⇒ mega list!

courtesy of blender:
The Greatest whatevers...parts that I possibly agree with:

1."Billy Jean" - Michael Jackson
Studio quibbles. The MTV color line. A Rolls-Royce engulfed in flames.
Once upon a time — before the courtroom dramas, the serial plastic surgeries, the nights spent in hyperbaric chambers and the play dates with Corey Feldman — Michael Jackson was just a run-of-the-mill 24-year-old musical genius, driving a burning Rolls-Royce with a melody stuck in his head.
It was the summer of 1982. Jackson was on Los Angeles’s Ventura Freeway, commuting home after a day in the recording studio, where he and producer Quincy Jones were working on the follow-up to the singer’s smash solo debut, Off the Wall. As Jackson recalled in his 1988 autobiography, he was “so absorbed by this tune floating around in my head” that he failed to notice the smoke billowing out from the undercarriage of his luxury sedan.
“We were getting off the freeway when a kid on a motorcycle pulls up to us and says, ‘Your car’s on fire.’ Suddenly we noticed the smoke and pulled over and the whole bottom of the Rolls-Royce was on fire. That kid probably saved our lives.” But not even that brush with death could shake Jackson’s obsession with his work in progress. “Even while we were getting help and finding an alternate way to get where we were going, I was silently composing additional material.”
The song was perhaps the most personal Jackson had ever written, a guilt- and fear-streaked paternity drama inspired by the singer’s run-ins with delusional female fans. Jackson had been working on it for months and was certain that he had something special on his hands.
“A musician knows hit material. Everything has to feel in place. It fulfills you and it makes you feel good,” Jackson would recollect. “That’s how I felt about ‘Billie Jean.’ I knew it was going to be big when I was writing it.”
Jackson was right: “Billie Jean” was, to say the least, “hit material.” Released in January 1983, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, held the No. 1 spot on the R&B chart for nine, sold more than a million singles and launched pop’s biggest-ever commercial juggernaut, Thriller, which has sold upwards of 47 million copies worldwide, more than any album before or since.
But the song’s place in history transcends mere numbers. “Billie Jean” shattered MTV’s color line and went a long way toward destroying the racial apartheid that had prevailed on commercial radio for decades. Ushering in the modern music-video era, the single also pioneered a new kind of sleek, post-soul pop music whose echoes can be heard to this day. Above all, “Billie Jean” marked a coming of age, the moment when a former kiddie singing star blossomed into a new generation’s equivalent of Elvis and the Beatles — the late 20th century’s preeminent pop icon.
Not bad for a song that, to this day, remains one of the most sonically eccentric, psychologically fraught, downright bizarre things ever to land on Top 40 radio. Jackson’s previous solo hits had been awash in the lush sounds of disco, but “Billie Jean” was almost frighteningly stark, with a pulsing, cat-on-the-prowl bass figure, whip-crack downbeat and eerie multi-tracked vocals ricocheting in the vast spaces between keyboards and strings. Over the years, listeners have grown used to Jackson’s idiosyncratic vocal style — the falsetto whoops, “hee-hees,” James-Brown-on-helium grunts and gonzo diction (“the chair is not my son”?) — but in 1982 no one had ever heard anything quite like it, which only heightened the song’s unsettling effect, the sense that “Billie Jean” was a five-minute-long nervous breakdown, set to a beat.
This weirdness wasn’t accidental. Bruce Swedien, Jones’s longtime studio engineer, remembers: “When we recorded ‘Billie Jean’ … Quincy told me, ‘Okay, this piece of music has to have the most unique sonic personality of anything that we have ever recorded.’ Jones had Jackson sing vocal overdubs through a six-foot-long cardboard tube, and brought in jazz saxophonist Tom Scott to play a rare instrument, the lyricon, a wind-controlled analog synthesizer whose sour, trumpet-like lines are subtly woven through the track. Bassist Louis Johnson ran through his part on every guitar he owned before Jackson settled on a Yamaha bass with an ideally thick and buzzing sound.
Swedien, meanwhile, turned his search for the perfect beat into an arts-and-crafts project, hiring carpenters to construct a special plywood drum platform, ordering a custom-made bass drum cover, using everything from cinder blocks to specially designed isolation flaps, all to capture just the right imaging on the snare and hi-hats. “See if you can think of any other piece of music where you can hear the first three drum beats and know what the song is,” Swedien has said. “That’s what I call sonic personality.”
A major component of that personality almost didn’t survive the final cut. “Billie Jean” opens with an unusually long bass-and-drums intro — Jackson doesn’t begin singing until the 0:29 mark—that Jones wanted to trim but Jackson vehemently insisted be kept.
“I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’” Jones recalls. “He said, ‘But that’s the jelly!’” — Jackson’s personal slang term for a funky beat is “smelly jelly” — “‘That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”
It was Jackson’s dancing, as much as his singing, that propelled the “Billie Jean” phenomenon. On May 16, 1983, more than 50 million viewers watched Jackson debut his famous moonwalk in a mesmerizing performance on the Motown 25 television special. Then there was the “Billie Jean” video, in which Jackson slinks and whirls through a fantasy cityscape, with a sidewalk that lights up like a disco floor underfoot. MTV rarely aired videos by black performers, and when they refused to show “Billie Jean,” CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff went ballistic. “I said to MTV, ‘I’m pulling everything we have off the air, all our product. I’m not going to give you any more videos. And I’m going to go public and fucking tell them about the fact you don’t want to play music by a black guy.’” “Billie Jean” was promptly put in heavy rotation, and neither Jackson nor MTV ever looked back.
Those video images have lodged permanently in the cultural memory. But it’s Jackson’s songwriting that makes “Billie Jean” such a riveting psychological drama — the real thriller on his landmark album. Few songs have provided so much fodder for armchair Freudians: paranoia, sexual terror, temptation and shame mingle in lyrics that lurch from outright denials (“The kid is not my son”) to seeming admissions of guilt (“This happened much too soon/She called me to her room”). Today, “Billie Jean” seems more than anything like a parable of the twisted relations between celebrities and their fans, a theme dramatized in the video, in which Jackson is pursued by a creepy gumshoe in a trench coat. Count on the most famous man in the world — a guy who has had audiences tearing at his clothes since he was 10 years old—to deliver the great artistic statement on celebrity stalking.
Whatever its larger autobiographical and historical significance, “Billie Jean” is first and foremost a dance track. Untold millions of radio and MTV plays have not reduced the power of a song that simply explodes out of the speakers.
“‘Billie Jean’ is hot on every level,” says Greg Phillinganes, a legendary L.A. session musician who played keyboards on the song. “It’s hot rhythmically. It’s hot sonically, because the instrumentation is so minimal, you can really hear everything. It’s hot melodically. It’s hot lyrically. It’s hot vocally. It affects you physically, emotionally, even spiritually.” Twenty-three years on, Michael Jackson can rest assured: No one has made smellier jelly.
Available on: Thriller (Epic)

3. Sweet Child O’ Mine - Guns N’ Roses
Before the hair plugs, before the full-blown insanity, L.A.’s greatest band released the mother of all power ballads.
by Jon Caramanica
It began as a joke. In the summer of 1986, Guns N’ Roses was just a few steps from smacked-out degeneracy. The group were all but squatting in a house in Laughlin Park, north of downtown L.A.: no real furniture, no TV, just a few lamps that sometimes worked and a few beds that did so more often.
The band — W. Axl Rose, guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Steven Adler — were lolling around one afternoon when Slash got to noodling on his guitar.
“This lick I made up,” he remembers, “was kind of a joke. Everyone was high.” Just a few cleanly spaced up-and-down notes, it was direct, melodic and, for a player much more accustomed to lightning-quick shredding with heavy doses of snarl, far too corny to do anything with. But Rose, suddenly inspired by Slash’s throwaway lick, rushed upstairs and finished writing a message of love to his then-girlfriend, model Erin Everly: “I had written this poem and reached a dead end with it,” Axl said later. But when he heard Slash’s riff, the poem “popped into my head. It just all came together.”
Axl’s mash note combined with Slash’s chance outburst to become the meat of “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the song that would rescue the power ballad from its stint in lite-rock purgatory and invest it with some serious swagger and brawn. Before “Sweet Child,” there was something comical about hard-rock bands who tried to emote. But this was a blend of dude-friendly guitar wizardry and carefully calibrated emotional outpouring that satisfied GN’R’s core headbanging audience while showing them to be capable of cleaning up nice when romance was in the air.
“Sweet Child” was indelible and epic. Even if their personal lives were in a shambles, everyone in the band was meticulous when it came to songwriting. Slash’s intro sounded like a reveille, and when Axl launched into the opening couplet—“She’s got a smile that it seems to me/Reminds me of childhood memories” — he sounded simultaneously brimming with elation and full of tears.
But “Sweet Child O’ Mine” would never have been half the success it became without the heavy MTV rotation of the video that came with it, shot in January 1988 in an abandoned ballroom in South Central L.A. The original idea was simply to capture the band hanging out and performing casually, with Erin Everly and the rest of the band’s girlfriends all on set.
It was a long, tedious shoot that at first seemed hopeless: “The first couple of takes, I’m thinking, ‘This looks like crap. There’s no vibe,’” says director Nigel Dick. “But over my shoulder, all the girls are giggling, wetting themselves.”
Axl, it turned out, was a sex symbol, and the ‘Sweet Child’ video minted his signature look. The teased hair he had when they filmed “Welcome to the Jungle” was gone, replaced by long, flowing locks, a bandanna wrapped around his head — and the side-to-side swaying that would become his distinctive anti-dance.
The only ballad on their debut Appetite for Destruction, “Sweet Child” was officially released as a single in late June 1988; two months later it hit the top of the Billboard chart, becoming Guns N’ Roses’ first and only No. 1 hit. “It was a signature lick,” says Appetite producer Mike Clink. “It was unmistakable, and unmistakably theirs.”
Axl would go on to marry Everly, and though the marriage lasted only a few months and ended in accusations of domestic abuse, “Sweet Child” remains a keepsake of a more optimistic time — for Axl, and for the band as a whole. “Axl sang beautifully on the song,” says Duff. “The whole thing was a beautiful mistake.”
Available on: Appetite for Destruction (Geffen)


5. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
Revolution, inspired by a woman’s personal hygiene product.
by Douglas Wolk
The footage from an early 1991 Seattle show on Nirvana’s With the Lights Out DVD illustrates it beautifully: Playing in front of an audience that’s never heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” before—because it’s never been played in public before—the band cannonballs into that mighty four-chord riff, and within moments everybody gets it. There are thousands of stories about how people’s ideas of pop music changed in the fall of 1991 that include the phrase “and then I heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’” The reaction is usually something like Tori Amos’s: “It was like my blood just stood up and saluted.”
The title was coined by Kathleen Hanna (now Le Tigre’s singer), who had scrawled kurt smells like teen spirit on Kurt Cobain’s bedroom wall. “Earlier on,” he explained, “we were kinda having this discussion on … teen revolution and stuff like that, and I took that as a compliment, I thought that she was saying that I was a person who could inspire … And it turns out she just meant that I smelt like the deodorant. I didn’t even know that deodorant existed until after the song was written.”
Cobain pulled together the famously cryptic words from his notebook—they appear to be about the demands of a mass-culture audience, aside from that whole mulatto/albino/mosquito bit—and strapped them to a loud-quiet-loud one-riff technique he’d picked up from his beloved Pixies. Nirvana recorded “Teen Spirit” for their second album, Nevermind, with producer Butch Vig and mix-polisher Andy Wallace. (Cobain later dismissed its production as “closer to Motley Crüe than a punk-rock record.”) The music industry was ready for Nirvana to do well—they’d been the subject of a huge major-label bidding war, and the week Nevermind was released, the college-radio magazine CMJ wrote, “if there’s a band that will single-handedly destroy the barriers between metal, alternative and commercial radio, Aberdeen, Washington’s Nirvana is it.” But nobody expected that “Teen Spirit” would conquer the world.
The rest of the story tells itself, a downward spiral of sadness: the cash-ins; the bandwagon-jumpers; the used flannel clothing that Nirvana bought because they were cold and broke becoming high-fashion accessories; the radio-friendly unit shifters; the alternative-rock gold-rush and bust and backlash; the fame- and drug-fueled freakouts; the 27-year-old junkie-father-figurehead’s blatantly telegraphed suicide; the posthumous beatification of a punk-rock guy who made something more powerful than he could handle; the endless longing for the next “Teen Spirit,” even though “Teen Spirit” wasn’t intended to be the next anything.
What an incredible song, though.
Available on: Nevermind (DGC)

7. Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division
The heartbroken origin of new wave.
by Douglas Wolk
Battered by epilepsy, his marriage in bad shape—partly because of his ongoing dalliance with a Belgian journalist—Joy Division’s 23-year-old Ian Curtis wrote a bleak three-verse lyric, staring with cold eyes into the numbing emotions and sexual alienation of a crumbling relationship. Thanks to their BBC radio performance in November 1979, the Manchester postpunk band’s agonized “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was the “best-known unrecorded song in Britain” for a few months; a reviewer at a February 1980 live show called it “one hell of a classic … staggeringly melodic and momentous.” The single finally came out in June 1980, but Curtis didn’t get to hear what became of it: On May 18, two days before Joy Division’s first American tour was due to start, he hanged himself at home in Macclesfield. “Love will tear us apart” was inscribed on his tombstone.
That’s the romantic fable, but it’s not the whole story. Curtis was a troubled artist, not an unstoppable doom machine—“Ian was primarily a fun guy, a good laugh,” guitarist Bernard Sumner has said—and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” isn’t just an epitaph, it’s a dance song. Joy Division had started out as punk rockers, but they loved disco: Drummer Stephen Morris was nicknamed “the human drum machine”; at the March 1980 session where producer Martin Hannett recorded “Love …” the band also cut a dancier version of their song “She’s Lost Control.” After Curtis’s death, the remaining members of Joy Division added keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, regrouped as New Order and built a reputation for club music.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” cracked the British Top 20 twice, in 1980 and 1995, but never even charted in the U.S. Time has been kind to it, though—the song has become an alt-rock standard, covered by dozens of bands from the Cure and Squarepusher to Nouvelle Vague, and not just because of its unshakeable lyrics.
In the icy, mechanical pep of its groove, Curtis’s mannered croon (inspired here by Frank Sinatra, according to his widow, Deborah), the airy synthesizer hook that sugars up the despondent chorus and the guitar parts that rush and tumble where they might have roared a few years earlier, you can hear Joy Division defining the style and sound of new wave for the next half-decade. “Love” was Curtis’s cry of despair; but what makes it bearable —what makes it great—is that it offers the body the release it denies the mind.
Available on: Substance (Qwest/Warner Bros.)

10. In Da Club - 50 cent
How a bullet-riddled Queens MC wrote the perfect song for nightclub brawls and sweet sixteens.
by Chris Norris
Before he even released an album, Curtis Jackson had pissed off half the MCs in America. With his beef-courting, hype-building 1999 single, “How to Rob,” the former Queens, New York, crack salesman simultaneously established his bottomless thug cred, proved his sense of humor and won the attention of the rap world by threatening to mug DMX, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z and a flock of others. It was 50’s willingness to make enemies that made him both appealing and unwelcome at Columbia Records, which signed him on the strength of the battle-ready stance that led to “How to Rob”—and then dropped him when he was shot a chart-topping nine times. “The rep was both a great thing and a deterrent,” says Paul Rosenberg, manager to Eminem, who signed 50 to Shady Records after he’d become a mixtape circuit demigod.
50’s aura of danger became an almost audible part of his first song aimed directly at the mainstream, “In da Club.” Over a tense, crime-soundtrack intro, 50 chanted syncopated “Go”s around the downbeats, giving the slowed-down party-call “Go shorty” an unsettling cadence. His bullet-wounded cheek lent the rapper a battle-hardened slur as he mentioned alcohol, drug use and emotionless sex in the opening chorus, establishing what became the ne plus ultra of the thug/club-track genre. “It’s a party record, but it’s a gangsta party record,” explains Rosenberg. “It’s got a hardcore vibe, no round edges.” For his subject, 50 imagined “the sort of ethereal club that everybody raps about,” says Rosenberg. Only with knives.
The lyrics and beat came together early. Dr. Dre roughed out a hypnotic track with stark keyboard jabs and a bassline by studio musician Mike Elizondo. 50 dropped his lyrics, and Dre mixed in his magic with spare, judicious doses: brighter stabs in the chorus, the tense guitar strum that enters midway through—”those little things here and there really brought it to life,” Rosenberg recalls. Smuggling state-of-the-art violence and sexism into a bouncy TRL-rocking package, the song became a No. 1 pop hit and helped sell 812,000 albums in four days, surpassing every other debut since SoundScan started keeping track in 1991. It was the theme song for a super-hardcore MC, or a universal soldier (the video referenced the Van Damme vehicle of the same name, when gym-buff 50 enters the top of frame upside down).
This is doubtless the meaning Oprah had in mind when she chose the song for her birthday special, although it’s unlikely that every bar-mitzvah and sweet-sixteen baller still pumping the hit is into getting rubbed. Even the song’s author recalls a more innocent joy with “In da Club,” sharing his somewhat paradoxical reaction to its success. “I was so excited,” he said in 2003, “I would just be at home listening to my record by myself.”
Available on: Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Shady/Aftermath/ Interscope)

14. You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC [1980]
Aussie Lords of the Riff dance on Bon Scott’s grave.
The death of a lead singer would do in most bands, but when AC/DC frontman Bon Scott fatally choked on his own vomit in February 1980, the group quickly hired a replacement (ace caterwauler Brian Johnson) and were back in the studio within weeks. That summer they released Back in Black, highlighted by this pummeling, fiendishly catchy, unrepentantly dimwitted celebration of hot sex and strained double-entendres. As Angus and Malcolm Young’s power chords crash and crunch around him, Johnson shrieks a string of silly metaphors (“Working double time/On the seduction line”) and brags about blowjobs (“Made a meal out of me, and come back for more”). A quarter-century later, the song remains the last word in metal-boogie, guaranteed to turn headbangers into dancing fools and vice versa.
Available on: Back in Black (Epic)

15. Hey Ya - Outkast [2003]
Unavoidable … and we’re still not sick of it.
Even Prince at his most experimental never conceived a genre-mash as nutty as Andre 3000’s electro/folk-rock/funk/power pop/hip-hop/neo-soul/kitchen sink rave-up. The sound is remarkable: Raucous acoustic guitar strumming collides with blipping synths, while Andre veers from tuneless shouts to gospel-style testifying. But beneath the sonic dazzle—and the leering come-ons to Beyoncé and Lucy Liu—lurks great confessional songwriting about love, sex, heartbreak and the impossibility of monogamy. (When Andre sings, “Thank God for Mom and Dad/For sticking two together/’Cause we don’t know how,” the pain is palpable.) All this, plus the twenty-first century’s first great catchphrase: “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”
Available on: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (LaFace/Arista)

17. Super Freak - Rick James [1981]
That’s not MC Hammer’s song. It’s Rick James’s. Bitch.
Rick James was the poor man’s Prince: a debauched funk auteur with dodgy fashion sense, his own lingerie-clad girl group (the Mary Jane Girls) and a genius for future-shock synthesizer grooves. This electro-funk masterpiece was first conceived while watching bad dancers flail across the floor at his concerts, but by the time it reached the pop and R&B charts in the fall of 1981, it had become an ode to a sexpot groupie. By today’s standards, the freak in question is … well … not that freaky. (“The kind of girl you read about in New Wave magazine”?) But James’s Vincent Price— channeling lead vocal performance is a hoot, and not even MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” could kill the joy of the song’s signature synth-and-bass riff.
Available on: Street Songs (Motown)

40. Push It - Salt ’N Pepa [1986]
Before “Let’s Talk About Sex,” these lusty lady rappers talked about sex.
This sassy electro-rap classic was a milestone on two counts: It was one of the first big hits by a female hip-hop act, and one of the first rap tracks to top the dance charts. Cheryl “Salt” James and Sandy “Pepa” Denton aren’t the world’s most technically polished or lyrically inventive MCs, but they’ve got bucketloads of personality, not to mention libido. (“Can’t you hear the music’s pumpin’ hard like I wish you would?” they rap, sounding none too pleased with their man’s performance.) In fact, “Push It” is less a rap song than a hip-hop instrumental, powered by its slinky, snake-charmer-like synthesizer line, hissing high-hats, copious heavy breathing and walloping downbeat. The gals spun many variations on the same sexed-up theme during their early-’90s heyday, but they never topped their first hit, to this day a surefire party-starter.
Available on: Hot, Cool ∓ Vicious (Next Plauteau)

41. In the Air Tonight - Phil Collins [1981]
The urban legend’s bogus, but the drums are undeniable.
Despite what Eminem’s “Stan” says, Phil Collins didn’t actually watch anybody let somebody else drown, much less point out the culprit at one of his shows. (Good story, though.) Best known at the time as Genesis’s baby-faced drummer-singer, Collins actually wrote “In the Air Tonight” about the 1978 breakup of his first marriage. The song—featuring, at the 3:40 mark, the most titanic drum break ever recorded—has enjoyed a pretty remarkable afterlife, though: After its appearance on his first solo album, it became a minor hit again in 1984 when it was used on Miami Vice; Collins performed it at both the London and Philadelphia Live Aid concerts on the same day in 1985; Tupac Shakur sampled it for “Starin’ Through My Rear View”; and Collins reprised it with Lil’ Kim for a tribute album a few years ago.
Available on: Face Value (Atlantic)

45. Sexual Healing - Marvin Gaye [1982]
Screwed-up loverman announces his eagerness to “operate”.
In late 1981, Gaye was a magnificent singer but a coke-addled wreck—keyboardist Odell Brown brought a witness when he played Gaye the instrumental groove that became “Sexual Healing,” to make sure he wouldn’t get his writing credit stolen. The song didn’t get its title until the following March, when visiting journalist David Ritz freaked out over some of the nasty porn Gaye had on hand and told him he needed “sexual healing.” The singer took Ritz’s phrase to mean that what everyone needs is “to live out their fantasies,” and recorded the plaintively blue-balled model for basically every slow jam since then. It became his biggest R&B hit ever, and the last he’d live to see; in April 1984, his father shot and killed him.
Available on: Midnight Love (Columbia)

52. "Wonderwall" - Oasis [1995]
The Gallaghers stop feuding long enough to pledge their love.
For a moment in the mid-'90s, it looked as if battling brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher were going to conquer the world, and "Wonderwall" was a good part of the reason. Named after George Harrison's 1968 instrumental solo album, it's a convincing if cryptic declaration of adoration, and still their biggest hit. In Noel's typically blunt words: "You can't get bored of 15,000 people shouting for 'Wonderwall' … You get a hard-on when you hear that."
Available on: (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (Epic)

53. "Beat It" - Michael Jackson [1982]
The crossover piledriver even metalheads could love.
Before he became a punch line, Michael Jackson was a magnificent, daring soul singer. An R&B record with a palpable sense of coppery menace and a shredding metal-guitar solo (Eddie Van Halen volunteered his services gratis) was a freaky idea in 1982, but Jackson pounces on every syllable of "Beat It" as if being "funky and strong" is enough to win the battle he's describing, and the elaborately choreographed video became a nascent MTV's West Side Story.
Available on: Thriller (Epic)

55. "The Scientist" - Coldplay [2002]
It's all downhill from here, says Chris Martin.
Singer Chris Martin calls "The Scientist" "perhaps the most beautiful song we will have ever written," and initially threatened not to make another Coldplay record because he didn't think he could top it. A Radiohead-esque love-and-apology song with piano and strings, "The Scientist" has a couple of aces up its sleeve in Martin's arcing, wordless cries and the buzzing waves of guitar from Jonny Buckland at its climax. The backwards-car-crash video is hard to forget too.
Available on: A Rush of Blood to the Head (Capitol)

61. "Ignition" (remix) - R. Kelly [2003]
R. sticks his key in, spends the weekend freakin'.
How many levels of genius are there here? A remix-previewed in the original version-that announces that it's the remix in the chorus, then ditches almost all of "Ignition" itself; a singer with major image problems declaring, snappishly, that he's kicking back and boozing it up for the weekend; vocals that evoke everything from purring seduction to dancehall reggae harshness in a matter of seconds; and the most lusciously summery porn-flick wah-wah in Kelly's entire repertoire.
Available on: Chocolate Factory (Jive)

63. "Beautiful Day" - U2 [2000]
How wanking off in the studio sometimes leads to global hits.
During a jam on another song, "Always," Bono yelled "it's a beautiful day," and producer Daniel Lanois convinced him to turn it into a chorus. The new song came together around that line: a vision of abandoning material things and finding grace in the world itself. Lanois described "Beautiful Day" as "one of those little gifts where you think, my god, we've got it!" The single went on to top the charts around the globe and won three Grammys.
Available on: All That You Can't Leave Behind (Interscope)

64. "Say My Name" - Destiny's Child [1999]
State-of-the-art technology, and Beyoncé's deepest performance.
By the time "Say My Name" began its three weeks at No. 1, it was obvious that Destiny's Child was Beyoncé Knowles and Some Other Gals-between its recording and video shoot, LaTavia Roberson and LaToya Luckett were replaced by Michelle Williams and Farrah Franklin, and few listeners noticed. But the song's real star is its writer-producer, then-22-year-old Rodney Jerkins, whose arrangement closes in like suspicion on Knowles's voice, gliding from acoustic simplicity to stuttering orchestral funk.
Available on: Writing's on the Wall (Columbia)

74. "Take Me Out" - Franz Ferdinand [2004]
Scottish quartet's murderous funk-rock split personality.
Two, two, two songs in one! The first minute of "Take Me Out" is lithe, pulsing rock that out-strokes the Strokes. Then it slows down, bulks up, and turns into a hot, brittle guitar-funk stomp for three more minutes-"music for girls to dance to," in the words of singer Alex Kapranos. It's debatable, though, whether most of the people dancing to it have noticed that it's about snipers aiming at each other.
Available on: Franz Ferdinand (Epic)

79. "Losing My Religion" - R.E.M. [1991]
Mandolin, mumbling and misgivings make magic.
Guitarist Peter Buck claims that "Losing My Religion" "really became a hit by fluke"-it's an inscrutable ramble with a mandolin as its lead instrument, recorded at a time when R.E.M. were trying to get away from their Big Rock reputation, and it somehow turned them into a stadium band. That's true-but it's also one of Michael Stipe's richest performances, it seeps and suffuses instead of rocking and its emotional (if not literal) sense is unmistakable.
Available on: Out of Time (Warner Bros.)

82. "Come As You Are" - Nirvana [1991]
Kurt follows up an infectious howl with one creepy moan.
The second single from Nirvana's 1991 blockbuster Nevermind followed up "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'s exploding ennui with a somber, singalong despair that was way scarier. Over Krist Novoselic's loping bass line, which dredged up Seattle sludge for emotional bottom-feeders everywhere, Kurt Cobain slurred out a backhanded invitation to a shadowy friend, someone who is either a memory or an enemy. On the coda, Kurt swore he didn't have a gun, but everyone figured he probably did.
Available on: Nevermind

86. "Work It" - Missy Elliott [2002]
Missy Elliott stays on the scene like an (overworked) sex machine.
With this squelchy club track, rapper Missy Elliot put the script down, flipped it and reversed it. Backwards and forwards, she made a dance hit while reminding us that sex can be hard labor. Lyrics like "If you got a big ugh, lemme search it/Gotta know how hard I gotta work it" sound like a sex worker filing an OSHA claim, while Timbaland's beats skip and stutter like a john's heart pumping towards a high-priced orgasm.
Available on: Under Construction (Elektra)

104. "Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns N' Roses [1987]
L.A. rockers stomp out hair-metal glam.
Compared to say, Ice Cube's "How to Survive in South Central," this crushing groove-metal ode to the sleazy Los Angeles streets isn't exactly scary. But with its down & dirty guitar riff, sneering misogynist threats and an angry stutter jacked from Led Zeppelin's "Nobody's Fault but Mine," the song succeeded in bringing L.A.'s glammy AquaNet metal scene to its kn-n-n-n-nees. Furthermore, its rip-your-face-off propulsion, topped by Axl's feral howl, made "Jungle" a preferred sports stadium greeting to out-of-town teams.
Available on: Welcome to the Jungle (Geffen)

107. "Fell in Love with a Girl" - White Stripes [2001]
Two Detroiters out-cool the Strokes, out-rock the Vines, out-fun the Hives.
Were they brother and sister? Married? Divorced? Detroit's White duo-virtuoso guitarist Jack and his junkyard drummer Meg-like to keep audiences guessing. Of course, when this garage-rock love confession exploded onto radio like a stove-top Jiffy Pop, their creation myth didn't matter: Audiences just wanted to pogo. The video, directed by Michel Gondry, animated both Stripes as Lego figures, as Jack weighed the morality of seduction: "These two sides of my brain need to have a meeting." To our knowledge, this meeting never took place.
Available on: White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry)

108 "Still Not a Player" Big Punisher [1998]
Gigantic tough-guy rapper swears fidelity, eats himself to death.
The clean version of this 1998 jeep-bumper is better than the dirty one. Anyone can "fuck"-but the bowdlerized replacement, "crush," presumably suited the late Boricua fatso's boudoir moves better. This song's stinging electric piano vamp and castanet clack, topped by Bronx shout-outs and bubbly-poppin' foreplay, make imminent rough sex with a 400-pound sadist sound almost tempting. And of course, the butta-nasty chorus makes the crucial distinction between being a player and crushing a lot. Huge, huge difference.
Available on: Capital Punishment (RCA)

113. Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O'Connor [1990]
She was bald, depressed and, for at least a couple of years, brilliant.
Frank Sinatra wanted to kick her ass. The Pope prolly did too. But even they couldn't take Sinead O'Connor's one shining moment away from her. Written and arranged by Prince, this indelible romantic dirge catapulted O'Connor from Irish obscurity to American ubiquity. The cause was furthered thanks to the video, a four-minute close-up of O'Connor's supremely round, close-shaved pate that, by giving her nowhere to hide, made her anguish inescapable and electric.
Available on: I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (Chrysalis)

114. Crazy in Love - Beyoncé [2003]
Destiny's Child loses its star, Jay-Z gains a girlfriend.
Cutting herself loose from the girl-group noose, Beyoncé celebrated ostentatiously on her first solo single, which sounds like a royal procession stomping through a '70s nightclub. The horns blare and pop, and B's syncopated sighs percuss atop. A child of Destiny no more, Beyoncé made this a move from one support system to another: Capped by Jay-Z's preening verse, "Crazy" became their unofficial coming-out party as a couple. "I'm very grateful," she said. "He gave the song exactly what it needed."
Available on: Dangerously in Love (Columbia)

120. Get Low - Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz [2002]
Back to the essence, meaning sweat, shouts and sex.
Lil Jon earned his Chappelle's Show parody with this gymnastic crunk workout, a track that sounds like 100 strip-club DJs spinning at once. Chants, howls, whistles-why rap when so many other options are available? "The only thing we trying to be true to is the people at the clubs," said Jon. "You can't deny the energy." The Ying Yang Twins drop guest verses, but the real magic might have come from Jon's Crunk!!! energy drink, which was presumably in abundant supply.
Available on: Kings of Crunk (TVT)

122. Through the Wire - Kanye West [2004]
How a seatbelt, an airbag and a lot of luck made for a hip-hop classic.
Partly recorded when this Chicago producer-MC's jaw was wired shut following a near-fatal car accident, "Through the Wire" proves that nothing short of death can stop the ostentatious display of Kanye West's ego. The Chaka Khan sample is triumphant, the rhymes are braggadocious and comedic. The crash kicked West's career-and his devotion to Christ-into high gear: "I feel like I've been ordained to come up with really good music," he's said.
Available on: The College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella)

128. Milkshake - Kelis [2003]
Her milkshake brought all the boys to the yard, and Nas too.
The best catchphrases are ciphers, applicable in a range of situations. And so even though Kelis never explains what a milkshake is here-"Some songs are meant to be read into," she said-it's abundantly clear that yours doesn't pass muster, and hers does. This was the last dance for Kelis and her ex, Pharrell, who blessed her with this sinuous beat and then, in the video, handed her off to her future husband, Nas, who was behind a restaurant counter, serving up a better shake.
Available on: Tasty (Star Trak/Arista)

136. Word Up! - Cameo [1986]
The codpiece that launched a thousand "Ooowwwwww!"s.
"If you were to look 'different' up in the dictionary, you'd see Cameo's picture," said frontman Larry Blackmon, he of the infamously plump red codpiece. A funk band with hip-hop attitude and aggressive sexuality, Cameo were sampled by everyone from DJ Quik to Mariah Carey. But they mostly leave this signature vamp alone, because it grooves, it shimmies, it seduces, it pummels, and to take just one part of it would only highlight the rest that was missing.
Available on: Word Up! (Mercury)

145. Stay - Lisa Loeb [1994]
The coffeehouse revolution that lasted exactly one song
The film Reality Bites gave us Ethan Hawke, post-grunge brooding and, quite by accident, the bespectacled singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb. With her soundtrack hit "Stay"—a spare, beautiful lullaby about loss-Loeb became the first unsigned artist with a No. 1 single in Billboard history. But coffeehouse chic was short-lived-"People only think of you as the couple of songs you have on the radio," she said. Most recently, quirky Loeb hosted a quirky TV cooking show with quirky then-beau Dweezil Zappa.

153. Ordinary World - Duran Duran [1993]
A love song by and for aging hipsters.
Don't let the frosted hair and mud-wrestling videos fool you: Duran Duran were innovators. As John Taylor put it, "We had the idea of playing European funk with punk attitude, but slicker and with clothes." Which made their 1993 comeback-featuring this adult-contemporary radio ballad—even more of a shock. Simon LeBon traded his seductive yelps for a more meditative sound, and the band played along. The result was tempered and catchy, not to mention rare-a band aging even more gracefully than its fans.
Available on: The Wedding Album (Capitol)

158. Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) - Jay-Z [1998]
Annie takes a wrong turn on the way to the orphanage.
Jigga got "no grief" for pilfering the hook here from the musical Annie. "They just call me genius." And while the credit for lifting the squealing tykes goes to producer Mark 45 King, it's Jay who pulls off the conceit without sounding conceited. Linking the plight of hardscrabble 'hood kids with the squeaky-clean orphans was savvy, but while the kids bemoan their rough-and-tumble plight, Jay doesn't get bogged down: "Since when y'all niggas know me to fail? Fuck naw."
Available on: Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life (Roc-A-Fella)

163. Ms. Jackson - Outkast [2000]
Rap's dynamic duo make amends to the baby mamas' mamas.
Hip-hop means never having to say you're sorry, especially to women, which is why Outkast's repentant missive broke the mould. Andre 3000 begs forgiveness from the mother of ex-girlfriend (and mother of son Seven Sirius) Erykah Badu, while Big Boi speaks for every weekend dad who just wants to do the right thing. Homaged by Kanye West and reworked by the Vines, it even made the perfect punch line during Nipplegate.
Available on: Stankonia (LaFace/Arista)

164. The Look of Love - ABC [1982]
Smart-aleck collision of disco, synth-pop and English wit.
When Martin Fry, a white Brit who dreamed of being Smokey Robinson, hijacked electronic band Vice Versa and set about turning them into his fantasy pop group, their first hit was also their finest. Founded on Fry's camp, self-referential lyrics and Trevor Horn's towering, wedding-cake production, "The Look of Love" is a treasure trove of witty touches, from Fry's arch internal dialogue to the female voice popping out of leftfield to drawl "goodbye."
Available on: The Lexicon of Love (Mercury)

166. Start Me Up - Rolling Stones [1991]
The greatest rock & roll band in the world discover the joys of recycling.
The Rolling Stones' last bona fide classic almost rusted away in the vaults. Written to a reggae beat and then abandoned in 1977, it was rediscovered by chance four years later and reborn as a vintage riff-rocker. "The story here is the miracle that we ever found that track," says Keith Richards. "It was like a gift, y'know?" It was one that kept on giving, too-Microsoft paid $10 million to use the song to hawk Windows 95.
Available on: Tattoo You (Virgin)

169. When Doves Cry - Prince [1984]
Freudian psychodrama you can dance to.
The biggest record of 1984 was a very odd piece of work: a funk record with no bassline, a tense hunk of neo-psychedelia (the synthesizers are meant to represent crying doves), a club hit wracked with angst about inheriting your folks' worst traits. Even though it was written for a specific moment in the Purple Rain movie, its appeal was universal, becoming the only song ever to be covered by Patti Smith and Ginuwine. But can doves really cry? Er, no.
Available on: Purple Rain (Warner Bros.)

172. Around the World - Daft Punk [1997]
Disco, Casios and Frenchmen: three unexpected comebacks in one.
This bubblegum robo-disco mantra was the song that made LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy fantasize about Daft Punk playing at his house. "I liked how wimpy 'Around the World' was," he explains. "It was really everything I hated, and I couldn't resist it. What a fucking track." Recorded in a bedroom, and boosted by director Michel Gondry's freaky-dancing video clip, "Around the World" made Paris hip again and left house music hooked on retro.
Available on: Homework (Virgin)

182. Janie's Got a Gun - Aerosmith [1989]
What happens when rock stars read Newsweek.
Coming hard on the heels of a single about doing the nasty in an elevator, the dark revenge fantasy "Janie's Got a Gun" was the biggest curveball of Aerosmith's career. Finding inspiration in child-abuse statistics and a Newsweek article about firearm fatalities, vocalist Steven Tyler took nine months to finish his story of a girl who puts a bullet through her abusive father's brain. Swinging between tense restraint and explosive rage, it's as dramatic as its subject matter.
Available on: Pump (Geffen)

192. Walk This Way - Run-DMC [1986]
Rock and rap hook up, future Linkin Park members take notes.
When Jam Master Jay's search for the heaviest beats led him to dig an old Aerosmith hit out of the crates, producer Rick Rubin suggested hooking up a collaboration. The result was rap-rock history, but don't try asking Reverend Run about his group's biggest hit. "We never liked that song," he kvetched a decade later. "They [Run and fellow rapper DMC] were pissed off that someone was making them do it," explained Jay. "But I knew they was hot."
Available on: Raising Hell (Profile)

196. U Can't Touch This - MC Hammer [1990]
The pop-rap megahit that couldn't be stopped.
MC Hammer might have made purists' toes curl-videos by 3rd Bass and Ice Cube lampooned his infamous baggy-pantsed dance moves-but even they couldn't get his Godzilla-sized breakout hit out of their heads. The Oakland MC founded the Puff Daddy school of flagrant, wholesale sampling, in this case a giant chunk of Rick James's funk monster "Superfreak." If only he'd had Puffy's business smarts-a decade after releasing the biggest-selling hip-hop album of all time, he was bankrupt.
Available on: Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em (Capitol)

217. Move Your Feet - Junior Senior [2003]
Technicolor Denmark duo combine hip-hop, homosexuality.
Not quite rap, not quite disco, and alas, not quite as big here as it was worldwide, “Feet” is a merrily cartoonish dance number. Over a blipping keyboard hook and a bell-ringing melody, Jesper “Junior” Mortenson (the skinny, straight one) does his best Michael Jackson falsetto over the chorus, while Jeppe “Senior” Laursen (the big, gay one) goofily scats along—making for an appropriately smorgasbordic experience.
Available on: D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat (Atlantic)

218. Seven Nation Army - White Stripes [2003]
Hey, maybe Meg White can play the drums!
“Army” opens with a seven-note progression so chillingly deep, many fans thought Jack White had sold out and—J’accuse!—bought a bass guitar. But that stomping intro was just more six-string wizardry from White, who equips this Zeppelin-worthy epic with so much ferocity, it feels as if an actual army is backing him up. Meg’s uncharacteristically steady tick-tock beat led to plenty of dance-floor mash-ups, as well as a cover by the Flaming Lips.
Available on: Elephant (V2)

226. Alright - Supergrass [1995]
Giddy British twerps find joy in simple pleasures.
With the possible exception of Oasis, their countrymen and chief eyebrow rivals, no band sang about sitting around and smoking cigarettes with such infectious glee as this merry trio from Oxford. With an irresistible cross-strain of Buzzcocks vocals and “Crocodile Rock” piano, this anthem to young scenester frivolity wound up in a montage of young scenester frivolity in Clueless. Smoke a fag, put it out? It feels alright!
Available on: I Should Coco (Capitol)

238. Everybody Hurts - R.E.M. [1992]
Garbled southern band bust out the power ballad.
R.E.M. took inspiration from two ’70 hits: The opening guitar line is stolen from Chicago’s prom ballad “Colour My World,” and Michael Stipe wrote the words while thinking about Nazareth’s “Love Hurts.” Sometimes, dross spawns greatness. “Everybody Hurts” is an invitation to feel compassion. “Now it’s time to sing along,” Stipe croons, and as recently as Live 8, millions have.
Available on: Automatic for the People (Warner Bros.)

240. All the Small Things - Blink-182 [1999]
The San Diegans who put the punk’d in punk.
Blink-182’s biggest hit started out as a love letter to a girlfriend and four leatherclad dudes. “I wanted to write a song with na-na’s, ’cause I love the Ramones,” singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge has recalled. “I thought, ‘I’ll write this song about my chick, and it’ll be an ode to the Ramones too.’” “All the Small Things” hit No. 6 and inspired one of the cleverest videos ever: a spot-on send-up of boy-band dance moves.
Available on: Enema of the State (MCA)

241. Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve [1997]
English rock band make brilliant song with one small catch.
Like a cursed monkey’s paw, this stately elegy helped make and break these long-laboring psychedelic rockers. Who knew a harmless little sample from a symphonic version of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time” would be so volatile? The band re-formed to put out this album, only to have a lawsuit award 100% of the publishing rights from this, their first smash hit, to the Stones. They broke up a year later, bitterly.
Available on: Urban Hymns (Virgin)

248. Careless Whisper - George Michael [1984]
The greatest sax hook in pop history.
When you spend the first few years of your career chirping cheeky dance tracks while encased in white shorts so tight you look like Elton John’s pool boy, a ballad can feel like artistic integrity. In this sleazy confession of infidelity, George Michael pairs Biblical wisdom (“Guilty feet have got no rhythm”) with a sax refrain that mopes like a lovestruck teenage boy. The result is something new: St. Tropez soul.
Available on: Ladies & Gentlemen: The Best of George Michael (Columbia)

263. Stan - Eminem [2002]
Em scrutinizes accusations of corrupting the kids by rapping as a corrupted kid.
Available on: The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope)

264. Malibu - Hole [1998]
A Billy Corgan co-write, it's Courtney Love at her barely-hinged best.
Available on: Celebrity Skin (Geffen)

268. With or Without You - U2 [1987]
Guitars wail, Bono weeps and stadiums worldwide simultaneously melt.
Available on: The Joshua Tree (Island)

287. Head Over Heels - Tears for Fears [1985]
Like "Crazy in Love," but New Wave—and Donnie Darko—approved.
Available on: Scenes From the Big Chair (PolyGram)

297. November Rain - Guns N' Roses [1991]
Nine glorious minutes of quintessential Axl excess.
Available on: Use Your Illusion I (Geffen)

299. Smooth Criminal - Michael Jackson [1987]
Jacko gets creepy—not Jesus Juice creepy, but danceably-sinister creepy.
Available on: Bad (Epic)

312. Smooth Operator - Sade [1985]
Quiet Storm soul so breezy it can be used as a Freon substitute.
Available on: Diamond Life (CBS)

317. White Flag - Dido [2003]
A.k.a. Bridget Jones 3: Adventures in Trip-Hop.
Available on: Life for Rent (Arista)

319. Genie in a Bottle - Christina Aguilera [1999]
A coy, curvaceous abstinence lesson, from her pre-assless-chaps days.
Available on: Christina Aguilera (RCA)

325. Jump Around - House of Pain [1992]
Irish rappers with "more rhymes than the Bible's got psalms," i.e., one song's worth.
Available on: House of Pain (Tommy Boy)

327. Slow Jamz - Kanye West featuring Twista and Jamie Foxx [2004]
An old-school celebration of R&B's chief goal: gettin' that booty!
Available on: The College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella)

336. Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper [1983]
Tear-streaked snapshot of long-gone love. Utterly beautiful.
Available on: She's So Unusual (Portrait)

337. Killing Me Softly - Fugees [1996]
Brooklyn-via-Haiti roots-rap trio peaked with this Roberta Flack update.
Available on: The Score (Ruffhouse)

340. Song 2 - Blur [1997]
A thunderous grunge send-up that ended up a grunge staple. Woo-hoo!

348. Independent Women Part 1 - Destiny's Child [2000]
Mastercard-carrying R&B roar for all Beyoncés and Lucy Lius.
Available on: Survivor (Columbia)

350. Stacy's Mom - Fountains of Wayne [2003]
Glossy guitar pop as flawless as the titular MILF.
Available on: Welcome Interstate Managers (S-Curve/Virgin)

352. Heart Shaped Box - Nirvana [1993]
Blistering riffs, lyrics about cancer-eating and other all-around cheer.
Available on: In Utero (DGC)

361. Show Me Love - Robyn [1997]
Swedish teen-pop starlet gets her Spears on.
Available on: Robyn Is Here (RCA)

363. Tainted Love - Soft Cell [1981]
A '60s soul breakup ballad, reborn as eerie synth pop.
Available on: Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (Mercury)

364. Buddy Holly - Weezer [1994]
All my honkeys, proudly geeky, throw your hands up at me!
Available on: Weezer (Blue Album) (Geffen)

366. I Touch Myself - Divinyls [1991]
Because who said songs about female masturbation had to be subtle?
Available on: Divinyls (Virgin)

373. Jump - Kris Kross [1992]
Irresistible jungle-gym rap that's so not wiggita-wiggita-wiggita wack.
Available on: Totally Krossed Out (Ruffhouse)

375. Purple Rain - Prince [1984]
No gender play, no horndog humpery, just sweepingly regretful gospel-rock.
Available on: Purple Rain (Warner Bros)

377. Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden [1994]
The Seattle grunge faves' sweeping, grotesque masterpiece.
Available on: Superunknown (A&M)

383. Torn - Natalie Imbruglia [1998]
The Aussie soap beauty takes a break from TV and belts out a torrid breakup tale.
Available on: Left of the Middle (RCA)

386. Total Eclipse of the Heart - Bonnie Tyler [1983]
She needs you now tonight/She freakin' needs you more than ever!
Available on: Faster Than the Speed of Night (Columbia)

388. When I Come Around - Green Day [1994]
Proof punks can be sad without getting all whiny about it.
Available on: Dookie (Reprise)

411. Ride - The Vines [2004]
Roaring garage rawk from an insufferable, autistic Aussie.
Available on: Winning Days (Capitol)

414. Flagpole Sitta - Harvey Danger [1997]
Radio-friendly schizophrenia from Seattle one-hit wonders.
Available on: Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? (Never)

415. Waterfalls - TLC [1994]
An uptempo R&B morality tale teaches us: Practice safe sex and be nice to mama.
Available on: Crazysexycool (LaFace)

416. Chop Suey - System of a Down [2001]
Operatic howls and haunted lyrics from nü-metal's smartest Armenians.
Available on: Toxicity (American)

420. Southern Hospitality - Ludacris [2000]
Over a dive-bombing Neptunes beat, Luda shows off some regional pride.
Available on: Back for the First Time (Def Jam)

421. Let Me Go
Heaven 17 [1983]
Chilly, vaguely menacing New Wave with wobbly synths and wobblier sexuality.
Available on: The Luxury Gap (Arista)

422. Sex Style
Kool Keith [1996]
Rap's weirdest genius invents "porno core," extols…urine?
Available on: Sex Style (Funky Ass Records)

427. That's the Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson [1993]
Pop's little sister grows up with a hypnotic, sticky-hot seduction joint.
Available on: Janet (Virgin)

440. You Get What You Give - New Radicals [1998]
Feel-good mall rock from a celebrity-dissing studio whiz.
Available on: Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too (MCA)

441. Don't You (Forget About Me) - Simple Minds [1985]
From Scotland, one helluva prom song.
Available on: The Breakfast Club (OST) (A&M)

443. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For - U2 [1987]
Heart-wrenching, majestic rock for anyone who's ever misplaced his remote.
Available on: The Joshua Tree (Island)

450. Smooth - Santana featuring Rob Thomas [1999]
A sublimely cheesy cha-cha, still good eleventy billion listens later.
Available on: Metamorphosis (Arista)

451. Country Grammar (Hot Shit) - Nelly [2000]
Cornell Haynes' killer debut single and one killer jumprope chant.
Available on: Country Grammar (Universal)

463. Hate It or Love It - The Game [2005]
A beat from Kanye, a hook from 50—how could he go wrong?
Available on: The Documentary (G-Unit/Aftermath/Interscope)

464. Trapped in the Closet - R. Kelly [2005]
Five times the intrigue! Five times the sex! Five times the gay clergy!
Available on: TP.3 Reloaded (Jive)

466. Baby Got Back - Sir Mix-a-Lot [1992]
Seattle's favorite portly pimp puts the ass in bass.
Available on: Mack Daddy (C2)

482. Man on the Moon - R.E.M. [1992]
A twangy, beguiling tribute to comedian/prankster Andy Kaufman.
Available on: Automatic for the People (Warner Bros)

487. Regulate - Warren G [1994]
Dr. Dre's cuz and Nate Dogg make gangbanging go down smooove.
Available on: Regulate…G Funk Era (Def Jam)

492. Here Comes the Hotstepper - Ini Kamoze [1995]
Jamaica's lyrical gangster toasts himself over a bassline like a bucking horse.
Available on: Here Comes the Hotstepper (Columbia)

495. Don't Speak - No Doubt [1995]
Gwennie leaps from ska-punk brat to pop ballad princess.
Available on: Tragic Kingdom (Interscope)

496. 1979 - The Smashing Pumpkins [1995]
Soaring suburban nostalgia for jaded Gen-X'ers.
Available on: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Virgin)

497. I Believe in a Thing Called Love - The Darkness [2001]
Amp-exploding rawk from a Queen fan whose catsuit is a size too small.
Available on: Permission to Land (Atlantic)

499. I Don't Want to Miss a Thing - Aerosmith [1998]
An epic love ballad to destroy giant asteroids to.
Available on: Armageddon soundtrack (Sony)

500. Yellow - Coldplay [1999]
Hey, Chris Martin: Bono called—he wants his awesomeness back!
Available on: Parachutes (Capitol)

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