming 12-string Rickenbacker guitar became folk rock’s defining sound. Everything else came from L.A. session players, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Larry Knechtel of Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew. But the rest of the Byrds soon caught up, and as the song was breaking, a curious Bob Dylan checked out the band at Ciro’s, a Los Angeles club. Reportedly, he didn’t recognize some of his own songs in their electrified versions.

In 1940, the folk icon was so perturbed by the pomposity of Kate Smith’s inescapable recording of “God Bless America” that he dashed off a set of down-to-earth, radical lyrics in response. “God blessed America for me,” Guthrie initially titled his answer song, borrowing a melody from the Carter Family’s “When the World’s on Fire.” Four years later, he’d edit those lyrics down to record “This Land Is Your Land,” which has become a kind of populist national anthem, sung by everyone from kindergarten classes to Jennifer Lopez at the 2021 presidential inauguration.

Beyoncé’s generational anthem of matrimonial empowerment was written in “like 17 minutes” by Tricky “the Dream” Stewart, who wanted to find a way to universalize her relationship with Jay-Z. “You want him to commit,” he recalled. “How do I make this a coffee-table conversation?” Beyoncé’s record label wasn’t too excited about promoting the song with black-and-white imagery. “They told me I wouldn’t sell if it wasn’t in color,” she recalled years later. “That was ridiculous.” Of course, the black-and-white video became iconic too, winning Video of the Year at the 2009 VMAs.

Maybe some people were temporarily distracted from the ugliness of the Vietnam War by the fancy wedding plans of Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie, but not John Fogerty. “You just had the feeling that none of these people were going to be too involved with the war,” the CCR frontman recalls thinking as he witnessed the pageantry. But Fogerty turned his disgust to inspiration and wrote this stinging, righteous defense of the poor against the privileged. As Fogerty rightly reminds us, “The song speaks more to the unfairness of class than war itself.”

“Someone told me that if you listen with the volume really, really up, you can hear me shout, ‘That was amazing,’ right at the end,” guitarist Johnny Marr recalled, looking back on the recording of this uncannily beautiful song — Morrissey’s most moving statement of afflicted romantic hunger, set to a riff Marr nicked from the Rolling Stones’ cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hiker.” Amazingly, Moz wasn’t sure of the song, and wondered if it should be released. He wrote in his memoir, “It is often a relief to be wrong.”

The late Sixties were a bittersweet time for Joni Mitchell. As her first marriage was falling apart, her songwriting career was blossoming: Judy Collins’ version of “Both Sides Now” was a Top 10 hit. The following year, for the LP Clouds, Mitchell recorded her own less-sweetened version of the song, which she’d written on an airplane, glancing out at the clouds, while reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. She’s described the song as “a meditation on reality and fantasy.… The idea was so big it seemed like I’d just scratched the surface of it.”

Embroiled in a love triangle with George and Pattie Boyd Harrison, Clapton took the title for his greatest song from the Persian love story “Layla and Majnun.” Recorded by the short-lived ensemble Derek and the Dominos, “Layla” storms with aching vocals and crosscutting riffs from Clapton and contributing guitarist Duane Allman, then dissolves into a serene, piano-based coda. “It was the heaviest thing going on at the time,” Clapton told Rolling Stone in 1974. “That’s what I wanted to write about most of all.”

Eminem’s scariest song is rooted in a terrifying nightmare: What if the rapper’s violent, self-destructive lyrics could drive an obsessed fan to murder? “He’s crazy for real, and he thinks I’m crazy, but I try to help him at the end of the song,” said Eminem of his character. “It kinda shows the real side of me.” Anchored by a sample from Dido’s “Thank You” (which became a hit itself as a result) and augmented by a haunted house’s worth of sound effects, “Stan” proved that Eminem understood the dark side of his music better than his worst critics did.

“When Stephen Stills first played me this song, I wondered what planet he was from,” Graham Nash recalls. No wonder: What Stills had written for his ex-girlfriend Judy Collins was less a song than a set of memorable fragments in search of a structure. As Stills put it, “It was the beginnings of three different songs that suddenly fell together as one.” Working together, the new trio fit those parts together as smoothly as their three voices harmonized, and as the lead track on their self-titled debut, this suite was a declaration of their desire to transcend simple pop forms.

Phil Spector heard the Ike and Tina Turner Revue at a Hollywood club at a time when their recording career had stalled, following a handful of R&B hits in the early 1960s. Spector had a song called “River Deep, Mountain High” that he was sure was going to be huge (in fact, “River Deep” barely cracked the Top 100), and he wanted Tina to sing it, though he forbade Ike from even coming to the sessions. “I must have sung that 500,000 times,” Tina later said. “I was drenched with sweat. I had to take my shirt off and stand there in my bra to sing.”

After the death of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, his band became New Order. “There’s life, and there’s death,” drummer Stephen Morris told Rolling Stone in 1983. “We were still alive, so we thought we’d carry on doing it.” “Bizarre Love Triangle” was a peak moment in their marriage of moody dance rock and electronic bounce, with Bernard Sumner swooning in cryptic wistful ecstasy amid the synths and sequenced grooves. Remarkably, it was never a huge hit in the U.S., barely cracking the Hot 100 — Aussie band Frente’s 1994 cover version actually charted considerably higher.

Petty wrote “Free Fallin’” with Jeff Lynne, who produced his solo debut, Full Moon Fever. “I got to the chorus of the song, and he leaned over to me and said the word ‘free-falling,’” Petty recalled. “I couldn’t get the whole word in. So I sang, ‘Freeee,’ then ‘free-falling.’ And we both knew at that moment that I’d hit on something pretty good.” They finished and recorded it in just two days, the first song completed for the album. The label initially rejected Full Moon Fever because of a lack of hits. “So I waited six months and brought the same record back,” Petty said. “And they loved it.”