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< 60-41 | 20-1 >
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40. The Juan Maclean
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If the Juan MacLean’s debut album was a relatively ruminative affair compared to the locomotive gems like “You Can’t Have It Both Ways” that gained them their reputation, the teaser single for their second, “Happy House,” was a welcome reminder of the band’s ability to bring warm-blooded things to the drench point. Through 12-plus minutes of jumpy piano-house delirium, Juan and the gang find time for brief interludes of Moroder mystery, snipped vocal techno, and a proggy unspooling of all the elements mentioned and several left unstated. A hyperkinetic Autobahn jam of a sort: what begins with the DFA’s vulcanized bassline and a really clipped edition of the brand’s trap-n-handclap beat ends in the disco pomp of Nancy Whang’s plea for space-launch. Some 10 minutes elapse between those two points; they’re kind of hard to recall when the fever breaks. Consider it a disco primer for the oughts, but make sure it’s playlisted a few months from now when muted things grow bright again.
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39. UGK
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Not even Sir Lucious Leftfoot's epic frowndown could snap Andre 3000's winning streak. In a banner era for posse cuts, Dre kicks off joyful and beatless over Willie Hutch's beloved "I Choose You," a pure glow that diffracts his cohorts' decidedly unchivalric verses. In cadence and theme, everyone plays to his mighty strengths: Bun B with his pimpin' cheerleader's chant, Pimp C's grouchy, boastful audition for a rider. Big Boi closes sub rosa with an epic, mumbled jeremiad about postnup. A veritable Round Table of shit-talking made all the sweeter by Andre's stylistic comeback.
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38. The Game
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Could you argue that 50 Cent represents the path both his career and rap music has taken over the past 10 years on this track? He kicks off full of youthful piss and vinegar, tempers his style quickly because he understands what sells, switches to introversion when the pressure gets too much, then signals a future when he'll have completely lost his way. I mean, you could argue that.
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37.Jürgen Paape
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Schlager—a potent strain of music aimed for a schlocky heart—is reviled by everyone I've ever met. But somehow Juergen Paape’s vocal sample in “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” pulled out something light and effervescent from Israeli schlaeger singer, Daliah Lavi, and her hot melodramatic mess. What began as a Love Parade staple turned into an Indie-dance staple and is ebullient enough to span both groups. From the gentle crack of the snare, the lulling chimes, the endearingly modest bassline, Paape’s track is gorgeous and impossible to hate.
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36. Britney Spears
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At the dawn of 2004, Britney Spears's career looked a little desperate. Three months earlier, she'd appeared at the 2003 VMAs in a stilted lip-lock with Madonna (a stunt to promote the eventual flop "Me Against the Music"), and then, right after the new year, there was that impetuous two-day Vegas marriage. But then came "Toxic." With its dizzying Bernard Herrmann strings, stuttering spy-movie guitar, and theme of spellbound submission, this high-octane dance-pop track was the perfect vehicle for Britney's naturally breathy, light-headed voice, and its frisson of danger made it a temptation awfully hard to resist.
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35. Phoenix
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“We’re having one of those moments right now … when everything is so perfect and so wonderful that you almost feel sad because nothing could ever be this good again” —Rory Gilmore, “Gilmore Girls.”*
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34. Hot Chip
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My contention has always been that Hot Chip's genius lies in contrasting their bouncey, rambunctious, sometimes jarring tunes with heavy doses of pathos. "Boy From School" is one of their finest, addressing nostalgia with wistful eyes and trying their best to smile the pain away. Even the lovely, dancey uptempo part has a tragic undertone to it. But then they drop down to harp strokes and that haunting, whistling solo, and finally strip it all away at the nearly a cappella end, until all you can hear is the sound of a heart breaking, long years ago.
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33. Robyn
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If there's any doubt the "Show Me Love" girl created a classic, listen to the stripped-back piano-and-voice version for confirmation. Then for the full impact, watch the original video, the Robyns in the mirror changing in time with the stutter-step beat and hectoring/leaping strings, going from blank to crying to rueful. "Be Mine!" is about the cold comfort of knowing, as if knowledge was any shield to heartbreak. You can change yourself or the situation as much as you want and it'll always come down to: You never were and you never will be mine.
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32. Annie
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I’ll be the asshole here and point out that “Heartbeat”, the best song Annie has ever released, was released in the wake of the Norwegian indie diva losing her real-life boyfriend to a hole in his heart. The song’s beat is an obvious metaphor, the heart cathartic and catalyzing in this rock-tinged paean to new, fleeting love. Chugging along at 128 BPM, a heartbeat typical for moderate exercise or amorous palpitations, the cut’s beat strengthens as an encounter with an anonymous club companion tilts up into full-on dance mode. However, Annie’s first line, “there was a time,” foreshadows the impermanent nature of the tryst. No dance locks eternal grooves, just as no such congress lasts forever. It seems like a pessimistic sentiment, one borne out of actual, profound loss. But Annie revels in the moment, cooing high-pitched melodies and remembrances of the “electricity,” “majesty”, the “symphony” of two heartbeats operating as one. The takeaway: in the ongoing narrative of your heart, that which you lose isn’t so as important as what you gain.
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31. Jay-Z
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Ignore the thirty wastes these morons ranked ahead of this cock of the walk. Nothing else this decade was just so rude: the unaccredited hook swiped from an Ice-T relic, Billy Squier's been-there boom-bap, tweaked and twiddled with cowbells by Rick Rubin. The fact is that no one ever bought that Shawn Carter was dangerous—we just liked his ugly smirk. The man who had to leave his Chinese chick “cause she kept bootlegging my shit” raps obnoxiously, gleefully, repugnantly, expertly. His swagger is such that his victory lap put him in “retirement” for a few years so he could play Monopoly with Def Jam. And when he mouths off to a crooked cop, we light up because the fantasy feels so much more attainable than the fallacies of living gangsta.
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30. Junior Boys
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I’m not sure what it says about the Junior Boys as artists that the duo’s highest-ranking song is so dissimilar from the bulk of its compositions. The eggshell-fragile Canadians earned great renown this decade for their exquisite juxtaposition of delicate R&B longing and quietly percolating dance-pop patterns; but “In the Morning” stands out as their most effervescently extroverted moment, the “fun” song that fans always clamor to hear in concert. It’s a song about sex that sounds like sex, from Jeremy Greenspan’s ecstatically breathy delivery to the fantastically rhythm insucks of breath in the background, to the orgasmic breakdown that hits like waves of pleasure just before the three-minute mark.
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29. Gnarls Barkley
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Of all the crushing realisations to dawn on a child, that the pop charts aren't always right is one that occasionally receives a challenge in adulthood. Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" was No.1 in the UK for nine weeks before being deleted by the band. They had no fanbase, they're not sexy, they weren't famous, it wasn't a gimmick, it wasn't in an advert or a movie. Sometimes the song wins, or rarer still, the performance. Dangermouse's ghoulishly detached backing chorus and dramatic string sweeps wouldn't sound half as good without Cee-Lo's masterful one-take vocal, a lesson to any singer still holding on to the handrail.
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28. Kleerup
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After 15 years in the game, Robyn embodies the severity of confidence, from lyrics delivered with street-smart spittle to a stray bang sinister in its studied disarray. The girl’s always been somewhere in-between a Curly Sue and a Dark Willow. However, her most successful single of the decade, a little ditty known as “With Every Heartbeat”, managed to and convincingly flesh out the girl’s humanity. The song gyrates wildly between denial and acceptance (“Still dying with every step I take / But I don’t look back”), the subject a victim to the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique of love, as producer Kleerup plays out ingenious dance-pop squelches and orchestral flourishes. Robyn finally admits to the painful finality of loss, pinning the syllables “And it hurts with ev-e-ry heartbeat” to each measure. Carried off to exquisite perfection, “With Every Heartbeat” showed Robyn as a girl who could play the conquered as well as conquerer.
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27.Kelis
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At a time when mainstream pop was becoming ever more hyper-sexualised—a journey which took us from the transgressive highs of Britney’s “I’m A Slave 4 U” to the reductionist shallows of Christina’s “Dirrty”—the obliquely suggestive riddle of “Milkshake” came as a welcome counterpoint. As we puzzled over its definition, our imaginations doing the dirty work on her behalf, Kelis offered no further clues. Artfully offhand, like some sort of sphinx of the schoolyard, she spun her teases and taunts over a lean, lithe arrangement: lurching, buzzing bass in the foreground, sparse acoustic slashes in the background, pattering beats, the occasional bell chime (“Time’s up—next!”), and not a fat lot else.
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26. The Killers
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Forget the album version played on Top 40 radio, or even the video, the impact of which is semi-obscured by Brandon Flowers’ cute makeup and Robert Smith jones at its most “In Between Days” poptastic. Months before Stuart Price aka Jacques Lu Cont reminded Madonna of how beguilingly her music could still thud-thud-thud, he remixed The Killers’ only American top 10 so that it stripped the song of its untoward guitar raunch and intensified its desperation.
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25. Delays
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Leave aside for a moment the audacity of the Katrina setting, the effortless falsetto, the incredible sunburst of a coda, the inexorable momentum of the song, that amazing chorus, and just listen for a second to the bass line during said chorus. Especially on headphones, the submarine pulse and leap of the bass under the flashier elements could make a million lesser songs. It plunges you into the refrains like a tidal wave, and I didn't even notice it the first dozen times. "Valentine"'s greatness is fractal, present in every little element just as much as in the astounding whole.
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24. Justin Timberlake
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“My Love” is everything we expect from a huge single: A great performance by a top performer, an immediately innovative beat by the world’s best producer, a guest verse from a rapper on the cusp of being kid-friendly, mother-approved. It’s the beginning of Timbaland’s third stage, where the dazzle and shimmer of synth-pop and house began to color his frenetically interlocking digital crunk. It’s where T.I. proved that he could be as charming as his music hinted. But it’s primarily where JT stopped playing the innocent puppy dog and started asserting himself as the cocky lothario we always knew he was.
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23.Beyonce
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It's not actually all about those incredible horns. Those are amazing, but they've helped Amerie to great tracks, too. What makes "Crazy in Love" is, most of all, B's bold, ballsy vocal. This wasn't just a solo debut, this was a clarion call, a statement of intent. It's also "When Beyonce Met Jay-Z...," a romance still playing out (like when she said, at the recent MTV EMAs, that he was the one "who put a ring on it"). But more than anything—the thumping beat, the booty-shake dance, any of it—it comes down to the most assured vocal she'd recorded at the time (and still one of her best).
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22. Franz Ferdinand
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The unexpected arrival of The Strokes and Stripes during the high summer of 2001 left Britain’s indie aristocracy looking bloated, boring, and irreversibly out-dated. Poise, wit, brevity, and style—the UK had arrogantly assumed a God-given monopoly on these qualities which were now being effortlessly executed across the Atlantic. With one song the Empire struck back. “Take Me Out” crams every known Britpop trick into its fevered four minutes. Every element slots together perfectly; they slide from new wave strut through punk funk groove to hard rock stomp with Beatlesque fluency and an ever-so-slightly-raised eyebrow. That they seem incapable of coming close to nearing the explosive impact of this opening salvo only makes its cocksure potency the more extraordinary.
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21. Daft Punk
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Though fundamentally celebratory in tone, “One More Time” foreshadowed a few of the themes that would be explored on Discovery itself. Romanthony’s majestically overpronounced-ah exhortations manage to be simultaneously reassuring, comically repetitive, and just a little bit militant. The inevitable sadness at the transience of it all reaches its peak during the breakdown, which is slightly too long in exactly the right way; but when that monolithic synthetic brass riff gallops back, it results in what may actually be the single most gratifying, heart-swelling introduction of a 4/4 beat in the history of dance music.
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< 60-41 | 20-1 >
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