The 200 Best Songs of the 2000s

Remember when everyone was partying like it was 1999 because it was, in fact, 1999? That was 10 years ago. Yes, the first decade of the 21st century-- "The Aughts"-- is coming to a close, and for music fanatics such as ourselves, that means it's a good time to make some lists. We round up our favorite albums, tracks, and videos at the end of every year, of course, but once in a while we go all-out and tackle an entire decade-- The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s, the Top 100 Albums of the 1990s, and so on. Since Pitchfork has been around for all of the 2000s, we're taking the opportunity to put together a detailed and wide-ranging story-- as told in four lists, four essays, and a timeline of events-- of what happened in music in the last 10 years. About what you'd get from a print magazine, but it's free and you won't throw it out the next time you move.

Our list has 500 songs, but only 200 to 1 have written briefs; read to the end to see numbers 201-500.

Beck: “Lost Cause” (2002)

The sad-sack, lost-love mumble of Sea Change is so thoroughly down, it’s hard to imagine it producing a single. But Beck managed to inject his stoic sorrow into a few catchy tunes, “Lost Cause” being the catchiest. Kind of the emotional inverse of “Loser”, it marries lyrical futility to an achingly circular melody, which goes up and down like stairs in an M.C. Escher drawing. The rest of Sea Change may be more hypnotic in its resigned sorrow, but “Lost Cause”, like the best mope-anthems, makes you nod along to sentiments that would otherwise have you hanging your head. –Marc Masters

Listen: Beck: “Lost Cause”

Portishead: “The Rip” (2008)

Perhaps the comeback of the decade. Portishead returned in 2008 and the space they’d carved out was somehow more removed and vacant than the phantom, fractured jazz and blues clubs suggested on their two previous records. That pulsing tone that opens the track could have been some dying transmission from one of Dummy’s analog synthesizers, yet the arpeggios that underpin the back half of the track sounded achingly contemporary. And threading a line between the 1990s and now was that voice, reminding us that nobody can spread multi-syllabic words of woe across bars of music quite like Beth Gibbons. –Matthew Solarski

Listen: Portishead: “The Rip”

Vitalic: “La Rock 01” (2001)

Before Justice and Daft Punk lit their megawatt crosses and pyramids in the name of all things distorted and danceable, there was Pascal Arbez aka Vitalic and his arena-ready take on four-down party spiking. Seemingly going for as many head bangs as hip flips, “La Rock 01” takes a pugilist’s mentality when it comes to dancefloor takeover-- put up a fight or get knocked out. Arbez pulled off the industrial-tinged techno attack a full four years before his famous French countrymen famously mangled their groove with 2005’s fuzzed-to-oblivion Human After All, and “La Rock 01” in particular sounds like the top of a blog-house family tree that’s still splitting bandwidth on a daily basis. And Arbez makes the machines work for him, whether they’re buzzing like bees on speedballs or causing EQ meters to snap into a billion pieces thanks to a what sounds like a demonic copy machine’s futuristic head-rush chomp. The 1990s promised a electro takeover of all things rock-- it didn’t happen. But Vitalic begins the decade by riding lightning as hard and fast as any musclebound fist-pumper-- and priming the formula that would eventually give rise to megawatt crosses and pyramids around the world. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Vitalic: “La Rock 01”

Joanna Newsom: “Peach, Plum, Pear” (2004)

Get past That Voice, and that harpsichord, and all the quirks that make Joanna Newsom either catnip or poison to her admirers and detractors, and what you find here is one hell of a composition. The odd chord progression stays precisely the same for the entire song, but the melody “changes some,” in Newsom’s phrase. So does the tenor of its lyric, from the ooze and floozies and alliteration of its first few verses to the manic, bolting horse and internal assonance (and therefore suggestion of “whores”) in the last few. None of that is obvious at first, but all of it works in the service of the song’s needle-sharp emotional sting. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Joanna Newsom: “Peach, Plum, Pear”

No Age: “Teen Creeps” (2008)

It’s tempting to hear “Teen Creeps” as a rant against No Age’s home, scene-defining L.A. venue the Smell. “I hate this place,” moans drummer Dean Spunt over guitarist Randy Randall’s gravity-pulled riffs. But the rallying, march-like feel of the track suggests that when Spunt insists, “I won’t end up like them at all,” he’s not pointing at his musical brethren, but scene come-latelys that “wash away what we create.” Or maybe the song isn’t that literal– certainly the music’s hazy hooks stand up to multiple interpretations. That’s the potency of No Age’s rough minimalism: it could mean almost anything, except nothing at all. –Marc Masters

Listen: No Age: “Teen Creeps”

Love Is All: “Make Out Fall Out Make Up” (2003)

Love Is All may specialize in songs that sound sharp and jagged, but their best single is more like a series of rounded upward curves, building up and crashing down like tidal waves confined to a kiddie pool. While the verses in “Make Out Fall Out Make Up” throb like a hangover headache, the choruses blare to the point of nearly collapsing into atonal cacophony, with Josephine Olausson’s trebly yelping rising above the din to absolutely nail the tune’s feeling of overwhelming romantic anxiety. –Matthew Perpetua

Listen: Love Is All: “Make Out Fall Out Make Up”

David Banner: “Cadillac on 22’s” (2003)

This is what I figured a brilliant Kid Rock ballad could sound like: Big plastic beats, folksy steel-string guitar, and devotional verses about the heart of the streets. But Kid Rock was a clown and David Banner just turned out to be confused– a guy who earned his savings shouting about pussy and pimpin’ but privately ground his teeth over whether raps about pussy and pimpin’ were really what his community needed. His most detached lyric– “My folks still dumping, my music bumping but I feel nothing”– is also his most engaged. “Record companies don’t give a fuck about ’Cadillac on 22’s,’” he told Pitchfork’s Tom Breihan in a Village Voice interview. Sadly, it figures. –Mike Powell

Listen: David Banner: “Cadillac on 22’s”

Twista: “Slow Jamz” [ft. Kanye West and Jamie Foxx] (2004)

It’s easy to forget these days, but Kanye West– self-serious megastar with a laser-light show and an androgynous girlfriend– was once funny as hell: The two-liner here about Michael Jackson is a great, simple gag, made even better by Kanye’s barely suppressed giggle. The concept of “Slow Jamz”, it being a slow jam about slow jams that namedrops slow jams, could have been a groaner, but young Kanye’s easy charm saves it, and the lite-jungle breakbeat and Twista’s hyperlogia saves the song from just being Jamie Foxx’s karaoke homage. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: Twista: “Slow Jamz” [ft. Kanye West and Jamie Foxx]

Pulp: “Sunrise” (2001)

There were two fitting epitaphs to Pulp. The first is the “Bad Cover Version” video, a charity song send-up with celebrity musician look-alikes paying tribute to Pulp’s musical legacy; the other– “Sunrise”, the final song on the group’s We Love Life album– wasn’t so celebratory. After spending 20 years chasing fame, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker realized it didn’t suit him much, releasing first the 1997 hangover LP This Is Hardcore and then the more introspective and conflicted Life. “All my achievements...range from pathetic to piss-poor,” Cocker claims before celebrating the titular sunrise of early semi-retirement. The band itself didn’t seem to want to go as patiently into that good night, closing the song with three minutes of its most ferocious work, a snarling, climatic build and a fitting send-off for one of the more creative acts of our time. –Scott Plagenhoef

Listen: Pulp: “Sunrise”

Vampire Weekend: “Oxford Comma” (2008)

There’s plenty about “Oxford Comma” that screams “Kitsch!”: that Lil Jon shoutout, the fact that Vampire Weekend, already with a reputation for overbearing bookishness, wrote a song ostensibly about grammar. But “Oxford Comma” is compositionally brilliant; clocking in at 3:15, it’s a microcosm of momentum-building, beginning with a slow thudding beat before, in short order, ramping to its double-chorus finale, resplendent and victorious without ever being angry or loud or fast. Montessori, finishing school, whatever it took: “Oxford Comma” is well-mannered punk rock. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Vampire Weekend: “Oxford Comma”

Panjabi MC: “Mundian to Bach Ké (Beware of the Boys)” [ft. Jay-Z] (2003)

Bhangra never blew up in the U.S. the way dancehall or reggaeton did, but its one shot says something about the ridiculous zone Jay-Z was in for the decade’s first few years. Before Jay got ahold of it, “Mundian to Bach Ké” was a geography-crushing global smash. Jay might not have understood a word of the original, but he heard a dope beat (that “Knight Rider” theme was always meant to destroy dancefloors) and an opportunity to flex regal. And Jay just tore this thing apart, protesting the Iraq war before it was cool and calling himself the black Brad Pitt, taking one of ya chicks straight from under ya armpit– which is always cool. Some days, globalization feels like a good thing. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Panjabi MC: “Mundian to Bach Ké (Beware of the Boys)” [ft. Jay-Z]

The Tough Alliance: “Silly Crimes” (2006)

Among indie dudes, “pure pop” used to mean “1960s-style pop.” Jangling guitars were a must– nothing too spicy, please. Well, the King of Pop is dead. Was that what he sounded like? How about the sound of global pop culture circa 2009? From heartfelt (OK, gloriously flawed) singing to running a collector’s-mentality record label, the Tough Alliance are way more indie than they’d probably like to admit. But they’ve seldom sounded more purely pop than on “Silly Crimes”, the flagship track from their maiden EP as label owners. Bass-heavy dance beats, sweetly yearning hooks, neon synths, utopian strings, and tropical sound effects– it’s New Waves, not “new wave.” And as frivolous delinquency goes, it’s pretty near a perfect crime. –Marc Hogan

Listen: The Tough Alliance: “Silly Crimes”

Jens Lekman: “Black Cab” (2005)

Oh, you’re so self-conscious, Jens. With a “There She Goes” bounce in his step, Lekman wittily wallows in the guilt of ruining someone else’s good time. Now, all he wants to do is get home and sleep in his own bed, but the poor guy’s missed the last train. So he straps on a harpsichord borrowed from the Left Banke and some violins and casts his lot with the disreputable drivers of the black cabs, singing, “They might be psycho killers but tonight I really don’t care.” If Lekman’s bad nights out beget songs like this, I hope he never improves his social aptitude –Joe Tangari

Listen: Jens Lekman: “Black Cab”

Booka Shade: “Mandarine Girl” (2005)

In 2005, dancefloors were awash in the anthems of what would briefly be known as “electro-house”– big, bold things with a beefed-up midrange as colorful and lovingly sculpted as the neon trim of an import tuner. Booka Shade claimed two of them, the Ibiza favorite “Body Language” and the more driving “Mandarine Girl”. Flush with rubbery riffs and sparkling counterpoints, the latter is essentially trance with swing, its syncopated refrain cycling upwards as fat, tubular synthesizers puff like smokestacks. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Booka Shade: “Mandarine Girl”

Fugazi: “Cashout” (2001)

Gentrification and real estate greed were not necessarily hot topics for rock bands to tackle in early 2001, but then Fugazi always have stayed ahead of the curve. Years prior to the final build-up and burst of the housing bubble, Ian MacKaye and company used “Cashout” to forcefully question the motives of real estate developers and the local governments who cater to them. In the process MacKaye delivers one of his most nuanced vocal performances, while the rest of the group matches his every lithe stride with characteristic economy of movement and an innate sense for genuine community action. –Matthew Murphy

Listen: Fugazi: “Cashout”

Dead Prez: “Hip-Hop” (2000)

In 2000, Dead Prez were the rare NYC group who recognized Southern rap’s subwoofer-heavy ascension as an opportunity, not a threat. The gargling-demon bassline on “Hip-Hop” kicked as hard as anything Mannie Fresh made that summer. And MCs M1 and Stic.Man used its buzzing urgency as a jumping-off point, slamming through righteous, fiery self-policing sermonism so woolly and ferocious that their preaching didn’t resonate as preaching. When Stic.Man pledged to run up on them crackers in they City Hall, you believed him. But at the end, when they broke away from all the fury to chant about how dope they were, you believed that, too. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Dead Prez: “Hip-Hop”

Queens of the Stone Age: “No One Knows” (2002)

This powerful slab of punch-drunk boogie rock stands as the most visible piece of QOTSA’s legacy, and not just because it topped the Modern Rock charts. A lot of its indelibility comes from the rhythmic swagger that arose from the combination of Josh Homme’s loping guitar riff, Nick Oliveri’s charging oompah-bass, and frequent ringer Dave Grohl’s memorably tourniquet-tight performance behind the kit. But there’s a sour, mournfully anxious mood under all that force, and the song stands as a bitter counterpoint to the manic pharmaceutical inventory of their previous single, “Feel Good Hit of the Summer”: “We get these pills to swallow/ How they stick in your throat”. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Queens of the Stone Age: “No One Knows”

Beyoncé: “Irreplaceable” (2006)

Seriously: What kind of numbskull would cheat on Beyoncé? She’s crazy, she’s ringing alarms, and– most important– she’s Beyoncé, almighty one-stop entertainer beamed down from Planet Perfection. But “Irreplaceable” is all about the revelation that there’s some unscripted emotion underneath all those hypnotic sequins. She puts on a good front: “You must not know ’bout me, I could have another you in a minute,” she sings, hand on hip. But the cracked delivery of “another you” gives her away– she sounds vulnerable, crushed, human. By the end of the song, the “another you”s are more strident as she turns back into the high-heeled superhero with invisible pores and quite-visible hips. But even when she loses, she wins. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Beyoncé: “Irreplaceable”

Yo La Tengo: “Our Way to Fall” (2000)

The English language suggests “falling in love” and “being in love” are two totally separate states. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley have been falling in love with each other long enough to know better. The wisdom of shared experience informs this song’s still-fluttery reminiscences on new romance, presented with the refined brushstrokes and humble restraint of indie rock Zen masters. It’s the little things you remember: what music you heard, gestures you noticed, what she was wearing around her neck and the day it fell to pieces behind the dresser. And it’s the little things Yo La Tengo get right with “Our Way to Fall”, an intimate anytime wedding march as post-Talk Talk tone poem. I remember the way it sounded walking down the aisle. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Yo La Tengo: “Our Way to Fall”

Morrissey: “The First of the Gang to Die” (2004)

Morrissey’s doomed romantic persona is the perfect vehicle for this update of American gangster mythology, which moves the action from the fedoras, Tommy guns, and speakeasies of 1930s Chicago and New York to the modern mean streets of L.A. His snuffed gangster, Hector, is no angel– he steals “from the rich and the poor and the not very rich and the very poor,” and steals our hearts as well. Morrissey’s grand musical backdrop and emotional distance allow him to croon his way to Hector’s complex inner nobility, and the result is a sensitive anthem for a tough, tough guy. –Joe Tangari

Listen: Morrissey: “The First of the Gang to Die”

Gwen Stefani: “Hollaback Girl” (2004)

“Hollaback Girl” proved divisive with critics, with this publication decrying it as second-rate Queen, but this list’s voters evidently have latched on to Gwen’s feminine sport anthem. Stefani actually wrote “Hollaback Girl” with producer Pharrell Williams in reaction to a derogatory statement made by Courtney Love labeling Stefani a cheerleader. From the outset, it’s pretty obvious that Stefani is a cheerleader, and a damn good one. The cut’s Spartan beat proved wildly successful in the club, with Stefani’s invocations leading legions of ladies (and dudes) in an empowering urban shout-along. –Mike Orme

Listen: Gwen Stefani: “Hollaback Girl”

Bon Iver: “Skinny Love” (2007)

People make too much of the cabin thing. Yes, Justin Vernon got his heart broken, hightailed it to the woods, donned some flannel, and emerged with some truly lovely music; it’s a story roughly as romantic as the records he makes. What makes “Skinny Love” so resonant isn’t just the wounded quality in Vernon’s unadorned voice or the easily identifiable chill carried by the track’s slight echo; it’s the fact that we can all imagine holing up while wounded and attempting to make something beautiful while making some sense of it. The only difference is, this guy actually did it. –Paul Thompson

Listen: Bon Iver: “Skinny Love”

Air: “Cherry Blossom Girl” (2003)

A successful marriage of the alien and the sensual is a tricky thing to pull off (check the Svedka she-bot for an example of how this can go horribly, horribly awry), but Air nailed it with this assemblage of FutureSex LoveSounds for the retro-futurist set. The lyrics may be all innocent infatuation, but the music tells a very different story. It’s hard to say which is more seductive: those gentle organic strums, the sci-fi synths, the Kenny G shit, or the way sensuous sounds past and present all come together in glorious communion here. File this one under “pomo-erotic”. –Matthew Solarski

Listen: Air: “Cherry Blossom Girl”

Eminem: “The Real Slim Shady” (2000)

As a self-styled controversy-courting public enemy number one, Eminem knew people would be listening closely when he dropped his second album The Marshall Mathers LP. Needless to say, “The Real Slim Shady”, its pop-culture-puncturing first single, went out of its way to chum the waters, and did so with such malicious glee that its instantly dated time-capsule lyrics hardly matter. “May I have your attention please?” asks Eminem politely at the song’s start, but he needn’t have bothered. He knows he’s got it long before he even hits that undeniably anthemic chorus. –Joshua Klein

Listen: Eminem: “The Real Slim Shady”

Xiu Xiu: “I Luv the Valley OH!” (2004)

A good Xiu Xiu song is like someone vividly describing his pain. A great Xiu Xiu song is like someone actually hurting himself, right in front of you. This isn’t their most violent effort, but it’s their most scouring; a place where mortar-round drums pound down on rolling bass and chiming guitars, unsubtly conveying the painful insight that some dreams have to be razed, not realized. But the killshot is Jamie Stewart’s plugged-in vocal performance. Couched in his family mythology, it’s both pining and excoriating, his fatal cries pluming out like red mist. It sounds wrenched from a deeper place than even Stewart often goes. –Brian Howe

Listen: Xiu Xiu: “I Luv the Valley OH!”

Usher: “Yeah” [ft. Lil Jon and Ludacris] (2003)

It’s hard to remember a time when a combination of Southern crunk’s trunk-rattling grit with sleek modern R&B would be considered groundbreaking. But so it was when Usher unveiled “Yeah” in early 2004. “Yeah” was the dirtiest-sounding thing Usher had done to date, but the real draw was Lil Jon’s ferocious-but-slippery production, featuring that crazy keyboard vamp that still sounds thrilling today. It also contains fantastic moments of unintentional hilarity, with lyrics dovetailing with Dave Chappelle’s loving TV mimicry of Lil Jon and the best guest-spot mispronunciation (Ludacris’ “Ursher”) since cats were calling Kanye “Cain” on his own records. –Joe Colly

Listen: Usher: “Yeah” [ft. Lil Jon and Ludacris]

Los Campesinos!: “You! Me! Dancing!” (2007)

A huge part of Los Campesinos!’ charm lies in their comfort with–and embrace of– being a bunch of nerds. And what’s more nerdy than not being able to dance? How about a song celebrating not being able to dance, but dancing anyway? “You! Me! Dancing!” explodes with the exuberance that comes from realizing that there’s no shame in being uncool, and no shame in doing uncool things like obsessing over long-lost indie heroes like Bis or throwing violin, glockenspiel, and girl-boy shouting over a tinny approximation of a classic rock riff. Fittingly, this track first drew attention via an uncool forum full of nerds: MySpace. –Amy Phillips

Listen: Los Campesinos!: “You! Me! Dancing!”

M.O.P.: “Ante Up” (2000)

Fact: Did you know that every time you play “Ante Up”, M.O.P.’s collaboration with LFO ceases to exist for exactly 4:09 seconds? It’s true; with every unhinged shout of “YAP THAT FOOL!” it becomes increasingly impossible that M.O.P.’s Billy Danze and Lil Fame ever worked with the “Chinese food makes me sick” dudes. It’s just that potent– the purest distillation of the sort of gun-blazing roughneck shit that M.O.P. have been slinging with wild-eyed, suicide-bomber conviction ever since 1993’s “How About Some Hardcore?” The Mash Out Posse do one thing, over and over again, and they do it incredibly well, and if there’s any confusion over what that thing is, then perhaps you are simply unclear on the meaning of either the words “mash” or “out,” or what they mean when put together. –Jayson Greene

Listen: M.O.P.: “Ante Up”

Shellac: “Prayer to God” (2000)

It’s not easy to find nuance in hate. Sounding like a country death ballad banged out by factory machinery, “Prayer to God” is a double-death wish with revealing specificity. The setup is simple enough: There are two people

here, and the narrator wants God to kill them. Over clamoring chords and the dead-air breaks in between, any other information comes slowly, and the same goes for the blustering climax and teeth-gritting tension from the lyrics’ repetition– all to be deflated by its grim punchline: the most disarming “amen” put to tape. –Jason Crock

Listen: Shellac: “Prayer to God”

Talib Kweli: “Get By (Remix)” [ft. Mos Def, Jay Z, Kanye West, and Busta Rhymes] (2003)

Before he claimed he’d rhyme like Talib Kweli if lyrics sold, Jay-Z appeared on a remix of Talib’s hit single and did just that in a way that made his desperate struggles sound suave. Before his outsized lyrical personality was as famous as his production chops, Kanye West augmented his masterful Nina Simone-derived piano-hook beat with his first truly great turn on the mic. Before both of their verses, Mos Def opened with what’d be his most impassioned performance for years to come. Before the stirring gospel coda, Busta tore shit up. And before I forget: Kweli’s the beating heart at the center of a legendary posse cut. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Talib Kweli: “Get By (Remix)” [ft. Mos Def, Jay Z, Kanye West, and Busta Rhymes]

Guillemots: “Trains to Brazil” (2005)

All swing drums, horn crescendos, and vocal gallantry, “Trains to Brazil” was the Guillemots’ first single and the most stirring encapsulation of the unabashed romanticism of their Through the Cliffs EP and debut full-length, Through the Windowpane. Singer Fyfe Dangerfield turns his eye toward the seemingly intractable conflicts of society: the title refers to Jean Charles de Menezes, who was killed after he was mistaken for a suicide bomber in the aftermath of the London train bombings. But being the obvious idealist that he is, Fyfe concludes, with a largely jazz-trained backing band playing ADD R&B behind him, that we’re all lucky to be alive. –Mike Orme

Listen: Guillemots: “Trains to Brazil”

Ludacris: “Southern Hospitality” (2000)

The early Ludacris singles remain the best because they had one quality much of his later music lacks: subtlety. There’s a stark menace to “Southern Hospitality” that makes his punchlines land harder because he’s not overwhelming the music by selling every line as a stand-up’s money shot. An early example of the already miserly Neptunes at their most restrained, the whistling synths are about the only thing coloring the clonk-and-clap drum pattern; it’s stand-out minimalism perfect for a performance with more honest, laconic menace than the rapper would later allow himself. Plus it brought a hip-hop catchphrase to Middle America on the back of something other than a shitty dance-craze record, no mean feat. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Ludacris: “Southern Hospitality”

Of Montreal: “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” (2007)

After establishing his mission in the very first line of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?– “We just want to emote ’til we’re dead”– Kevin Barnes tries his damndest to fulfill it on the record’s 12-minute centerpiece. And for Of Montreal, the past almost seemed like a set-up to blindside listeners with this song. For a band that built its following on “Sesame Street” psychedelia that sounded like eating a box of acid-laced crayons, “Grotesque Animal” is a jarring detour, a prowling, evil drone-rant that eschews Barnes’ usual sugar-high hooks for a diary-reading travelogue of love gained and lost, culminating, inevitably, in screaming sheets of Casio catharsis. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: Of Montreal: “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”

Liars: “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack” (2006)

The Hollywood ending of Liars’ most essential album, “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack” climbs from Drum’s Not Dead’s summit of rhythm, tension, and dissonance into a valley of easy harmonies splayed over chiming guitars. This woozy love song takes its time finding contentment, too, with a beat that sits still and vocals that promise to stretch on forever. In its own angular, art-rock way, “The Other Side” presaged the slow-song, group-vocals that bands like Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear turned into tour buses. –Grayson Currin

Listen: Liars: “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack”

Gui Boratto: “Beautiful Life” (2007)

Brazil’s not particularly known for its techno, but then Gui Boratto isn’t your average techno producer. Armed with a background in radio jingles and engineering credits for the likes of Garth Brooks and Des’ree, Boratto dropped in Chromophobia one of 2007’s most intricately mapped techno expeditions. Most of the record consisted of haunting, wordless sequencer games, but it’s “Beautiful Life”, an eight-minute slab of lo-fi vocal trance-pop, that many listeners remember. Sleepy vocals recorded by Luciana Villanova, who also happens to be married to Boratto, top out the New Order tribute without diminishing the impact of Gui’s techno swath. –Mike Orme

Listen: Gui Boratto: “Beautiful Life”

Jimmy Eat World: “The Middle” (2001)

“Don’t write yourself off yet.” In the world of rock’n’roll, that’s about as good as advice gets. But “it’s only in your head you feel left out, or looked down on,” on the other hand, is a total lie. They really are looking down on you, and they’d rather you not come along at all. But you can’t let the enormity of that hit you when you’re 16 (the hardest age) and in the middle of it. So it’s a good kind of lie, the kind that helps you when you need it most, and J.E.W.’s affirmation, then, is offered as a sort of public service to a nation of insecure teenagers. And if your band delivers that message of hope with the kind of power-pop chorus hook that gives the best couple of Weezer songs a run for their money, you’ve accomplished something. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Jimmy Eat World: “The Middle”

Broadcast: “Come on Let’s Go” (2000)

Compared to the heady, slippery stuff Broadcast has created since The Noise Made By People, the lava-lamped bubble-chair groove of “Come On Let’s Go” sounds downright decadent and facile. But if this alluring combination of spy-flavored radiophonics and Trish Keenan’s velvet-honey coo is easy, then I don’t want to know from difficult. –David Raposa

Listen: Broadcast: “Come on Let’s Go”

Girl Talk: “Smash Your Head” (2006)

The first half of “Smash Your Head” is just a well-executed mash-up, blending Clipse with Fall Out Boy and Nirvana with Young Jeezy and making them sound like they could all have some fun together. But then comes Elton John’s sped-up “Tiny Dancer” piano, and right behind it, Biggie. The collision opens up a new world for each song, making Elton’s piano trills sound like the perfect backing to any story told with heart, and the words that much more poignant. And as Biggie talks above all about a love of music, what that can mean to a kid, and shows how that can be carried into adulthood, he unwittingly sums up Girl Talk’s entire M.O. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Girl Talk: “Smash Your Head”

Grizzly Bear: “Two Weeks” (2009)

Sunny and psychedelic, sure, but far from trapped in its own 1960s echo chamber, Grizzly Bear’s sweet “Two Weeks” is as welcomingly open as it is sneakily weird. While the band’s celestial “oohs” and “ahhs” soar, the song itself is driven and underpinned by soft piano plinking, shimmering but subtle sonic accoutrements, and a booming beat that’s more song-of-the-summer than inward indie. The track could probably go on forever but instead ends abruptly, which is perhaps the only way it really could end: flying so high above it all, there’s simply nowhere left for it to go. –Joshua Klein

Listen: Grizzly Bear: “Two Weeks”

Christian Falk: “Dream On” [ft. Robyn and Ola Salo] (2006)

Dance music– and the act of dancing itself– has long been as much about creating safe havens for outsiders as about crafting moveable beats. Swedish DJ Christian Falk’s “Dream On” plays up that warm inclusiveness: Robyn and the Ark’s Ola Salo check IDs and stamp hands outside the a club tailormade for outsiders, offering sanctuary to pigs, snitches, thugs, lifers, freaks, junkies, and outcasts of all stripes. These may be the very same people many dancers want to get away from, but on this bubbly bit of triumphalism, Falk knows the promises of dance music are nil unless extended to every loser and locked-up intern. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Christian Falk: “Dream On” [ft. Robyn and Ola Salo]

50 Cent: “In Da Club” (2002)

Sorry to get all meta re: this list for a second, but this result is surely more a reflection of how absurdly hard 50’s star has crashed over the past five years than any real comment on the song’s quality, right? Because seriously: There are probably only a handful of grooves in recent hip-hop as remotely as instantaneous or as happy-making as these chugging chords, and I feel like in 2003, we all understood this a bit better. What else to say– the lyrics are standard-issue party jam bulletproof braggadocio that squarely lay out the terms: 50 doesn’t make love but he still wants to be loved. Other questions: Was this awesome because 50 doesn’t sing in the chorus? Do you think he’s still happy to sell like Eminem? –Mark Pytlik

Listen: 50 Cent: “In Da Club”

Cat Power: “I Don’t Blame You” (2003)

In retrospect, it can be easy to view Cat Power’s 2003 album You Are Free as a transitional work, one that marks the closing of a musical chapter for Chan Marshall. On the album opening “I Don’t Blame You”, this desire for artistic liberation is at once literal in Marshall’s lyrics and palpable in her performance. Backed only by a solo piano, Marshall’s voice brims with sympathy as she witnesses a musician tormented by audience expectation, a portrait that bears close resemblance to her earlier onstage self. Yet the song is also tempered by a certain measured distance, a sense of quiet acceptance that mirrors Cat Power’s eventual musical evolution away from such harrowing, introspective bloodletting. –Matthew Murphy

Listen: Cat Power: “I Don’t Blame You”

Art Brut: “Formed a Band” (2004)

I’m sure I wasn’t the only disappointed one in the room when, one night earlier this summer, Art Brut left “Formed a Band” off their setlist. But I get it, I do. An origin story this powerful can eclipse a band’s subsequent work– even a band of such overwhelming personality and aggressive rock’n’roll theater. Along with sharp-sticked campaigns to call bullshit on the industry and their peers, Art Brut have committed their career to unpacking “Formed” and selling the joys of forming your own (even if, like Eddie Argos, your singing voice is more drunken harangue than golden croon). So maybe we don’t need the three-minute digest version of their career at every show. Actually, maybe we still do. –Amy Granzin

Listen: Art Brut: “Formed a Band”

Kanye West: “Touch the Sky” [ft. Lupe Fiasco] (2005)

In maybe his last public act before dying, Evel Knievel sued Kanye for jacking his style in the “Touch the Sky” video. He should’ve thanked Kanye for celebrating his goofy-ass legacy. If Knievel didn’t want to see pop’s most dizzily egocentric figure trying on his star-spangled jumpsuit, he should’ve listened a little closer. In some ways, “Touch the Sky” is Kanye at his humblest: Detailing his struggles and failures before exploding into that glorious chorus, outsourcing the beat to fellow Roc-A-Fella house producer Just Blaze because nobody could’ve flipped that Curtis Mayfield sample harder. And when a then-unknown Lupe slickly ducked and weaved through that guest verse, another star was born. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Kanye West: “Touch the Sky” [ft. Lupe Fiasco]

The Pipettes: “Pull Shapes” (2006)

No offense to the lovely brassy ladies of the Pipettes and the shapes they themselves pull with aplomb, but they’re just the cherry on top of this symphonic sundae. Those gorgeous soaring strings, with center stage all to themselves for the track’s first 30 seconds, are the song’s turbo-charged engine. It’s all listeners, and even the Pipettes, can do to hold on and enjoy the ride. –David Raposa

Listen: The Pipettes: “Pull Shapes”

Coldplay: “Clocks” (2002)

Are they a part of the cure or a part of the disease? Well, Coldplay spent the decade securing next-U2 status by swiping Radiohead’s falsettoed grandiosity and stripping it down to a deliriously unthreatening rise-and-swoop formula. So check on in the “disease” column, I guess. But Chris Martin is the rare singer who can write lyrics that mean nothing and sell them like they mean everything, pushing his angelic wail over the glorious tumbling pianos and locked-in cymbal crashes of “Clocks” like Icarus trying to see how far he could push this whole flying thing. “Clocks” is MOR arena-pop done as well as MOR arena-pop can possibly be done. And nothing else compares. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Coldplay: “Clocks”

Sufjan Stevens: “Casimir Pulaski Day” (2005)

Somewhere between his five-volume Christmas album (surprisingly pretty, by the way) and his conceptual work about the BQE Expressway at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (hula hoops, angel wings, and enormous projections of blow-up gorillas played key roles) it started becoming a little more difficult to recall the simple pleasures of Sufjan’s keenly observed folk-pop. Now that his swelling string sections are permanent parts of the indie DNA it’s hard to remember just how fresh-sounding it all was, and how inviting his loose, communal approach to music-making felt, especially when contrasted with his grandiose, 50-ALBUMS-FOR-50-STATES! ambitions. But “Casimir Pulaski Day”, the modest follow-up to “Chicago”, still retains its campfire glow: a softly plonking banjo and guitar, some muted horns, and Sufjan’s gimlet storyteller’s eye. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Sufjan Stevens: “Casimir Pulaski Day”

Luomo: “Tessio” (2000)

“Microhouse,” or house under a microscope? Luomo’s early work honed in on house’s fleshy expanses to reveal a secret world of riotous molecular activity, strewn with dub echo and whispering clicks and snaps. “Tessio” is his most romantic epic, its hesitant build into a voluptuous house groove mirroring the journey of its enigmatic singers from uncertainty to sheltering comfort– “Baby, it’s okay,” they murmur finally, like these simple words could heal a thousand scars of past disappointments. The lingering resonance of “Tessio” as a house anthem full stop confirms that the biology of seduction is unleashed not in a laboratory, but on dancefloors every night. –Tim Finney

Listen: Luomo: “Tessio”

Life Without Buildings: “The Leanover” (2000)

It’s beautiful for many reasons– Robert Johnston’s lyrical guitar work and Sue Tompkins’ genius-baby sing-speak embody pure delight. But mostly, it’s beautiful because it feels like the stuff of spontaneous inspiration, the splatter-paint syllables falling into unrepeatable patterns. Remarkably, this is an illusion, as the faithful version captured on Live at the Annandale Hotel attests. The dense wordplay and Rorschach-blot diction make the hundredth listen feel almost as fresh as the first (in 2009, for instance, opening line “If I lose you” sounds an awful lot like “Fallujah”). But the emotional baseline, bursting with love and quavering with doubt, remains satisfyingly constant –Brian Howe

Listen: Life Without Buildings: “The Leanover”

Santigold: “L.E.S. Artistes” (2008)

On the face of things, Santi White (aka Santogold, now Santigold) would not seem like a person who lacks confidence. Yet there is an undercurrent of self-doubt that ripples through her 2008 breakout single “L.E.S. Artistes”, providing crucial emotional ballast to her buoyant and acerbic songcraft. Though the song takes aim at the poseurs she might see lurking around her Lower East Side neighborhood, lines like “What am I here for?” and “I hope it will be worth what I give up” reflect someone not afraid of turning the same critical eye towards herself, glancing back at avenues not taken while still maintaining her self-assured swagger. –Matthew Murphy

Listen: Santigold: “L.E.S. Artistes”

Junior Senior: “Move Your Feet” (2002)

Thank you, internet! How else would we have found Junior Senior, a gay/straight Danish duo crafting dance parties from whatever genre ingredients were within arm’s reach. “Move Your Feet” caught the online jet stream, helped no doubt by its 8-bit evil squirrel and talking hot dog video (thanks again, internet!), but also through skilled deployment of roller-rink dance-hit staples: bad rapping, funk guitar, bells, humanism-through-dance. Its timing was exquisite, not just for distribution purposes, but for hitting American indie ears just as their dance music allergies were fading and meet-you-halfway disco-punk was leaving newly-founded indie dance parties unsatisfied. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: Junior Senior: “Move Your Feet”

Dan Deacon: “The Crystal Cat” (2007)

What a lonely, lonely sound. Dan Deacon’s shows are about the high of communal experience– about surrendering your ego to a crush of overheated strangers. But his music is solitary. Cartoons and video games might make twentysomethings flush with nostalgia, but “The Crystal Cat” sounded more like Kraftwerk’s cold futures cast in pixels– a sound, above all, about distance rather than closeness. Yeah, you can twist to it. Yeah, it’s freaky and buzzing and loud. But when Deacon squeals through the hail of synthesizer noise and junked drum machines, he sounds like an astronaut sucked through the airlock– lost. –Mike Powell

Listen: Dan Deacon: “The Crystal Cat”

Air France: “Collapsing at Your Doorstep” (2008)

It’s a travel-agency ad, not a pop song– an aural scrapbook by Scandinavian youths who’ve probably seen more of Barcelona through postcards than sunglasses. (We sure love music of distance, huh? Swedes dreaming of the beach; New Yorkers dreaming of the jungle; Timbaland dreaming, endlessly, of deep space.) The swishy, euro-pop pose always bugged me until I heard “Collapsing at Your Doorstep”. It’s music driven by longing, not owning. Music that sounds urbane, but like its makers are shut-ins and cinephiles. With Air France, it’s hard to tell what’s sampled and what’s live– in other words, which sun-soaked daydreams are actually theirs, and which we all somehow share. –Mike Powell

Listen: Air France: “Collapsing at Your Doorstep”

Wilco: “Poor Places” (2002)

“A lot of times when you’re playing, if you don’t have any kind of sonic landscape behind you, everything kind of turns into a folk song,” explains Jay Bennett during the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart as Wilco maps out “Poor Places”. Indeed, on paper, this tune comprises four chords, four verses, and a chorus; on record, though, it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption, with tiny parts lurking in the background only to spring the song into surprising directions. A coruscated drone becomes sedate pop becomes that folk number about which Bennett warned us becomes the most damaged minute in some dude’s iTunes library: No incarnation of Wilco has since outfitted Jeff Tweedy’s universal unease so boldly. –Grayson Currin

Listen: Wilco: “Poor Places”

Fennesz: “Caecilia” (2001)

Fennesz’s Endless Summer may have been complicated to make, but its effect is simple: sweet melodies poured into mesmerizing noise. “Caecilia” is the prettiest such concoction, burying lapping waves of digital grit under a languorous vibraphone hook. The pairing smoothes the former and toughens the latter until they fuse into a real song. How Fennesz fit all his blips and blurs into a song-mold remains a mystery– it sounds more like they’re organizing themselves, like a flock of birds flying in a V. Many imitators since have attempted that trick, but no other digital magicians keep their secrets hidden quite like Fennesz. –Marc Masters

Listen: Fennesz: “Caecilia”

Broken Social Scene: “Cause = Time” (2003)

By the time “Cause = Time” appears eight songs into Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People, the Toronto indie-rockestra had covered much stylistic turf– from noisy garage-rock to bossa nova to orchestral folk. But it was this peak mid-album track that both consolidated the album’s textural sprawl and confirmed Broken Social Scene’s own transformation from ambient hobby project to powerhouse rock band. With its cryptic references to menstruation, religion, and numerology, “Cause” isn’t about political activism any more than Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot” was about tossing Molotov cocktails. But by updating classic, class-of-1988 indie rock anthemery with motorik post-rock rhythms, it served as the wake-up call for a new generation of daydream nationalists. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Broken Social Scene: “Cause = Time”

Justice vs. Simian: “We Are Your Friends” (2003)

Only in Paris could something as seemingly uncool and ho-hum as a college radio remix contest birth a worldwide dancefloor sensation. Made using pretty rudimentary remixing tools, “We Are Your Friends” not only won Justice some contest prize, it established them as a force to be reckoned with. The prodigal duo almost completely gutted Simian’s “Never Be Alone” with the same audacity that would make their debut album such a monolith a few years later. However, despite the drastic re-imagining, Justice, always rockists at heart, preserved the original’s fist-pumping immediacy, a detail too many remixes neglect. –Adam Moerder

Listen: Justice vs. Simian: “We Are Your Friends”

Feist: “1234” (2007)

It’s the song that sold a whole bunch of iPods, and gave “Sesame Street” a chance to learn a new way to count. And it’s a tune that vaguely mirrors Feist’s own transformation from beloved Broken Social Scenester to ubiquitous adult-contemporary everywoman– it starts off modest and gentle atop some acoustic strumming (on guitar and banjo), and then gradually builds to an ebullient horn-filled crescendo, with Feist proving to be just as adept at belting as at murmuring, but never at the expense of the song. –David Raposa

Listen: Feist: “1234”

The Flaming Lips: “Do You Realize??” (2002)

The Flaming Lips nabbed critics with The Soft Bulletin and their carnivalesque live performances, but “Do You Realize??” secured their public spotlight for years to come. Their commercial profile is one of many strange twists and turns over their career, and “Do You Realize??” does more than just announce it: it challenged them to take the vulnerability and earnestness of The Soft Bulletin widescreen, and not fall headfirst into a bucket of sap. The lyrics walk that tightrope precariously, but it’s really only the Lips, after years of spiritual quests, spider bites, flaming cymbals, and constant self-exploration, who can earn them. –Jason Crock

Listen: The Flaming Lips: “Do You Realize??”

Britney Spears: “Toxic” (2003)

The thing that made Britney’s mid-decade breakdown so distressing is that the lady actually had great pop instincts. It’s not like when Jessica Simpson lost her damn mind and we the listeners lost exactly nothing. Sure, Brit bounced back with Blackout, but for better or worse she was a warbling ghost in her producer’s gleaming machines. “Toxic” was the last great Britney single (so far), the last where it felt like a personality was inhabiting the tune. (Britney always had more individualist pep than her peers, important when you’re dealing with steamroller productions from the mind of Max Martin.) And as a bonus, the backing track remains deeply, enjoyably weird-but-catchy: a club-tempo stepping breakbeat colored by James Bond soundtrack outtakes. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Britney Spears: “Toxic”

Interpol: “NYC” (2003)

From “New York, New York”, Ryan Adams’ accidental anthem, to Cat Power’s Sinatra cover, to LCD Soundsystem’s waning-decade lament “I love you but you’re bringing me down,” 9/11’s musical legacy is a still-unresolved mess of bewildered public discourse and private grief. With its aqueous chords and Paul Banks’ quietly desperate, yet poker-faced pronouncements, nothing, perhaps, vents the city’s confusion and ambivalence as elegantly as “NYC”. Everyone always remembers “subway is a porno,” and forgets the chorus, “New York cares,” but this song isn’t just some hipster’s crack-of-dawn crawl home. It’s also an epiphany a lot of New Yorkers reached post-attack: Civic disengagement’s no longer an option. –Amy Granzin

Listen: Interpol: “NYC”

Daft Punk: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” (2001)

Dance songs with instructional chants for lyrics tend to have a short shelf life. So upon first hearing “Harder, Better, Faster Stronger” (and to a greater extent, “One More Time”), I wondered if the new decade had already stumbled upon its “Bodyrock” or “Rockafeller Skank’. But how has “Harder” stood the test of time when so much borderline-brainwashing big beat has turned into dated punchlines? Because even if Kanye made it really tough to find as much novelty in those vocals, there’s just so much else to be amazed at that transcends novelty: go ahead and press play again and try to remember which part is your favorite– the 10 seconds before the intro beat drops? That ridiculous breakdown after the vocals go all widdly-widdly like an electric guitar? There are 138 songs on this list that do a better job of improving your day immediately? In terms of both artists and listeners, this decade has in large part been defined by its pleasure-seekers, and no matter where they sought their thrills, it never seemed like we got too far removed from “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Daft Punk: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”

D’Angelo: “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” (2000)

This single became notorious for its sexually charged video, featuring a series of lingering shots of D’Angelo’s nude body that split the difference between mass voyeurism and personal intimacy. But the rapturous intensity in his lushly multi-tracked vocal performance still holds more weight than any pin-up shot could– swooping and diving, gliding smoothly over the sway of the beat only to punctuate it with a sharp hitch or an extension of his deceptively delicate falsetto into an intense wail. The musical backing only adds to that euphoria, with gospel-soul pianos direct from Aretha’s Muscle Shoals sessions intertwined with pre-Dirty Mind (but still dirty-minded) Prince guitars. –Nate Patrin

Listen: D’Angelo: “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”

Ladytron: “Destroy Everything You Touch” (2005)

The average pop song is a short lesson in delayed gratification– a calibrated crawl from intro and pattern-stamping verse to the big chorus. “Destroy Everything You Touch” has no such self-control: just 16 seconds in, the scorched-earth banger explodes and then gleefully burns for more than four minutes on sarcasm and spite. In an evil-genius marriage of sound and image, the catwalk-perfect “Destroy” partly soundtracks the forthcoming film doc about Anna Wintour, Vogue chief and booster bar none of last-capitalist excess. Marx should be so persuasive. –Amy Granzin

Listen: Ladytron: “Destroy Everything You Touch”

Ghostface Killah: “Shakey Dog” (2006)

We enter Ghost’s stream-of-consciousness stick-up narrative with the action already in progress, and leave with a “to be continued.” Within this seemingly arbitrary framework, however, Ghost omits no detail: the lady with the shopping cart hiding a cocked shottie, the steak and onions cooking down the hall, the “Sanford and Son” theme. Amidst the soul-superhero horn charts and Ghost’s dizzying thick description, it’s that sustained, soulful vocal note present throughout that gives “Shakey” its bullet-time panopticon perspective, with no bit of minutiae too tiny to mention. Tony Montana reference notwithstanding, “Shakey” is part cinema vérité, part “CSI”. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Ghostface Killah: “Shakey Dog”

The Strokes: “The Modern Age” [EP version] (2001)

Though they were one of the most talked-about bands of the decade, the Strokes were never among the highest-selling. Maybe it had to do with the fact that their feverishly anticipated debut album, Is This It?, had the misfortunate of dropping just weeks after 9/11, rendering their carefree garage-rock jangle– of which this debut single still stands as the purest distillation– almost instantly out of time and place. But even if the Strokes’ “Modern Age” sounded a lot like Lou Reed’s golden one, the song belongs to that rarefied class of singles that (like “Please Please Me” and “God Save the Queen” before it) divides history between the before and the after– specifically, a modern age defined by a ceaseless parade of definitely-articled, skinny-jeaned, pretty-boy rock bands, and an increasingly accelerated mode of blog-about/spit-’em-out musical consumption. However, divorced from the hyperbole that greeted its release, “The Modern Age” now just sounds like a sweet, innocent ode to fun in the sun– and a poignant time capsule of a world where it’s still Sept. 10, all the time. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Strokes: “The Modern Age” [EP version]

Clipse: “Trill” (2006)

Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury is too thick with highlights to truly contain a centerpiece, but there is something about the dark, streamlined “Trill” that beats very close to the album’s steely heart. For the album the Clipse brothers requested only the Neptunes craziest productions, and here Pharell Williams and Chad Hugo dutifully respond by packing “Trill” tight with bass, jittery beats, and motion-sick keyboards. The track’s ultimate brilliance depends entirely upon the way Malice and Pusha T are able to faultlessly balance their matter-of-fact braggadocio above the song’s shifting, precarious instrumental backdrop– as though savoring a brief moment before it all comes crashing down. –Matthew Murphy

Listen: Clipse: “Trill”

Belle and Sebastian: “Your Cover’s Blown” (2004)

To parse NME’s cheeky comparison from 2004, there’s a bit of bohemian in “Your Cover’s Blown,” but not much rhapsody. “Cover” is more a slinky spy theme for breaking free from scenester security, and Stuart Murdoch plays the puppetmaster with puckish understatement. But this doesn’t mean that “Cover”– still the funkiest and longest song Belle & Sebastian have created– doesn’t create its own form of dramatic tension. The quickly alternating currents of chippy disco rhythms and Bolero-style guitar make Murdoch’s anxiously told tale of surreptitiously splitting the city for the sticks into a quietly garish operetta. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Belle and Sebastian: “Your Cover’s Blown”

Panda Bear: “Comfy in Nautica” (2005)

Noah Lennox’s to-do list, summer 2005: Go to Coney Island. Clap more. Hear the beauty in thunderstorms. Watch the night skies for UFOs. Define “coolness” without being uncool or getting into one of those boring “what does ‘indie’ even mean anymore, brah?” dormroom bull sessions. Place off-kilter but emotionally packed melodies over repetitive loop collages, establishing a new instrumental paradigm for forward-looking rock and pop musicians. Render Animal Collective’s past yawpy unintelligibility newly intelligible; don’t lose sight of all that you can’t put into words. Capture the sound of the global village chanting. Be less afraid. “Try to remember always/ Just to have a good time.” Underline those last two words. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Panda Bear: “Comfy in Nautica”

Destiny’s Child: “Say My Name” (2000)

Beyoncé is a force now, but it would be almost impossible for her to ever again wield the kind of stranglehold over the world’s ears the way Destiny’s Child did at the turn of the millennium. At the time, they so thoroughly dominated the charts and airwaves, the hits just kept coming even when they ditched half the band. “Say My Name” is DC at their peak, riding a tidal wave of feisty righteousness to the ladies club anthem of 2000. The girls stop and start like ultrafine robots, sleekly maneuvering through producer Rodney Jerkins’ arsenal of space-age R&B effects. I could never figure out why the guy in the song even picked up the phone in the first place, though. –Amy Phillips

Listen: Destiny’s Child: “Say My Name”

Spoon: “The Underdog” (2007)

It’s only fitting that on a song called “The Underdog” Britt Daniel takes a well-deserved victory lap. For folks that remember Spoon’s failed dalliance with Elektra Records, this song’s call to “cut out the middleman” might sound like a long-awaited response to the two-song Saddle Creek single Daniel once recorded in honor of the group’s less-than-honorable A&R rep. But that was a long, long time ago– if anything, “The Underdog” is just emblematic of Spoon’s unabashed embrace of the pop sophistication they’ve been honing throughout their Merge career, critics and naysayers be damned. When the tune’s handclaps give way to a boisterous horn section, it’s a middle finger to any and all doubters and purists, and it’s delivered with an infectious smile. –David Raposa

Listen: Spoon: “The Underdog”

Andrew W.K.: “Party Hard” (2001)

There’s a place in music for subtlety, layered meaning, and nuance, but it’s somewhere way the fuck on the other side of town from this piston-pumping, steam-rolling, brick-wall-compressed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life riff machine. Indeed, the first single from I Get Wet wins the decade’s truth in advertising award: It’s called “Party Hard”, it opens with the phrase “When it’s time to party, we party hard,” the verses are about partying (hard), and the chorus features shouts of “Party hard!” over and over. Before Red Bull and vodka became fashionable and sports drink companies made the decade all about the pursuit of eXtreme energy, the movement already had its anthem. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Andrew W.K.: “Party Hard”

The Mountain Goats: “No Children” (2003)

“No Children” would be one of the most lacerating breakup songs of all time...if John Darnielle actually allowed his characters to break up. Instead, Darnielle’s frequently chronicled Alpha Couple are doomed to drown together, “hand in unlovable hand.” As the couple’s male half spews bilious hate-fuckery in the direction of his wife, sprightly piano props him up, symptomatic of the way Tallahassee pushed Darnielle’s previously stubborn lo-fi aesthetic towards studio sheen. Besides, if she’s gone, who would be left for our narrator to hate more than himself? At least they didn’t have any children, thank god. –Amy Phillips

Listen: The Mountain Goats: “No Children”

Ciara: “Oh” [ft. Ludacris] (2005)

Lyrically, “Oh” could practically be a T.I. track, drunk on the little local-color details that rappers love so much. Musically, it’s not too far off either, Dre & Vidal’s organs copping that sunny “Rubber Band Man” melodicism. But Ciara’s gorgeous robo-sigh of a voice is something else entirely. She floats just above the beat, slowly and breathily pushing it back and forth. When Ludacris jumps on board for one for a typically masterful hyperspeed guest-verse (and good lord he was on a roll back then), he’s the antic, amped-up counterpoint to Ciara’s slow sensuality. Every city deserves a song like “Oh” in its honor; almost none get one. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Ciara: “Oh” [ft. Ludacris]

Califone: “The Orchids” (2006)

Sometimes for better but oftentimes for worse, Califone have forsaken song for sound, reveling in the possibilities of the studio while obfuscating Tim Rutili’s fragmentary ditties. The same holds for British industrialists Psychic TV, who, after a ponderous instrumental introduction, led 1983’s Dreams Less Sweet with “The Orchids”. Lifted by pointillist keyboards and ascendant horns, it remains one of the band’s purest pop moments. Califone one-ups them on this cover: After a violin fanfare, the veterans saunter through what might be the most cohesive, communicative and contagious three minutes of their repertoire. In Rutili’s weary voice, the song’s resilient mantra– “In the morning after the night/ I fall in love with the light”– feels like a testimonial. –Grayson Currin

Listen: Califone: “The Orchids”

The Field: “Over the Ice” (2006)

Minimalism tends to work in deep code, with referential gestures that cater to initiates on a very “head” level, but the Field imbues it with huge, rushing feeling: No arcane knowledge required. “Over the Ice” is your pulse, your stride, the blood squeaking in your ears. It’s also the voices in your head, chattering in a benevolent language, and your bright, ringing nerves. It eventually became a permanent part of me, that staccato “da, da-da, da-da, da-da da” still on silent repeat in my head. This might be a problem if it weren’t so salutary, organizing the chaos of ecstatic experience into endlessly hospitable courses. –Brian Howe

Listen: The Field: “Over the Ice”

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” (2002)

Yeah, it’s about the Specials; the key line in Ted Leo’s fedora-tip and hit of liquid sunshine isn’t the second-wave ska roll call, but the one about dancing and being free. And the elements of “Rude Boys”– Leo’s ever-impassioned pleas, the rumbling rhythm section, that overjoyed guitar running up its center– sounds both like that freedom and will easily inspire that dancing. So the message to you, Rudy, isn’t really about bygone days, but about possibility of the future: of being young, of having a favorite sound, and, heck, maybe even of ending your punk song in a round. –Paul Thompson

Listen: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?”

Kanye West: “Jesus Walks” (2004)

Oh Kanye. On only his third single ever, he can’t help but congratulate himself inside the actual song for supposedly bringing the Lord back to hip-hop airwaves. But comparing his relationship with Christ to Kathie Lee and Regis isn’t exactly St. Augustine’s Confessions. Instead, “Jesus Walks” is a densely layered premonition of the producer/rapper’s ambitions, from a guy mostly known at the time for playing soul records at the wrong RPM. Militaristic drums, choral melisma, snake-charmer keyboards, and swatches of orchestration made “Jesus Walks” an odd thing to spill out car windows in Summer 2004, if more for the music than the message. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: Kanye West: “Jesus Walks”

Cam’ron: “Hey Ma” [ft. Juelz Santana, Freekey Zekey, and Toya] (2002)

“Why in the world would anybody put chains on me?” croons Lionel Richie on the 1977 breakup ballad “Easy”. In a roundabout way, “Hey Ma”– which nicks the Commodores classic for its summer barbecue beat– asks the same question: Why commit when Cam and Juelz make (um) casual relations sound like a worthwhile be-all, end-all? Even with his reams of rat-a-tat talk and self-directed C-movies soaked in fake blood, Cam is still at his best when flashing that devil-may-care smirk, as on this flirty manifesto. Then there’s sidekick Juelz, who actually is a goofy and eager teenager; “I’m 18 and live a crazy life/ Plus, I’ll tell you what the 80s like,” he raps, stepping to a girl who doesn’t need a fake ID. She laughs; so do we. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Cam’ron: “Hey Ma” [ft. Juelz Santana, Freekey Zekey, and Toya]

Johnny Boy: “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve” (2004)

The title of Johnny Boy’s indie hit convicts us all of, well, something (consumerism, probably? Fashion?), but it’s the London duo themselves that mimic 1960s big-studio mastery with a minimal setup of vocals, loops, and guitars. The same duo who appropriated Robert De Niro’s punkass Mean Streets act for bombastic, teeth-rotting pop. The lesson? We’re all killing everything dead but the tombstones are going to be fucking awesome. So we buy Burberry and Adidas and a couple of never-heard-from-since Brits apply Queen-dynamics to the Supremes and make off for a world where Joey Ramone looks like Steve McQueen. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Johnny Boy: “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve”

Phoenix: “If I Ever Feel Better” (2000)

Disco meets soft-rock with production so shiny it verges on the antiseptic, which makes it no surprise that I heard “If I Ever Feel Better" as the outro music on “Entourage” the other night, one of many times Phoenix has served as pop cultural bumper music in the last decade. But what makes “If I Ever Feel Better”, well, better than your typical 21st-century high-gloss yacht schlock is that there’s no studio filter to fake true ebullience or melancholy. When singer Thomas Mars rushes smiling through four flushed “I can try”s, that giddiness is infectious. Plus the music really is awesomely slick and catchy, which should never be discounted when discussing capital-P pop. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Phoenix: “If I Ever Feel Better”

T.I.: “Rubber Band Man” (2003)

The nine in his right and the 45 in his other hand got him in some trouble a few years later. But at the time, nobody minded that Tip was bragging on his arsenal while a mob of school-kids chanted deliriously joyous la-la-las underneath. That’s the thing about “Rubber Band Man”: Its forbidding snarls evaporate when confronted with David Banner’s ice-rink organ and candy-floss melody. Tip’s got a striver’s quiet confidence, reveling in his small triumphs: “But why the rubber band? It representin’ the struggle, man.” Ludacris later made fun of Tip for only being worth a piddling couple hundred grand, but that didn’t last long, either. –Tom Breihan

Listen: T.I.: “Rubber Band Man”

Camera Obscura: “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken” (2006)

Lloyd Cole was a lyrical namedropper in his day, but it was the nameless, second-person address in “Are You Ready to be Heartbroken” that had the most lasting effect. Thankfully, one of those moved by it 22 years later was fellow Scot Tracyanne Campbell, who set about crafting that rarest type of response song. “Lloyd” packs the sort of built-up, bittersweet patience that comes from finally replying to an old letter pulled from the bottom of a dresser drawer, and is perfectly situated within Motown-derived pop-soul, giving that indelible refrain equal parts effervescent joy and lonesome resignation. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Camera Obscura: “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken”

Animal Collective: “Leaf House” (2004)

If Animal Collective have a pivot point, it’s here– when their arrangements became lean, spare, and syncopated; when they salvaged their vocals from the margins and evolved beyond the shout and moan; when South American and African music emerged as influences in their sound, not just sidebar bullet points about their record collections. After the humid Here Comes the Indian, I doubt even their most slavish fans expected music as lithe as “Leaf House”. I remember exactly where and when I first heard it– there’s probably still saliva in the carpet. –Mike Powell

Listen: Animal Collective: “Leaf House”

The White Stripes: “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” (2002)

That loud squeal that opens the first song on the White Stripes’ third album– for many listeners it was their debut– announced the duo’s arrival as neither garage-rock bandwagoneers nor showboating blues revivalists. “Dead Leaves” mapped out a primitive sound that came across as downright innovative in 2001, pairing Jack’s gargantuan guitar riff with Meg’s rudimentarily pounding to create a song that moved effortlessly between cracks of thunder and pockets of quiet. Instead of delivering another screed against women as evildoers (a common blues depiction), Jack sings the tenderest of love-song sentiments: Her every breath is a “tiny little gift,” and he sounds like the most mannish boy for acknowledging it. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: The White Stripes: “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”

Dirty Projectors: “Stillness Is the Move” (2009)

Imagine the bored, flat, tuneless tones of a thousand underwhelming indie vocalists drove a hipster to the demonstrative gymnastics of Mariah Carey or the playful entreaties of Rihanna. But imagine that listener still musically craved the left-turn dissonance and unpredictability of his favorite arty strivers. Now you understand part of the reason why so many indie acolytes eventually acknowledge the triumphalism of pop, and why “Stillness Is the Move” was such a godsend, pairing Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman’s soaring, heart-stopping testimonials with such satisfyingly squiggly guitars and creative melodic and harmonic shifts. –Joshua Love

Listen: Dirty Projectors: “Stillness Is the Move”

!!!: “Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard (A True Story)” (2003)

The lyrics were already outdated by the time they released this single in 2003 (young folks: Rudy Giuliani was once New York City’s law’n’order mayor, 1994-2001), and frankly Nic Offer isn’t much of a singer. But a) Who cares, and b) Who cares– neither were his models in the Clash, New Order, and Liquid Liquid. !!! advanced all of those bands’ tradition of integrating the urgent abrasion of underground rock into the time-obliterating throb of club music (hint: cowbell!!!). The most thrilling moments of the many packed into "Giuliani"’s nine minutes come when an electronic pulse emerges from a sour thicket of rock instruments, or when the machines do an echo-dub dive away from the mix and the human noise rises back to the surface. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: !!!: “Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard (A True Story)”

Kelis: “Milkshake” (2003)

When Kelis and the Neptunes first came together, they were relative unknowns with weirdbeat designs on the charts. Thus began the mutual rise that commenced with 1999’s twerky Kaleidoscope and peaked with “Milkshake”. With its atonal, disruptive clatter, it has the distinction of unofficially ushering in the brief era of the female meme-chasing single (see: “Hollaback Girl”, “My Humps”) while simultaneously being one of the last big-bottomed hits to flourish before being subsumed by the high-end-fixated sing-songy ringtone R&B that remains summer’s hottest look. Speaking of memes, “milkshake” did well in the noughties. But before Henry Plainview drank it, Kelis brought it. –Mark Pytlik

Listen: Kelis: “Milkshake”

Lindstrøm: “I Feel Space” (2005)

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm certainly wasn’t the first artist to re-imagine Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s classic Italo-disco prototype “I Feel Love”, but he arguably did it best. Indeed, the Norwegian producer’s “I Feel Space” sounds not unlike Moroder launched into outer orbit, its arpeggiated synths and thumping bass so bouncy they could have been recorded in zero gravity. The high-water mark for what became known as space disco? Sure. But “I Feel Space” is an even simpler victory: The employment of traditional music-making expertise– check the sweeping chord changes and perfectly timed handclaps– in the creation of one flawless dance track. –Joe Colly

Listen: Lindstrøm: “I Feel Space”

Aaliyah: “We Need a Resolution” (2001)

R&B has made a craft of apportioning guilt as much as declaring love, but “We Need a Resolution” despairs at ever separating the two. “You got issues, I got issues,” Aaliyah sighs, as always evocative rather than exhibitionist, “but I know I miss you…” The song’s series of questions (“Who should be hurt? Who should be blamed?”) could only have been asked by Aaliyah; any other singer would have given away the answers. Timbaland’s arrangement offers little guidance, its unsettling clarinet melody, chattering beat, and gamelan twinkles balancing on a knifepoint of uncertainty fully as much as Aaliyah’s delicate interrogation. –Tim Finney

Listen: Aaliyah: “We Need a Resolution”

Dizzee Rascal: “Fix Up Look Sharp” (2003)

Dizzee Rascal ends the 2000s as Britain’s biggest urban music star. “Fix Up Look Sharp” was his first record to suggest that might be a safe bet. He had more surprising songs and more challenging tracks but “Fix Up” had the muscle and hunger. That delirious signature yelp of cartoon contempt began here– “your head splits like ba-NARNAR” and the flow demonstrated that Dizzee could make the hugest hook his own. In truth “Fix Up” is as fiercely stark as any 00s production but you simply don’t notice that: Dizzee’s addictive, dominating talent turns it into thrillingly uncompromising pop. –Tom Ewing

Listen: Dizzee Rascal: “Fix Up Look Sharp”

Grizzly Bear: “Knife” (2007)

There’s a palpable musk around “Knife”, as if it were buried for a long time and then exhumed in 2006. You might peg the date of interment in the 60s, when the Shangri-Las and George “Shadow” Morton were clotting simple yet twisted love songs with mossy production, making them sound all deathy and decayed. There are just a few words, inscribed in a lavish script on the harmonies; a handful of chords. But a whole host of sensations pour through them, and not just emotional ones: The guitars prickle and clutch; the refrains scale ear-popping altitudes. You can, it turns out, feel the knife. –Brian Howe

Listen: Grizzly Bear: “Knife”

The Hold Steady: “The Swish” (2004)

The Hold Steady came as a relief to squares who liked AC/DC’s riffs but got tired of searching for value in cock jokes on repeated listens. But they weren’t simple– their songs were long; their verses obsessively detailed; their codas jarring; their theater weird. Craig Finn didn’t need vocal melodies– he had one-liners. This is a guy messing with puns the year Funeral came out. He rants with such force that, with headphones on, you can feel spit showering your eardrums. Though they’re a band best experienced as a big picture, “The Swish” distills their appeal to an essence– a collage of 70s rock dressed in pop-culture trivia and half-remembered stories about drug dealers. A fan’s band from the first song. –Mike Powell

Listen: The Hold Steady: “The Swish”

M83: “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” (2005)

The fantasy of dying in your lover’s arms amidst a fiery auto accident has been a pop staple from 1960s teen tragedy songs through the Smiths and beyond. With “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”, M83’s Anthony Gonzalez blows that tradition up into full-screen high definition, the track serving as a bridge between his more abstract earlier work and the explicit melodrama of 2008’s Saturdays = Youth. Here, the adrenaline spike of the car crash is replicated at the nexus of shoegaze bliss-out, ambient oblivion, and stadium rock release. Piledriving drums, headrush guitars, unearthly synths– not a bad way to go out, huh? –Amy Phillips

Listen: M83: “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”

The Mae Shi: “Run to Your Grave” (2008)

Who would guess that this hyperactive, riff-happy six-piece could calm down enough to craft an all-together-now anthem? Or that it would be a moving ode to sprinting through life to the end? In the year-plus since its release, the super-sunny "Run to Your Grave" has become even bigger and brighter, inspiring a bro-fest video and countless live sing-alongs (the band has even been known to stretch it into passages of solo-guitar folk and freestyle rap). But the humble little LP version remains a powerful bit of pied-piper synth-pop, while still retaining the band’s Casio-freak edge. –Marc Masters

Listen: The Mae Shi: “Run to Your Grave”

Grinderman: “No Pussy Blues” (2007)

In which Nick Cave proves there are few things funnier than a hyper-literate old man driven to sputtering frenzy by the erection he can’t relieve. It takes bravery to add a fresh twist to a 30-year-career with a song about being hard up, though it probably mitigates some of the sting when you’re mordantly self-aware, happily married, and take to black humor like the proverbial duck. It also helps when the backing track refuses any concessions to the encroaching gentility that seems to invariably come with age. And unlike most rock’n’roll songs about an inability to get your rocks off, you suspect the anti-adolescent “No Pussy Blues” will only become more hilariously apt as you grow older, whatever your gender. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Grinderman: “No Pussy Blues”

Eminem: “Lose Yourself” (2002)

If this list reflected the number of “no-one-watching, in-the-mirror, punch-the-air self-psyching”-moments a song produced and not the whims of a group of music critics, this song would be such a runaway number one Vegas would’ve stopped taking bets six months ago. It’ll be quicker, so let’s do it this way: raise your hand if you haven’t pumped yourself up for a workout, date, hockey game, or hipster-ogling with “Lose Yourself”? Yeah, pretty much the same number that predicted Em’s most lasting moment would be an almost too-serious soundtrack jig about the perils of a character named (presumably) after a John Updike protagonist. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Eminem: “Lose Yourself”

Feist: “Mushaboom” (2003)

Just do a cursory search for real estate in Mushaboom, Halifax. Look at the landscape shots. It’s all you really need to know. Feist had been kicking around in punk bands, touring with Peaches, and singing sweet, fucked-up songs with Broken Social Scene for a decade before “Mushaboom”. But then this simple song about simple life in the tiny Canadian town hit and your platonic indie pop ideal was born. Singing in a controlled lilt, Feist performs “Mushaboom” like a plaintive acoustic number that just might fit right in on the Singin’ in the Rain soundtrack. From Peaches to Debbie Reynolds: This is the versatility of a great artist. –Sean Fennessey

Listen: Feist: “Mushaboom”

Cut Copy: “Hearts on Fire” (2007)

You once could find Cut Copy’s debut Bright Like Neon Love in the dollar bin at San Francisco’s Amoeba Records. Think you’ll find it there now? Neon Love’s diffident and dreamy synth-pop relegated the band to the fringes of hardcore appreciators. In the interim, their makeover, partially tended to by DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy, morphed them into indie stars, fuelled first by the Hearts on Fire EP in 2007 and a kaleidoscopic game of Human League that casts shadows of Berlin period Bowie. The best part? At 30 seconds in, keyboard stabs and female vocals chime in, and the song evokes the Night at the Roxbury head-whipping of La Bouche or Haddaway. It takes stones to pull that off. –Mike Orme

Listen: Cut Copy: “Hearts on Fire”

Jürgen Paape: “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” (2002)

Though the original version first appeared on Kompakt’s 2001 Total 3 compilation, many listeners first discovered Jürgen Paape’s luscious “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” when Erlend Øye used the song as the opener for his stellar 2004 DJ-Kicks mix. However you arrived at the track, its five-and-a-half minutes– a swaying, heady blend of weighty bass, spray-can hisses, and warm-blanket synths– remain some of the most thoroughly pleasurable techno of the decade. But what truly sets “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” apart is Paape’s masterful sampling of Israeli-born schlager singer Daliah Lavi’s wispy vocals, which elevates a gorgeous instrumental into something heavenly. –Joe Colly

Listen: Jürgen Paape: “So Weit Wie Noch Nie”

Jamie Lidell: “Multiply” (2005)

For a long time, Jamie Lidell was a voice in search of a vessel– a “walking talking question mark,” as he put it in another song, who poured himself into his samplers on stage, hoping to find the loop that would straighten him out again. And then with “Multiply”, the lead track off his debut album, he found his container in a Sam Cooke castoff. Just a hair from all-out plagiarizing the melody of “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”, Lidell and his collaborator Mocky strung plucky electric guitar figures like so many clothespins along a loose, ropy drum line, with falsetto doo-wops billowing above. Lidell– multitracked, and singing sweetly of the schizo mindset– never sounded so whole. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Jamie Lidell: “Multiply”

MGMT: “Time to Pretend” (2008)

What makes “Time to Pretend” so universally liked (even by cranky indie rock purists) is its dazzling wire walk between smug, smartass irony and actual lust for the kind of fucked-up celebrity lifestyle that keeps Perez Hilton in bandwidth. MGMT’s perfect sound was an evolution. The duo’s earlier self-produced Casio-chintzy version of the song made no secret of then-college students Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden’s dry disdain. But Dave Fridmann’s major-label-funded take two is something out of Hieronymus Bosch, a lush pleasure garden of melodies twining like naked limbs, guitars and drums distorted into dirty, Ecstatic grooves. It’s all a little unsettling– decadence always is. But MGMT pull “Pretend” off with the kind of conviction that standing on the precipice of stardom can give you. –Amy Granzin

Listen: MGMT: “Time to Pretend”

Beirut: “Postcards From Italy” (2006)

How fitting is it that this one initially rose to prominence via a nascent blogosphere? The story of “Postcards” is also the story of this hyperactive age of information exchange and accrual. Sure Beirut’s Zach Condon had actually been to the Old Countries, but his appropriation of traditional Yiddish and French styles is still just that, and a tinge of desperation can be felt in this song’s attempt to detach from the very age that, paradoxically, makes it possible. It’s nostalgic, sure. But this wasn’t so much, to crib James Murphy, borrowed nostalgia for an unremembered era. This was a kind of *imagined *nostalgia, one that could be acquired through the sheer act of looking at old photos– or postcards– and a sentiment that could be convincingly and compellingly evoked by a 20-year-old kid dreaming away in his New Mexico bedroom. It may sound entirely out of time, but “Postcards” is a decidedly 21st century anthem. –Matthew Solarksi

Listen: Beirut: “Postcards From Italy”

Belle and Sebastian: “I’m a Cuckoo (by the Avalanches)” (2004)

Belle and Sebastian believe in traveling light. The Avalanches believe in traveling. On 2003’s Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress, “I’m a Cuckoo” was just one audaciously kooky, Thin Lizzy-owing AM pop thrill en route to the even greater lavishness of 2006’s The Life Pursuit. The Avalanches’ reimagining spirits Stuart Murdoch’s cheerfully heartbroken vocal (and not much else) to North Africa for hand-played percussion, wooden flute, and a Sudanese children’s choir. Not only does this version make “Cuckoo” finally sound as carefree as its melody, it also predicts indie pop’s late-2000s turn Africa-ward. (See especially the Tough Alliance and Air France remixes of former Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman’s Taken By Trees project.) So if Murdoch still would “rather be in Tokyo,” he has some traveling left to do. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Belle and Sebastian: “I’m a Cuckoo (by the Avalanches)”

Clinic: “Distortions” (2000)

It was hard to know what to make of Clinic when they debuted with a string of singles in the late 1990s. The only points of reference you could formulate to describe them were absurd and floral, like what if Radiohead and the Pixies were broadcasting garage-rock distress skronks from some lunar shore? But this enigmatic new-millennium band dropped its guard a little on the amorous-mixtape staple “Distortions”, which beat the Postal Service to the indie-electronic slow dance by several years. The funny thing is, it’s not really a romantic song. Ade Blackburn may love it when you blink your eyes, but he’s also picturing you dead and thinking about marrying your sister. Despite the devotional tone, you get the sneaky feeling that “free of distortions” is a euphemism for being left alone. –Brian Howe

Listen: Clinic: “Distortions”

Wolf Parade: “I’ll Believe in Anything” (2005)

It’ll always go down as a Spencer Krug song, but “I Believe in Anything” testifies to the power of teamwork. Don’t ask me how the blue collar Dan Boeckner ever gelled with an ADD Renaissance fair castaway like Krug, but this freak of a power ballad maximized the group’s disparate strengths. Bands with cobbled-together lineups like Wolf Parade’s too often fall short of the sum of their parts, usually because they don’t have the artistic genius (or compromising skills) to take, say, this wacky funhouse melody and hammer it on repeat until it becomes a Springsteen anthem. It also doesn’t hurt to have Wolf Parade’s heart-on-sleeve conviction. Krug promises to take you to a place where “nobody knows you” or “gives a damn either way”, and the funny thing is, I trust him– even if he does sound like a weirdo. –Adam Moerder

Listen: Wolf Parade: “I’ll Believe in Anything”

The Futureheads: “Hounds of Love” (2005)

In the decade of post-punk pastiche overload, too few bands focused on the pop-centric quirk on those classic John Peel radio shows. What made the Futureheads 21st-century p-punk exemplars was their commitment to twee-boy harmonies as dizzyingly overlapping hooks. And it’s the play of voices that made this Kate Bush cover more than a one-note joke.

“Play” is right: few contemporary rock bands have sounded like they’re having as much fun as the Futureheads. They almost trip over themselves in transforming Bush’s paean to the slow surrender of control into a race to be the first one wrestled to the ground by love. In a decade when mainstream rock continued its ignoble slide into pure alpha-male-ism, it was beyond refreshing to see four boys embracing one of pop’s most theatrically feminine figures. –Jess Harvell

Listen: The Futureheads: “Hounds of Love”

The Game: “Hate It or Love It” [ft. 50 Cent] (2005)

The notion that 50 Cent was ever involved in a song this, well, appealing feels pretty remote in 2009. He’s deep into his late-period-Tyson decline now, the stage in which you brag about hanging out with Bette Midler on your mixtapes, narrate porn films, and (possibly) make an appearance on Foxy Boxing. But man, the Curtis of “Hate It or Love It”– this guy seemed like he might be a star forever. The nimble rhythm of the chant “hate it or love, the underdog’s on top” bobs and weaves around the syncopated bass line, and his evocative opening verse– his last great one– seems to summon Cool and Dre’s summer-soul track into existence: sheepskin coats and gold ropes, Rakim’s “My Melody”, bikes getting stolen, mommy kissing a girl. By the time Game comes huffing onto the track, it’s already all over, which is probably one of the reasons Game refuses to perform this song. He knows who it belongs to, and it still burns him up. –Jayson Greene

Listen: The Game: “Hate It or Love It” [ft. 50 Cent]

Modest Mouse: “3rd Planet” (2000)

The world begins and ends in “3rd Planet”, which is kind of a lot to tackle in a rock song. Birth, death, depression, possibly stoned revelations about the shape of the universe itself, all prove conversation fodder on this, the leadoff track to The Moon & Antarctica, one of the decade’s most expansive albums. Rattled by the loss of a child, Brock– one eye on his navel and the other fixed skyward– navigates the cosmic chaos as the band crafts a sound to match the scope of his gaze. Brock’s disarmingly direct lyrics still manage to hint at a well of hurt and self-reflection a few minutes couldn’t possibly hope to resolve– he dares to ask personal questions of the universe, and “3rd Planet” finds him posing some of the toughest ones yet. –Paul Thompson

Listen: Modest Mouse: “3rd Planet”

Justice: “D.A.N.C.E.” (2007)

Maybe it’s just the “P.Y.T.” reference, but it’s kinda hard to write about “D.A.N.C.E.” at this point without the mind eventually turning to Michael Jackson. Even forgetting the letter-by-letter MJ breadcrumb trail in the lyrics (“P.Y.T.”, “B.E.A.T.”, “A.B.C”), it always felt like this was Justice’s best attempt to soften their pulverizing brand of French touch by locating it in a sweeter time, i.e., somewhere between the Jackson 5 and Off the Wall. Hell, considering the syrupy disco strings, emphatic childlike joy, overstuffed melodies, and unrelenting technical efficiency at the heart of it, you could even build a case for this being a sort of loving metaphor for MJ pre-Thriller. In the world outside of half-baked critical theory, “D.A.N.C.E.” suffered from more practical bugaboos in the form of flagrant and unrelenting overexposure. Swear to God there was a brief period in 2007 where it was government-mandated to appear in 40% of the world’s advertisements and television musical montage moments. Are we ready to hear it again? Probably not quite yet. Good tune, though. –Mark Pytlik

Listen: Justice: “D.A.N.C.E.”

The Streets: “Weak Become Heroes” (2002)

The fourth single from the Streets’ 2002 album, Original Pirate Material, jettisoned the cocky Cockney mirth and the jovial 2-step skip of its predecessors in favor of a gently swinging, genuinely heartfelt piano-house ballad. The object of Mike Skinner’s then-24-year-old affections? His first E, its dizzy new heights breathlessly described with a storyteller’s pitch-perfect eye for detail, right down to “Mad little events happen,” which should ring true for anyone who’s ever puzzled over the jigsaw contours of the chemical night. Rising piano chords and muted drums carry as if from at the far end of the field; Skinner metes out observations like crumbly Mitsubishi quarters to the new mates gathered around him, the “weak become heroes” who are both audience and subject of his starry-eyed tale of rave’s star-crossed generation. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: The Streets: “Weak Become Heroes”

The Postal Service: “Such Great Heights” (2003)

Really, the Postal Service’s sound was an inevitable development. Just as laptops begin infiltrating stages and indie rock began to finally turn away from years of anti-electronic orthodoxy, Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello made themselves the odds-on favorites to play genre husbandry when “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” grabbed ears on Tamborello’s 2001 Dntel album. So the world was ready for “Such Great Heights” when it finally appeared, a salad of itchy microhouse beats and pointillist synthesizers rescuing Gibbard’s dreamy love song from congealing into a thick Jack Johnson sap (a hazard Iron & Wine helpfully demonstrated). Go ahead and blame the Postal Service for launching the subsequent decade of lazy lap-pop, but it’s a “blame Star Wars for Transformers 2” sort of haterade, assigning guilt to Gibbard and Tamborello for making an updated synth-pop song so perfect, it introduced a new vocabulary to emo kids’ bedrooms, for better or (mostly) worse. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: The Postal Service: “Such Great Heights”

The New Pornographers: “Letter From an Occupant” (2002)

Carl Newman certainly knows his way around a hook, and I can count three distinct, why-not-just-build-a-song-around-me candidates in the New Pornographers’ barnburning “Letter From an Occupant”: the chorus, of course, “where have all sensations gone?”, and the “song is shaking me” bit. So you take one of Newman’s most strident earworms from a decade that found him in no short supply of them, get the incomparable Neko Case to wow and flutter over top in what’s almost certainly her finest vocal performance on a New Pornographers record, have your band of sorta-superstars pound out some no-nonsense neon behind it, and whaddya know, there’s nary a second that goes by that could be any catchier. Show offs. –Paul Thompson

Listen: The New Pornographers: “Letter From an Occupant”

Mike Jones: “Still Tippin’” [ft. Paul Wall and Slim Thug] (2005)

“I got the internet goin’ nuts,” Paul Wall drawled near the end of “Still Tippin’”, a weirdly arcane boast at the time but absolutely a true one. Back in the pre-YouTube days of late 2004, the grainy BET Uncut video for “Still Tippin’”, later recut without the girl blowing Slim Thug in the Escalade, circulated online and set everyone to Googling. The appeal of the song wasn’t quite in the rapping, though the rumble-voiced Slim easily won MVP honors there. Instead, it was the hazy, trapped-in-amber feel of the song, the way Salih Williams’ mournful violin moan slowly floated above the trunk-rattling bass, the way the rappers’ unflappable voices lazily wound their way through everything, encapsulating the city’s slow-crawl aesthetic in one bite-size chunk.

After “Still Tippin’”, every rapper on the song got a major-label contract, as did half the rappers in the city. None of them became stars, and none of them recaptured the magic of this song. But “Still Tippin’” still sounds like steam rising off hot asphalt. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Mike Jones: “Still Tippin’” [ft. Paul Wall and Slim Thug]

Mclusky: “To Hell With Good Intentions” (2002)

By the early 2000s, indie rock had grown largely disconnected from its 80s post-hardcore roots, trading in once-prized qualities like dissonance and provocation for cuddly, campfire collectivism or synth-pop sleekness. But these three cranky Welshmen weren’t going down without a fight– or at least a good larf. Over a bruising backbeat and a riff that feels like chewed tinfoil, Andy Falkous unleashes a veritable Quote-of-the-Day calendar of one-liners (“My band is better than your band/ We got more songs than a song convention”) that skewer the sport of indie-elitist one-upmanship. But the most resonant lines are the least cheeky: “When we gonna torch the restaurant? When we gonna get excited?”– desperate pleas for anarchic abandon that would go unanswered at a time when popular indie rock was forsaking its core contrarian ideologies in favor of strategic placements on episodes of “The O.C.” and Starbucks display racks. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Mclusky: “To Hell With Good Intentions”

Phoenix: “Long Distance Call” (2006)

The best moment during “Long Distance Call” is when singer Thomas Mars, in the second verse, draws the line between “doing well well well” and “only doing just fine.” If that were the entire emotional spectrum the peppy, perpetually lovelost Mars experienced, no one would be surprised. But “Long Distance Call” draws a tension between Mars’ laissez-faire mantra-making (“Your capital letters keep me asking for more”) and his bandmates’ up-off-the-floor-there-pal riffing.

“Long Distance Call” is a song about... well, I’m not sure exactly, only about one-third of the lyrics make any sense, which means it’s probably a song about being lost, or at least away (phones– check; lack of cash– check). Like the best summer flings, college road trips, Parisian honeymoons, Phoenix manage to turn romantic confusion and map-less wayfaring into a statement of independence. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Phoenix: “Long Distance Call”

Peter Bjorn and John: “Young Folks” [ft. Victoria Bergsman] (2006)

Like Jonny Greenwood’s electric-guitar hiccups on Radiohead’s “Creep”, the insidious whistled melody of Peter Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks” was an unintentional, rough-draft accoutrement that effectively catapulted the Swedish trio from indie-pop upstarts to international It Band. But it’s what happens between all that tootin’ that really set our iPods on repeat, with Peter Morén and guest vocalist Victoria Bergstrom (formerly of the Concretes) acting out a tentative courtship between two aloof hipsters who only seem to express any emotion during the rousing chorus, in which they effectively admit they don’t have any (“All we care about is talking/ Talking over me and you”). Innumerable TV-soundtrack appearances and a Kanye endorsement would soon follow, but perhaps the most telling indicator of the song’s remarkable success was that Peter Bjorn and John felt the need to react against it with a difficult follow-up album (2009’s Living Thing). –Stuart Berman

Listen: Peter Bjorn and John: “Young Folks” [ft. Victoria Bergsman]

Basement Jaxx: “Where’s Your Head At?” (2001)

Most dance music evokes pleasure of one kind or another: movement, sex, freedom. The evil, grinning genius of “Where’s Your Head At?” is that it’s a doctrinaire house record in some ways, but it’s about a really bad trip: failure, stasis, friends getting antsy while you’re stuck in a K-hole. In lieu of factory-sterile, aerodynamic electronics, there are totally septic analog synthesizers lifted from a pair of Gary Numan songs, decorated with an unusually dissonant version of Basement Jaxx’s habitual vacuum-abhorring sound effects and drop-ins. The vocals are a three-dimensional array of disembodied heads screaming that something’s wrong and you’re letting everyone down. The song surges forward into the darkness like a flood in a tunnel (maybe the reason it made its biggest impact on the Tomb Raider soundtrack). And it’s totally hilarious in the context of its era’s sleek, muscular, cheerful dance music. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Basement Jaxx: “Where’s Your Head At?”

Robyn: “Be Mine” (2005)

Sometime between 2005, when Robyn released “Be Mine” in her native Sweden, and last year, when the single finally hit charts beyond Scandinavia, somebody added an exclamation point. Unnecessary! Except to drive home something you’ve probably already noticed: This utterly heartbroken song has a title phrase you see on chalky-tasting Valentine’s Day candy.

Exclamation or not, “Be Mine” is made of such paradoxes. Poised vocals express overwhelming emotion. “Racing heartstrings” (as Stephen Deusner said in a p4k review) adorn depressive lyrics. And the spoken-word section, starring old Whatsername’s shoelaces, recounts a scene any real narrator would’ve been too distraught to remember so touchingly. In indie rock, where craft is sometimes viewed with suspicion, angst makes singers sound like Conor Oberst; even Annie’s “Heartbeat”, which opened many indie listeners’ ears to Scandinavian pop in 2004, remains vocally icy and detached. “Be Mine” works by expertly using all the tools of commercial, instantly communicative pop– even when what’s being communicated is deep personal anguish. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Robyn: “Be Mine”

Deerhunter: “Nothing Ever Happened” (2008)

“Nothing Ever Happened” came at a moment when Bradford Cox seemingly spent all his time doing one of two things: compulsively writing a litany of often-great songs about the fallibility of his memory and body, and issuing public correctives for the fallibility of his big mouth. Both tendencies made Deerhunter one of the decade’s most continually compelling acts, and both come to a head on “Nothing”, easily the band’s best song. As an aughts indie epic of cathartic self-loathing, the song is Deerhunter’s own “The Rat”, but the failure to go out and see people is the last thing on Deerhunter’s mind. Cox’s terrors are buried deep inside, and to the degree he’s able to access them, they’re released with hushed, uncomplicated passion that finds the perfect fit between Poe, post-punk, and pot. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Deerhunter: “Nothing Ever Happened”

Lil Wayne: “A Milli” (2008)

That tinkling soundtrack trill on the intro is such a great fakeout, with producer Bangladesh mocking late-decade rap’s orchestral fixation before letting the insanity start. And then there it is: the bubbling mantra refrain, the eyepunch snare-hits, the ravenous bass thud. “A Milli” has the simplest beat this side of “Grindin’”, but the feeling you get from it isn’t spartan crunch; it’s gibbering chaos. Part of it is that bent vocal sample, and part of it is Wayne himself, disappearing down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. Bangladesh later complained that Wayne didn’t follow up the millionaire concept of that hammering beat, that he just freestyled the song. But that’s the magic of “A Milli”; it sounds like a random four-minute excerpt from a freestyle that could’ve gone for hours, Wayne chasing tangents until they become catchphrases. What’s a goon to a goblin? Nobody even knows what that means, but there’s a reason none of the hundreds of rappers who manhandled the “A Milli” beat on mixtape freestyles could ever equal the original. (FYI: Fabolous came closest.) –Tom Breihan

Listen: Lil Wayne: “A Milli”

Jay-Z: “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” (2001)

“Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” is essentially an autobiographical song, but the details of the lyrics are so secondary to the track’s feeling of sustained triumphalism that the only thing that comes across loud and clear is the notion that Jay-Z is a force of unstoppable greatness. Self-hagiography has always been a dominant lyrical theme in rap, but the magic here is in the way a young, hungry Kanye West brings out the joy in the rapper’s swagger by framing it in the context of the Jackson 5’s ebullient “I Want You Back” and transfers his ecstatic egomania to the listener like a contact high. At the start, Hov thanks us all for showing up, because we could have been anywhere in the world. Back in late 2001 when it seemed like the Apocalypse was an imminent possibility, there could not have been a more appealing place to be than basking in the glow of this man’s supreme confidence. –Matthew Perpetua

Listen: Jay-Z: “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”

Freelance Hellraiser: “A Stroke of Genius” (2001)

The golden rule of mash-ups is the same as it was in 2002: if you can’t show us something new about the source material, don’t bother. It was broken a lot back then, and even more now, but Freelance Hellraiser at least set the bar high. Christina Aguilera and the Strokes find smolder in one another, Aguilera’s purring sultriness transforming the ache in “Hard to Explain” from world-weariness to frustrated desire. Impressively, the Hellraiser predicted the arc of 00s teenpop with this– its turn away from bubblegum R&B to guitar-driven confessionals. While most mash-ups read and play like gimmicks, “A Stroke of Genius” skips free of its origins and fits into the world of Kelly Clarkson and the Veronicas as, simply, a standout pop song. –Tom Ewing

Listen: Freelance Hellraiser: “A Stroke of Genius”

Three 6 Mafia: “Stay Fly” (2005)

A bruising round robin about getting so high your speech sounds screwed and chopped before the remix. By 2005, everyone had heard a soul sample, but most listeners were still getting used to the profound lethargy of tracks like “Still Tippin’”– and “Stay Fly” had both. Tom Breihan called it a “curious departure” in his review of Most Known Unknown, but I’ll dissent. True, for guys who built their reputation barking at each other over minor-key piano arpeggios and airless beats, double-time rapping over a soul sample probably sounded like a sellout. (And it sold– their first Top 20 single since forming in 1991.) But the way they flipped it– it glimmered like a knife under a streetlight; like Psycho, luxurious without losing its edge. –Mike Powell

Listen: Three 6 Mafia: “Stay Fly”

Hot Chip: “Ready for the Floor” (2007)

It’s apropos that the group which put the geek back in funk better than anyone this decade would morph dancing and debate so seamlessly, and cleverly. On the “do it” front, “Ready for the Floor” is the best paean to shaking ass-as-shyness shedding since Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up”. It’s almost as funky and twice as nerdy, to boot. From the “say it” perspective, “Ready” offers a hand to take the lead in conversation, giving the impression that something important needs to see daylight. The lyrical sentiment might be purposefully illusory, but combine it with that wobbly rhythm and sour synth, and there’s no mistaking that “Ready” is twerpy, charming, intelligent, and irresistible. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Hot Chip: “Ready for the Floor”

Aaliyah: “Try Again” (2000)

Timbaland’s late-90s work with Aaliyah helped usher in an era of R&B singles as modernist pop events– “Try Again” has a claim to be its peak. At the time Timbaland’s use of acid house’s signature 303 bassline sound caught the attention: a decade on what strikes me is how well it suits the song, and its singer. Aaliyah’s great necessary quality as Timbaland’s muse and chief interpreter was poise, the ability to deal nervelessly with whatever fresh unlikeliness he conjured. This lack of showiness led some to dismiss her as bland– with hindsight what she had was mystique. Here the 303 dances around her, dramatizing her hinted come-ons, becoming the itch under her lover’s skin. “I might be shy on the first date– what about the next date?” And then suddenly, no more next dates. “Try Again” stands as a reminder of R&B’s lost possibilities– a snakier, subtler take on the decade’s defining pop form, and a singer who might have been our best guide to its nuances. –Tom Ewing

Listen: Aaliyah: “Try Again”

The Knife: “Silent Shout” (2005)

There are few things more satisfying for a music lover than witnessing an artist making the leap from promise and scattershot potential to full-bore, concentrated vision. Rarely has the statement “We are done fucking around” been made as unmistakably as the Knife managed on the opening title track from 2006’s Silent Shout. Joining the likes of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and Liars’ “Broken Witch”, it’s an album opener that boldly marks a shift from what the artist may have made or meant before. There’s no hook or release here, no foothold to reassure you everything’s going to be all right, just five minutes of ominous vocal intonations and icy synth. It’s the sound of the Knife staring into the abyss and making sure you know full well there’s no turning back. –Joshua Love

Listen: The Knife: “Silent Shout”

Animal Collective: “Grass” (2005)

“Grass” was a staple of Animal Collective shows long before it got encoded onto Feels. Live, the band would drift into it subtly– you sometimes couldn’t recognize it until the chorus hit, as Avey Tare chanted along to Panda Bear’s drum crashes. On record, the track’s growth is clearer, merging tribal rhythms, sprinkling guitars, and electronic debris into a cloud-shaking prayer. But “Grass” is primarily an Avey showcase. His wandering vocal style makes arrhythmic polysyllables, off-beat sing-song, and simian screech all sound sublimely musical. Animal Collective aren’t the first to turn lung-tearing screams into a catchy chorus, but nobody has made it seem so natural, even inevitable. And the way the circus-like sound of “Grass” rises around Avey like fast-sprouting foliage in a high-speed jungle, shrieking to this rain-dance is really his only option. –Marc Masters

Listen: Animal Collective: “Grass”

The Killers: “Mr. Brightside” (2003)

In the decadent, Moulin Rouge-inspired, ham-a-lot video for “Mr. Brightside”, Brandon Flowers and Eric Roberts battle for the love of a ghostly courtesan by playing a game of... checkers. Not chess. Not poker. Not, like, a pistol duel– checkers! Is there a less sophisticated and/or consequential way to settle a score? (Naturally, Flowers eventually flips the board in disgust, ending the brief showdown.) But this band of Vegas showboats are at their best playing to the masses and letting their flamboyant flags fly. Merging Duran Duran makeup, New Order hi-hats, and Bruce Springsteen-ian grandiosity, they gave rock fans a non-geriatric arena-ready alternative to the world’s Nickelbacks this decade, and for that we owe them thanks. Custom fit for a generation weaned on Shakespeare Lite farces like “The O.C.”, the Killers blew up everyday dramas– jealousy! betrayal! heartbreak!– into Gone With the Wind-style epics. Rampant melodrama is their BFF. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: The Killers: “Mr. Brightside”

Kanye West: “Gone” [ft. Consequence and Cam’ron] (2005)

There’s something perverse about jacking Otis Redding’s short, spare “It’s Too Late” as the backbone for “Gone”. Arriving late on Late Registration, the sample beams in like a ray of sunlight on a mostly baroque album. But it’s just a set-up for this swelling peak of sonic pomp. Featuring the most insistent and insinuating orchestral Jon Brion composition on an album full of ’em, Kanye cackles at his own grandeur by throwing Cam’Ron– at the height of his asshole savant powers– right in the thick of it. Cam’s verse, not so much a lyrical feat as it is a bit of aural hopscotch (“Bloop bloop” “Whoop” “Poof poof”), is actually an understated moment. After an adequate Consequence verse, “Gone” floats off into nearly a minute of Phillip Glass-ian stabs before a spitting-mad Ye leaps back in: “Ahmmm/ Ahead of my time/ Sometimes years out.” Self-referential, aggressive, funny; it’s one of his best verses ever on one of his finest songs. –Sean Fennessey

Listen: Kanye West: “Gone” [ft. Consequence and Cam’ron]

Junior Boys: “In the Morning” (2006)

The Junior Boys (with or without help from members of Mouse on Mars) are masters at infusing their glistening dance music with an alluring hesitance and awkwardness. Usually the heavy lifting to that end is accomplished mostly by Jeremy Greenspan’s hushed vocals eliding the gaps where the music reconsiders itself. On “In the Morning”, thought, there’s another human element at play– the percussive sound of a voice gasping “oohs” and “ahhs,” like someone singing Michael Jackson ad-libs to themselves. The Boys take these breaths and gasps and turn them into a human hi-hat, merging it perfectly with the backing track’s glistening synth arpeggios. It’s just another example of the group’s gift of synthesis, but just because they’ve done it before doesn’t make it any less impressive. –David Raposa

Listen: Junior Boys: “In the Morning”

Arcade Fire: “Rebellion (Lies)” (2005)

On an album of unabashed melodrama, “Rebellion (Lies)” surges just a little harder and higher than the rest. It’s built like a perpetual motion machine, from the backing vocals that egg Win Butler on through the chorus with a chant of “Lies! Lies!” to the insistent piano to the strings that claw at the guitar in the final push to the sudden ending. It’s like life, vital and flowing right up until the moment it’s over. Butler tries to sort out what he believes about death and dreams from what he’s been told and decides dreams are the better escape: “Come on, baby, in our dreams/ We can live on misbehavior.” More than that, “Rebellion” captures the confusion of unlearning all the things you know are wrong, and does in a way you can sing along to. –Joe Tangari

Listen: Arcade Fire: “Rebellion (Lies)”

Dr. Dre: “Forgot About Dre” [ft. Eminem] (2000)

Ostensibly a retort to the baby piranhas nipping at his heels on the barely breathing Death Row label, “Forgot About Dre” actually has far less to do with remembering Andre Young than it does reconsidering him. Seven full years since his last proper solo album, 2001 was an overhaul– more Technotronic than TEC-9, Dre became a programming fiend utilizing tensile synths, razor’s edge keyboard sounds, and sputtering drums. The rigidity is a perfect complement to the frenetic but deeply in-control heart of the song: an emerging Eminem. Em wrote every word of this song, performs one breathless verse and the chorus. His idolatry and pitched-up insanity is on display in equal measure. “So fuck y’all, all of y’all/ If y’all don’t like me, blow me,” Dre blurts. Hardly Marshall Mathers’ most elegant moment as a writer, but it is an attuned response. Dre is an artist, but he’s never been more than vocal muscle. He saves the grace for the track. –Sean Fennessey

Listen: Dr. Dre: “Forgot About Dre” [ft. Eminem]

Band of Horses: “The Funeral” (2007)

One of the biggest trends of the last nine years has been the rise and growing acceptability of licensing as a means of making money in a dying industry. Ten years ago you wouldn’t have caught a Sub Pop band in a car commercial, but “The Funeral” has not only scored spots for the Ford Edge, but also a controversial internet-only ad for Wal-Mart– you may have also heard it on a bunch of TV shows. It’s no surprise that music supervisors would be interested in this track from Band of Horses’ 2006 debut. With its death-haunted lyrics delivered by Ben Bridwell’s sensitively tremulous tenor and a dramatically build that crescendos from the vaporous “oohs” and gentle guitar arpeggios of its opening to the driving guitar chug of its explosive chorus, it makes for an undoubtedly sweeping soundtrack. –Rebecca Raber

Listen: Band of Horses: “The Funeral”

Fleet Foxes: “White Winter Hymnal” (2008)

Fleet Foxes’ backwoods Beach Boys debut was nearly flawless– it was American folk music cast to wander in a deep, twisting cavern of reverb, and there it found moments of uncommon beauty. “White Winter Hymnal” repeats the same lyrics and verse melody three times, sung in rich harmony, and that would be satisfying enough given that power of said verse. They aren’t content to merely hypnotize you, though, creating a dynamic series of instrumental arrangements that cast it in a new light each time. The simple, impressionistic lyric explodes in a stunning burst of color and violence on its final line: “And Michael you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in summertime.” The wordless answering vocal and big, twangy guitar that erupt after the verses are just as astonishing, their immensity throwing the song’s intimate imagery into sharp relief. This is one enormous little song. –Joe Tangari

Listen: Fleet Foxes: “White Winter Hymnal”

Justin Timberlake: “Cry Me a River” (2002)

Even with that greasy-sponge hair, it was easy to see he was best dancer-singer-talent from the 1990s boy band glut. Still, it was hard to picture the pipsqueak in the too-tight t-shirt from the “Tearin’ Up My Heart” video somehow flowering into the closest thing to a next Michael Jackson (sorry, Usher). In order to bury his Mousekateer past, Justin needed to get a little dangerous. Mix in a hip-hop producer at the a-ha! moment of his pop maturation, a tabloid-ready scandal, and sleek stalker video and “Bye Bye Bye” says so long with the immediate snap of a Timbaland snare.

Justin’s “Billie Jean” stabs backs instead of crying wolf, but the parallel remains– like Michael, Timberlake turns black to white, turning off his waterworks with hopes of starting a flood on her end. Meanwhile, Timbaland attacks his big pop break with everything he knows, along with a couple newbies: moody, near-baroque lines, syncopated mouth percussion, vengeful choir, cawing seagulls. The biggest can sometimes be the best, too. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Justin Timberlake: “Cry Me a River”

Interpol: “Obstacle 1” (2002)

Is it any wonder these guys took to numbering their obstacles? They certainly had enough going against them when they shot to indie notoriety in summer 2002: the band members’ lack of personality, those inscrutably awkward lyrics. And has any widely beloved indie act in recent memory seemed so painfully self-aware and shamelessly calculated? Yet there was no denying the galvanizing might of Turn on the Bright Lights, and this early knockout from the record remains the signature distillation of Interpol’s well-apportioned strengths, as if urgency + hook + tempo change = all you’ll ever need to craft the perfect little rock song. Even if we really have no clue why somebody’s repeatedly stabbing themselves in the neck, we can certainly hear the blood pulsing through this thing. –Matthew Solarski

Listen: Interpol: “Obstacle 1”

The Hold Steady: “Stuck Between Stations” (2006)

It’s weird enough that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road narrator Sal Paradise winds up in an E Street Band-style rave-up, but poet John Berryman? And we spend half the song inside his head as he stands on a bridge contemplating suicide? What kind of party music is this? The Hold Steady kind, where sharp wit and lyrical depth come in fist-pumping, shout-along anthems. With its crunchy power chords and sharp turnaround into the chorus, “Stuck Between Stations” would have been a great song even if it wound up being about driving around and having a mindless good time, like so many classic rock songs before it. But Craig Finn upped the ante with words about his favorite subject– that moment when the fall-back patterns of youth start to fail and escapist benders are becoming too much to bear– and came up with an unlikely monument to confusion and dislocation. –Mark Richardson

Listen: The Hold Steady: “Stuck Between Stations”

The Shins: “New Slang” (2001)

“New Slang” was the eerie, indelible little tune that nonchalantly breezed its way into 2000s-era indie rock’s version of Reality Bites; an ambling, wayward thing that never insisted upon itself but also refuses to leave your consciousness. As far as “breakthrough hits” go, it’s a pretty modest affair, a sighing shrug of a song built on a campfire strum and some floating signifiers that could almost pass for Murmur-era R.E.M.: “Dance like the king of the eyesores”; “Dawn breaks like a bull through a hall.” And that’s not even touching on that “dirt in your fries” line, which, as far too many people delightedly pointed out, made a rather odd fit for a McDonald’s ad. But that cognitive dissonance was the other legacy of “New Slang”: An agoraphobic bedroom-pop gem that shuffled its way onto a stage larger than anyone imagined possible, “New Slang” paved the way for Norah, Nick, Juno, and the many lovely, odd, and grating mainstream/indie pairings to come. –Jayson Greene

Listen: The Shins: “New Slang”

Wilco: “Jesus, Etc.” (2002)

For all the talk of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s noisy ambiance, one of its most memorable cuts lacks any scree. The smoky backroom jazz of “Jesus, Etc.”, violin swells conjuring late-night embers of a campfire fiddle jam, sees Wilco branching from careerist jangle to a complex view of America and Americana. Reprise execs famously derided the resulting Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for lacking a viable single; Wilco ended up fleeing the label, YHF masters in hand, for Warner’s more niche Nonesuch imprint. Hindsight may be 20/20, but Reprise’s myopia is doubly startling: “Heavy Metal Drummer” is the obvious throwback summertime jam, evoking Linklater’s idyllic Dazed and Confused, but “Jesus Etc.” is its wizened brother, meditating on last cigarettes amidst stabs of pedal steel and eerily dovetailing with 9/11 (“Tall buildings shake”, “skyscrapers are scrapin’ together”). –Mike Orme

Listen: Wilco: “Jesus, Etc.”

Ghostface Killah: “Nutmeg” (2000)

Let’s get the less-obvious highlights out of the way first: The beat, provided by the comparatively unknown Arthur “Black Moes-Art” Wilson, does an amazing transformative job on Eddie Holman’s weepy 1977 break-up slow jam “It’s Over”, turning it into the gleaming, amped-up entrance theme of an undefeated world champion. And the RZA’s in top form on his guest verse, simultaneously at his most funny, bizarre, and awe-inspiring (“Snap the wing off of bats, my battleaxe tongue hacks tracks/ Once the ball drop, I’m’a snatch ten jacks”). But it’s Tony Starks’ world here, and he welcomes you to it with head-spinning free associations, metaphors inside metaphors, furious between-verse rants, and a flow so fluently cool it completely distracts you from the possibility that you’re not entirely sure what lines like “spiced out Calvin Coolidge, loungin’ with seven duelers” or “Hit Poughkeepsie crispy chicken verbs throw up a stone richie” mean. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Ghostface Killah: “Nutmeg”

Radiohead: “Pyramid Song” (2001)

Anything but effete following the immortal one-two of OK Computer and Kid A, Radiohead returned with a record of Kid A session cuts that included this, an absolutely singular track in a catalog with no shortage of standouts. “Pyramid Song” is at once a travelers’ song for those skirting the outer reaches of consciousness (note the aquatic imagery), a nostalgic ode to a dystopian future (“astral cars”), and the slurred, drunken waltz of the damned (that piano). One can’t help but marvel at how the boys’ talents come together on this one, too; budding composer Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral arrangement is impeccable, Nigel Godrich’s sonic touches as producer have seldom been so essential, and Phil Selway’s drumming practically conjures a mist of eerie intrigue around the whole thing. Perhaps most of all, “Pyramid Song” testifies that no matter how far-flung Thom Yorke’s state of feeling, Radiohead are ever capable of bringing us to feel it too. –Matthew Solarski

Listen: Radiohead: “Pyramid Song”

The White Stripes: “Fell in Love With a Girl” (2002)

Remember when the White Stripes got lumped in with hype magnets like the Hives and the Vines? It seemed absurd enough at the time, but revisit the Stripes’ pulse-quickening breakthrough “Fell in Love With a Girl” and you may wonder why any other band got hyped. With Jack White’s stiffening howl, Meg White’s simple beat, and a woo-hoo chorus copped nicely from the Pretenders’ “Middle of the Road”, “Fell in Love” is such well-formulated garage-pop that it could sound sterile in lesser hands. But White’s white-hot guitar gives the song such blinding speed, it almost lobotomizes him. “The two sides of my brain need to have a meeting,” he yelps convincingly. Michel Gondry’s video, which transformed Jack and Meg into blurry Lego figures, caught that manic drive. It lasts less than two minutes, but its hook remains a brain-sticker eight years later. –Marc Masters

Listen: The White Stripes: “Fell in Love With a Girl”

TV on the Radio: “Wolf Like Me” (2006)

The first time most of us heard "Wolf Like Me", it was the leadoff track on an incorrectly sequenced version of Return to Cookie Mountain that leaked months in advance of its street date. In that context, it was stunning– it churned on a nasty bassline, mid-coitus howling, and aggressively shredded guitars, announcing TVOTR as, above all, a rock band, even a sexually charged one. Once "Wolf Like Me" got positioned in the middle of the official version of Return to Cookie Mountain, it lost none of its impact– even if its musical content is easily understood, the lyrics made their intent all the more overt– "Baby doll, I recognize/ You’re a hideous thing inside." Sometimes the smartest guy in the room just wants to fuck. –Ian Cohen

Listen: TV on the Radio: “Wolf Like Me”

Dizzee Rascal: “I Luv U” (2003)

“I love you,” a sampled voice announces blandly. It’s clear that things aren’t what they seem, but nothing can prepare for the sudden, abrasive intrusion of pounding kick drums and whipcrack snares, and least of all Dizzee’s voice, overwhelmed and overwhelming. Dizzee remains the greatest MC to emerge from the UK’s grime scene, but he never sounded as good again as on this opening salvo, his throaty flow clotted with outrage and wounded pride. Dizzee was also grime’s greatest dramatist, knowing that a battle of the sexes has to sound like actual warfare to cut through. The music’s sharp angles and trudging grind suggest romance shorn of all its niceties and most of its pleasure. But the act of being more brutally callous than anyone else delivers its own singular and compelling satisfaction. –Tim Finney

Listen: Dizzee Rascal: “I Luv U”

Outkast: “Ms. Jackson” (2000)

By 2001, you either recognized the visionary virtuosity of Outkast, or you didn’t listen to a lick of hip-hop. With the release of “Ms. Jackson”, the second single from the game-changing Stankonia, the numbers in that latter category shrank considerably as everyone and their mama (and mama’s mama) embraced the duo’s heartfelt address to disappointed mothers, wives, and lovers. Not that Dre and Big Boi tackled post-break-up complications lying down– the track deceptively but deftly bobbles cold defensiveness– but the balance worked perfectly, earning the group its first #1 single. –Joshua Klein

Listen: Outkast: “Ms. Jackson”

Missy Elliott: “Work It” (2002)

Yes, there’s a beat– a dumbfounding one, so stripped-down and fluid it’s practically gestural, so good you say blah blah blah– and the samples that bookend it (Rock Master Scott at the beginning, Run-D.M.C. at the end) point out just how much more graceful technology has made hip-hop in 20 years. But this is Missy’s show as both a writer and a rapper, and she’s got so much juice she can literally reverse the flow of time. She can end nearly every line with an oh-ah rhyme (half of which are words she made up herself), she can ditch rhymes altogether for an even funnier effect (of course “nails done” matches “hair did”!), and she can totally grind on you and play it off as a giggle– note that she’s not comparing herself to Halle Berry but to “a Halle Berry poster.” There aren’t many more bluntly sexual songs that have turned into hits this elephantine; maybe it slid by because there aren’t many songs that are anywhere near this funny about sex. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Missy Elliott: “Work It”

The Strokes: “Someday” (2001)

Rock fans weren’t exactly fiending for recycled CBGB riffs when the Strokes stumbled upon the popular consciousness in 2001. What they were craving, I think, was someone to put the selfishness, sloppiness, and sex back into rock after a decade of PC causes, benefits, and self-congratulating communities. The placement of “Someday” as the top Strokes song on our list befits the fact that it’s possibly the best distillation of lead singer Julian Casablancas’ irresistible brand of insouciant asshole charm. Musically no less springy and precise than any chart-pop pleasure, “Someday” pins its bad-news reputation on Casablancas’ half-bored roar (“I ain’t wastin’ no more TIME!”) and especially on dickishly shrugging asides like “Alone we stand, together we fall apart” and “My ex says I’m lacking in depth.” Who could resist? –Joshua Love

Listen: The Strokes: “Someday”

Kanye West: “Flashing Lights” [ft. Dwele] (2007)

Given: “Stronger” came through with the head-smacking, hip-house obviousness. But, if you’re gunning for Superstar First Class like Kanye, obviousness isn’t such a bad strategy. That said, “Flashing Lights” slid past knee jerk “sampling” and blaring positivity, giving us a Euroclub-ready beat that wasn’t “Kanye doing Daft Punk” as much as it was “Kanye doing Kanye.” Alongside the raving pulse are Late Registration strings, prime-cut post-fame paranoia, and a wounded psyche that would later come into full bloom on 808s and Heartbreak.

“You on the other side of the glass of my memory’s museum,” he raps. “I’m just saying, Hey Mona Lisa, come home– you know you can’t Rome without Caesar.” It’s classic Kanye– self-possessed, superfluously art-ridden, probably too clever by half. In Kanye’s post-everything museum, da Vinci sidles up next to a bust of Julius; a Karen O-repping blog post follows one dedicated to 10-ft. tall “Chewing Gum Sculptures”; Parisian house mingles with stadium hip-hop. “But what do I know?” goes the hook, pop-pushing curiosity still intact. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Kanye West: “Flashing Lights” [ft. Dwele]

Jay-Z: “Takeover” (2001)

Remember when September 11, 2001 was merely shaping up to be a pretty shitty day for Mobb Deep and Nas? But even if “Takeover” could rid itself of the unfortunate historical heft of The Blueprint’s release date (it doesn’t help that Jay-Z would rap “I dropped the same day as the Towers” in subsequent freestyles), it would still remain this decade’s moment in New York hip-hop where you simply couldn’t be an impartial bystander.

There have been diss tracks that have been more personal, more vicious, hell, even more effective– Nas got a bigger career boost out of his response, the simplistic and homophobic “Ether”, which inexplicably (well, not really) was declared the winner by internet scorekeepers who would soon use its title as a slang for smiting one’s enemies at all costs. But there’s never been a better diss song: Kanye West’s “Five to One” flip turned Jim Morrison’s Dionysus into Hercules while Jay calmly doled out dismissals that were all the more perfect for their brevity and focus– “a wise man told me don’t argue with fools…”; “I sold what your whole album sold in my first week”; “you only get half a bar…” That entire third verse. As is the case with so many other spats in real life, Jay-Z and Nas would eventually bury the hatchet in the name of good business, but listen to “Takeover” if you’re ever confused about who’s wearing the pants: Regardless of Jigga’s recent output, “Takeover” will always beam with the righteousness one can only have when they’re clearly playing the upper hand. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Jay-Z: “Takeover”

Basement Jaxx: “Romeo” (2001)

A criticism you sometimes hear about Basement Jaxx tracks is that they’re too busy. Not unfair– except that leaves out how hyperactivity can inflate a fine song into something fantastic. Imagine a version of “Romeo” played totally straight– a post-Winehouse retro-soul belter. It wouldn’t be too bad, but it wouldn’t be on this list. “Romeo” needs its touches of mixing desk dementia: The way the stomped emphases at the end of Kele Le Roc’s lines set off pinball-combo beats all around your earspace; the way the middle eight dissolves into swoon and flutter; the husky work-gang chants. And so when Le Roc cuts loose it doesn’t sound stagey– more a wholly understandable reaction to all the craziness and tension the Jaxx are pumping in. Frustration has rarely sounded so gleeful. –Tom Ewing

Listen: Basement Jaxx: “Romeo”

Sufjan Stevens: “Chicago” (2005)

The genius of Illinois was the way Sufjan made grand, epic-scale orch-pop out of local-color minutia: Historical footnotes, backwater towns, serial killer biography. But “Chicago” is the moment where all that goes out the window, where eyes turn skyward. “Chicago” is Sufjan’s “Clocks”, his “Such Great Heights”– the song that sounds custom-built to end up in the trailers for indie romantic comedies forevermore. The dizzying melody is all longing, and Stevens builds it up perfectly, piling on the horns and strings and choral voices before letting it repeat about 50 times because he knows we aren’t getting sick of it anytime soon. It’s not an indie pop song. It’s a pop song, pure and simple, and a great one. –Tom Breihan

Listen: Sufjan Stevens: “Chicago”

Panda Bear: “Bro’s” (2006)

Animal Collective’s sprawling catalog has often been defined by the group’s restless spirit and urge to reach new ground. But there is a more meditative and tranquil pace to Person Pitch, the third solo album from AC’s Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), and nowhere is this more evident than on the album’s beatific 12-minute epic “Bro’s”. Constructed of voice and intricately layered samples, “Bro’s” can feel like a single, prolonged exhalation, as Lennox cycles through the song’s simple looped patterns with a light but deliberate touch. Though it makes use of repetition, the track’s landscape is anything but static: Snatches of instruments, sound effects, and voices arrive then disappear, while Lennox’s lyrics gently ruminate on brotherhood and friendship. Above all, “Bro’s” displays an exquisite sense of patience, with Lennox constantly turning up new surprises as he lets his various loops echo back onto themselves, as though determined to leave no possible corner of this song unbrightened. –Matthew Murphy

Listen: Panda Bear: “Bro’s”

Burial: “Archangel” (2007)

Burial works like an alchemist on “Archangel”, converting scuffed, accidental rumble into a lithe, swinging 2-step pattern; an instantly nostalgic crackle suggests a worn stylus carving golden filigree out of a favorite record’s ground-down grooves. All that might have resulted in sullen murk were it not for the magic Burial works upon his vocal samples. Detuning a set of R&B a cappellas into weird, warbly chirps, Burial appropriates other singers’ words (“Loving you... holding you... kissing you”) to fit to his own tune. All the warping and collaging turns the song’s sentimentalism almost desperate, as though whatever the artist had to express were too much for a “real” voice to bear. The masked pathos of the gesture only helped confirm the myth around the then-anonymous Burial, but his coming out hasn’t robbed anything from this gorgeous, unforgettable song, which keeps its secrets hidden in cryptic rhythms and molten glissandi. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Burial: “Archangel”

Robyn: “With Every Heartbeat” [ft. Kleerup] (2007)

Like Wilco’s *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot *success, Robyn’s triumph of personal artistic vision over major-label shortsightedness is one of the great David vs. Goliath music-industry stories of the decade. And it’s poetic justice that “With Every Heartbeat”, the singer’s futuristic electro-pop collaboration with producer and fellow Swede Andreas Kleerup, would become her most successful song to date, eventually reaching #1 on the UK singles chart in 2007. It’s easy to see why people took to it. “With Every Heartbeat” is the best kind of pop hit– one with perspective-broadening ability but catchy enough for anyone to enjoy. And for a song ostensibly about pain and heartbreak, the thing’s downright triumphant in the end. Credit Kleerup’s throbbing arrangement– that synth build!– which pulsates beneath Robyn’s melancholic coos before intensifying into its hair-raising climax. Robyn may be talking breakups here, but she isn’t moping, and that’s partly because the song’s too vigorous to allow for it. –Joe Colly

Listen: Robyn: “With Every Heartbeat” [ft. Kleerup]

Hot Chip: “Over and Over” (2005)

“Over and Over” is Hot Chip’s best “fuck you.” Vocalist Alexis Taylor has a soft tenor that, on singles like “Ready for the Floor” and “Boy From School”, sounds tender at best; at worst, he sounds like a pushover. Not here. “Over and Over”, and its indispensable, brilliant video, plays like a series of dares: “You want laid back? I’ll give you laid back. You want special effects? Here’s the sloppiest green screen job ever.” Over the song’s wobbly two-step and busted guitars, Taylor and co-vocalist’s Joe Goddard sing it mild, yes, but with a dry wit. By the time Hot Chip get to the song’s spell-along countdown, you crave the guitar hook, then the synth organ hook, then the chorus again, though they cruelly withhold the latter, daring you to play it over and over. –Jessica Suarez

Listen: Hot Chip: “Over and Over”

Franz Ferdinand: “Take Me Out” (2004)

Thanks to incessant cheerleading on the part of the established rock press, retro garage-punk emerged as the predominant strain of post-millennial rock music in 2001. But partway through the decade, aspiring buzz bands realized that, down on the disco floor, they could really make their profits– and that paradigm shift can be scientifically pinpointed to the 55-second mark of Franz Ferdinand’s 2004 breakthrough single. After a tense build-up– wherein Alex Kapranos’ lays out the song’s desire-as-death theme– “Take Me Out” sounds ready to blast off; instead, Franz pull an aesthetic 180 and slow it down into a militaristic, libidinous funk stomp– and even after five years of perpetual play at student discos around the world, that change-up still startles. Franz Ferdinand famously formed to create “music for girls to dance to,” but the Scottish band’s most successful U.S. single to date can be attributed to the fact that their definition of dance music was still heavy enough to lure in those girls’ jock boyfriends. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Franz Ferdinand: “Take Me Out”

UGK: “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” [ft. Outkast] (2007)

Plenty of other rappers have availed themselves of Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You” before UGK and OutKast. 50 Cent, for instance, and Project Pat. Even Cam’ron had a go. But none of those matter now. From the second André 3000 cues up the heavenly choir of Hutch’s original with a pregnant “So...,” Project Pat’s “I Choose You” becomes about as relevant as Black Moon’s “Stay Real”, which has the misfortune of sharing its sample source with Jay-Z’s “P.S.A.” André’s nervous-groom routine on the opening verse– “spaceships don’t come equipped with rearview mirrors,” he tells himself, and his giddy butterflies are practically audible– was one of rap’s most winning moments this decade, and that’s before Pimp C stomps all over the track and Big Boi offers his indelible chopped-and-screwed “ask, ask Paul McCartney.” Other rappers relied on the majesty of Hutch’s plush soul choir to elevate their shit-talk: UGK and OutKast, in their last moment together before the death of Pimp C, actually make Willie sound more heavenly. –Jayson Greene

Listen: UGK: “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” [ft. Outkast]

Battles: “Atlas” (2007)

I’ve heard “Atlas” softly criticized as being more muscle than heart. Beyond the fact that the heart is a muscle, well, that’s a completely reasonable position to hold. When Tyondai Braxton’s cracked whinny rises at an impossible angle over what could initially be confused for any number of shuffle-based beats (“The Beautiful People”, “Rock and Roll Part 2”) it’s like a clarion call to exhibit the sort of physical domination few of us ever get to experience in our cubicle-bound lives.

“Atlas” is not a song you put on a mixtape. It’s a song you use when you’re coming to bat in the 9th inning against a fire-throwing closer, to soundtrack an intensely focused 5 a.m. weightlifting session (guilty), to train an army as powerful and precise as John Stanier’s drumming. So yes, “Atlas” doesn’t appeal to one’s emotions so much as it appeals to ideals. Upon hearing it for the first time, Battles’ astonishing technical proficiency set them apart from most other bands. Two years later, you don’t wonder why Battles are better than those guys, but why those other guys aren’t trying to do more to catch up. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Battles: “Atlas”

TV on the Radio: “Staring at the Sun” (2004)

George Carlin said fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. In the summer of 2003, both were happening. The U.S. had invaded Iraq, TVOTR’s home city was covered in National Guard, and temperatures hit a record high. Helplessness was a kind of fever, or maybe a real fever, or SARS, or another form of loneliness, but TVOTR understood sex could purify as well as distract: “Beat the skins and let the loose lips kiss you clean,” they commanded. Sonically, it was a primer on what was to come from them: grinding basslines, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s unearthly harmonies, rhythm as pared-down and vital as a heartbeat. By the time the song reappeared on their 2004 LP, it could have soundtracked the war or served as a protest song. The birth rate went up, at least. “I was a lover before this war,” Adebimpe reminded us later on Return to Cookie Mountain. We remember. –Jessica Suarez

Listen: TV on the Radio: “Staring at the Sun”

The Avalanches: “Since I Left You” (2000)

When I found out “U Can’t Touch This” was really “Superfreak”, I was bummed. My only disappointment about the opening track from the Avalanches’ sample-based magnum opus, though, was discovering the song was actually called “Since I Left You”. I could’ve sworn that female vocalist was singing “since I met you.” I cheered up after I realized “Since I Left You” refers not to a breakup, but to an escape. This music is a travelogue to an imaginary, idyllic realm reachable only through forgotten 1960s AM pop, Latin-tinged guitars, and easy-listening schlock. While plenty of people have continued to explore the use of samples, that bacchanalian locale has been the song’s most significant legacy, particularly in the work of artists from chilly Sweden: Jens Lekman, the Tough Alliance, Air France, Studio, and jj. By the way: She really was singing “since I met you.”. –Marc Hogan

Listen: The Avalanches: “Since I Left You”

Modest Mouse: “Float On” (2004)

Platinum sales. A #1 album. Magazine covers. Top 40 radio play. Kidz Bop. Why Modest Mouse? Why not a thousand other bands from backwater towns who also spent a decade schlepping across the country in beat-up vans? Only the gods of capitalism and pop know for sure, but, hell, if Pavement had written anything as straightforwardly uplifting as “Float On”, maybe they would have ended up on “American Idol”, too. For three and a half minutes, eternally vexed frontman Isaac Brock breaks through the rainclouds to pay tribute to the audacity of hope. The rhythm section marches forward like the irrepressible human spirit, the out of tune yet utterly undeniable pinprick guitar line seesaws like a rickety carousel, and the shout-along, clap-along, fist-pump-along chorus hits like a ticker-tape parade. Cars crash, money is stolen, jobs are lost– whatevs, man. We’ll all float on, OK. –Amy Phillips

Listen: Modest Mouse: “Float On”

T.I.: “What You Know” (2006)

It may not be possible to sound bigger than T.I. on “What You Know”. Ask T.I.; no one knows better. He spent a few years straining fruitlessly to match it and came up with ESPN-Zone theme songs (“Big Shit Poppin’”) and "Numa Numa"-sampling self-help anthems (“Live Your Life”). He seems finally to have figured it out, scaling back down to the lean, hungry street cuts he made his name with. Good call. A thousand mixtape rappers have crashed on the rocks of DJ Toomp’s roiling sea of a beat, but T.I. rides that wave of glorious noise with the grinning aplomb and justified self-regard of a rapper who knows he has Made the Leap, that he has stumbled upon “the moment where the rapper becomes the moment,” as Chris Ryan once pithily put it. “You know about me, dog,” he crows, letting loose with an insinuating “yeeaaaaaahhhh” that stretches out so far it starts to feel like an act of public lewdness. Rarely has a rapper’s victory lap felt quite this exhilarating. –Jayson Greene

Listen: T.I.: “What You Know”

Kylie Minogue: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” (2001)

How did Kylie make one of the decade’s finest dance-pop anthems? By offering less: less singing, less melody, less feeling. What’s left is a buzzy, insatiable desire, an itch you can’t scratch but maybe can dance out. Kylie is a diva more than singer, understanding intuitively how each coy purr, each insouciant whisper can speak to and for the lust of her audience. The point is not to want her, but to want what she wants: In the right environment, dancing to “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” traces a shared history of hopeful flirtations, irresistible seductions, inevitable disappointments, and the helpless compulsion to repeat the cycle again. If its sleek, synthetic surfaces feel hollow, it’s because fantasy is hollow, a shell for impossible expectation. “Just to be there in your arms…” Kylie imagines, then falls silent while the beat goes on. –Tim Finney

Listen: Kylie Minogue: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”

Sigur Rós: “Svefn-G-Englar” (2000)

Despite the fruitful decade that followed for Iceland’s Sigur Rós, there’s still no better introduction to the band’s majesty than “Svefn-G-Englar”, their first single (released in 1999 in their home country) and the lead track of its worldwide entrance, Ágætis Byrjun. The bowed guitar and billowing voice of Jonsi Birgisson create waves of sound in which steady keyboard and drum lines simply drift like tiny buoys at the mercy of a gentle ocean. But Sigur Rós soon moved on to bigger climaxes, stickier melodies, and richer textures. Listening now, “Svefn-G-Englar” feels mostly like a template. The questions it raised about its makers catalyzed our intrigue and inquiry are, to an extent, the same ones people continue to ask: Is that a girl singing? And is it singing, “It’s you,” over and over? What language is this, anyway, and how are those nautical noises made? Can all future music be this beautiful? –Grayson Currin

Listen: Sigur Rós: “Svefn-G-Englar”

Animal Collective: “Fireworks” (2007)

On Strawberry Jam, “Fireworks” fades in from the previous track on a stuttering drum machine, giving the impression that it really has no beginning. Hearing it live, Animal Collective give the impression that it might never end. What truly stands out about “Fireworks”, other than its endless and endlessly involving melody, is how starkly it lays out its emotions in such an honest, easily parsed manner. Far removed from the sort of primitivist, childlike affectations often ascribed to Animal Collective, Avey Tare is an adult here, emotionally nude and fearfully alone. Tare greets passersby and is struck by the thought that “I think that I’m only one I see sometimes,” frightened at the possibility that after all these years of fanciful naturism, this is the result of him being honest with himself. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Animal Collective: “Fireworks”

M.I.A.: “Galang” (2003)

Forget the Grammys– what M.I.A. really deserves recognition for is her unwavering dedication to the onomatopoeic and the staccato; the hard consonant and the long vowel; the simple pleasure-giving properties of words. “Galang” may be patois for “go on,” but the word’s real currency, she suggests, is in its stackability, the way it piles on top of itself to galang-a-lang-a-lang.

A similar feeling-over-meaning instinct informed many of her future artistic choices, including those related to the complicated and not easily untangled circumstances of the Sri Lankan civil war. Despite its artist-conferred status as protest music, the video for “Galang” features M.I.A. dancing in a stylized wonderland of neon-bright graffitied iconography (bombs, tigers, machine guns) that wears insurgency and inequality like fashion. To a continent that’s often guilty of doing exactly that, “Galang” rang to some as troublesome, a criticism that M.I.A. forcefully rejected without ever convincingly explaining away. This willful conflation of style and substance– and a stubborn refusal to separate one from the other– has become a constant in her career. It’s what makes her relevant and worthy of thought and discussion, and it began here. –Mark Pytlik

Listen: M.I.A.: “Galang”

Spoon: “The Way We Get By” (2003)

Spoon were late bloomers. The first seven years of the band’s career yielded many great songs, but in retrospect, Britt Daniel and Jim Eno spent all of that time gradually refining the elements of their style into a striking aesthetic all their own. “The Way We Get By” is their breakthrough, and it still stands as the track that best defines the Spoon sound: rhythm and melody pared down to the barest essentials; extremely dry piano mingling with tight-pocket percussion; Daniel’s sexy rasp hitting a perfect balance of cool aloofness and genuine emotional investment. The lyrics may namecheck some Iggy Pop classics, but the melodic sensibility is more like an alternate universe version of Billy Joel raised on the minimal punk of Wire. For longtime fans, this mastery of style and form was well worth the wait, but for just about everyone else, it was a revelation. –Matthew Perpetua

Listen: Spoon: “The Way We Get By”

Amerie: “1 Thing” (2005)

“1 Thing” is a song without a center, without a floor or ceiling; it seems to hover in midair for four minutes. It comes out of nowhere, with producer Rich Harrison’s flipped-and-splintered drum break from the Meters’ “Oh, Calcutta!” exploding right in your face, and then it’s nothing but breakdown, i.e., the good part. There’s basically no harmonic grounding– no bass, no synths until it’s halfway through, only a few pitch-shifted shards of Leo Nocentelli’s jazz-chord guitar and Amerie’s voice. Her singing refuses to anchor the song, either: the “no-no-no-no-no-oh” that serves as its first hook sounds like it’s flown in from an ad-lib. Even during the verses and choruses, phrases and gasps and wordless flashes of harmony pop up all over the stereo field. There’s no individual Amerie singing it, just momentary impressions of a hundred Ameries, all scraping the roof of emotional response. All of which is to say that it’s a precise evocation of being overwhelmed and swept away by passion. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Amerie: “1 Thing”

Jay-Z: “Big Pimpin‘” [ft. UGK] (2000)

The decade starts here– damn near literally, since the album this song appears on dropped three days before 2000 began. But more than that, “Big Pimpin’” represents the aughts’ increased legitimization of the South as a region that could get shine from NYC, both lyrically and production-wise. UGK’s show-stealing guest spot ensures the former; it was a well-deserved breakthrough for the Texas icons and features the duo at their sharpest, whether it’s Bun B turning a classic rhyme-scheme switch by toying with the pronunciation of “scenario” or Pimp C drawling out eight tracks’ worth of potential hooks in his verse. And Timbaland’s creatively lucrative infatuation with Eastern sounds hits its first jackpot here, with its trilling bellydance melodies refitted into a super-widescreen ass-propulsion motivator. The only thing that hasn’t maintained its freshness: Hova’s declaration that he’ll never give his heart to a woman– though his staccato-yet-sleek time-shifting flow makes it easy to forget he reneged on that by “Crazy in Love”. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Jay-Z: “Big Pimpin’” [ft. UGK]

The White Stripes: “Seven Nation Army” (2003)

The Detroit duo withstood the “Return of Rock” brouhaha to make a niche for themselves as arena-rocking, side-project-glutted, guitar-god-torch-carrying icons that we’ve mostly forgotten the fake-sister mythmaking that set tongues wagging in the beginning. And “Seven Nation Army” is the garage-rock revivalists’ anthem. (Need proof? It’s still in heavy rotation in sporting arenas and strip clubs.) People, right down to those School of Rock tots, have argued about Meg’s proficiency as a drummer, but “Seven Nation Army” wouldn’t have half of its menace were it not for the simplicity of her thumping, insistent floor tom. In the end, though, it is Jack’s guitar– from its descending bass-y riff to its nimble, trebly solo– that whips the song into a furious squall from its rumbling intro. –Rebecca Raber

Listen: The White Stripes: “Seven Nation Army”

Hot Chip: “Boy From School” (2006)

“We tried but we didn’t have long/ We tried but we don’t belong.” With those lines, Hot Chip showed they were more than a bunch of synth-fetishizing goofballs. “Boy From School” wraps itself up in poignant nostalgia– the kind you can’t escape from after spotting a high school acquaintance 10 years after the caps were tossed. It’s about the undeniable desire to go backward and make things right: do that work, behave that way, see that girl. “I got lost/ You said this was the way back,” it concludes, as if stuck in a looping dream.

Which would all be a bit bedwetter if not for a thump jacked in from some sort of disco eternity. Hot Chip don’t wallow in their past, no matter how bittersweet. The physicality of the beat and the clarity of the emotions fuse into a twinkling rumble that crystallizes teenage alienation without dwelling upon it. These Brits are bringing clubs into headphones and head space onto the floor; they’re trying, succeeding. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Hot Chip: “Boy From School”

Antony and the Johnsons: “Hope There’s Someone” (2005)

It’s hard to think of a human experience untouched by song. With patience, you could piece together a playlist that chronologically represents everything that’s ever happened to you– birthdays and funerals, weddings and break-ups, workdays and trips abroad, all of it. Or you could simply cut to the chase and put on “Hope There’s Someone”, where we experience the fullness of a lifespan in a few overpowering minutes. At first, it’s small and delicate, like something taking its first tentative steps out of a cracked egg. Gradually, it learns to walk, grows, spreads its wings, soars, and is transfigured into a piano storm that seems very much like death. Antony Hegarty prays for safe passage for as long as he can, then gives in to the immense pressures he’s cultivating, and just howls. Metamorphosis is his leitmotif, glinting in portions through his songs, but he nailed down the entire wriggling shape of it here. –Brian Howe

Listen: Antony and the Johnsons: “Hope There’s Someone”

Clipse: “Grindin’” (2002)

It’s one of the great triumphs of counterintuitive pop thinking that the 21st century’s definitive hip-hop yayo-chic anthem sounds so sparse. It could be because Pusha T and Malice put themselves on the supply end of the chain rather than the blown-out, hubris-loaded demand that fuels traditional coked-out musical excess. Besides, they’re more concerned with milking charisma out of a profession whose afterthought clients, for all we know, could be anyone from day traders to destitute single mothers. It’s all strictly business anyhow, fodder for some ingeniously cold wordplay (“I move ’caine like a cripple”) and visions of Benz wagons and Gucci Chuck Taylors. That the Neptunes set it to a beat that sounds like car-door slams rearranged into a minimalist, clap-accented drumline only makes it easier to feel complicit in their trade, and if it wasn’t so damned nod-provoking one might start asking some troubling questions about why we’re bobbing our heads to coke rap in the first place. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Clipse: “Grindin’”

Justin Timberlake: “My Love” [ft. T.I.] (2006)

No one wants to admit it now, but the majority of pop critics had written off Timbaland by 2006. He’d spent almost 10 years rewriting the sonic guidelines for Top 40 hits, expanding both the melodic and rhythmic palette of pop, a pretty respectable run for any producer. But when a few years went by and Billboard’s resident genius slipped into the nether region below the Top 40, pastiching himself to middling effect, plenty of people were ready to call him a spent force.

Then: “My Love”. A two-for-one reaffirmation that both Timbaland and the man with his name on the label, then-recently legitimatized boy-band refugee Justin Timberlake, had another round in them. The duo had already drawn attention with the grinding eroto-disco of “SexyBack”, but “My Love” was a full-on leap into the world of slo-mo techno. J.T.’s lyrics are of a piece with a career built on guileless mash notes, but the charm of his double-time choruses dovetails perfectly with Tim’s spiraling club synths. Rarely has a song fulfilled an album title’s aesthetic manifesto so succinctly. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Justin Timberlake: “My Love” [ft. T.I.]

Rihanna: “Umbrella” [ft. Jay-Z] (2007)

In pop’s armory of emotions, fidelity is among the trickiest to get right. Too easily its expression tips into the reassuring sentimentality of “That’s What Friends Are For”. This only makes “Umbrella” more startling and precious: In this particular field the song is possibly without peer. The secret was to capture fidelity’s difficulty, its challenge, and Rihanna’s method is pleasingly literal, pitting her pledge of devotion against nature itself: synthesizer chords like a rainstorm and breakbeats like thunder claps or trees crashing to the ground. In the midst of it all, Rihanna herself sounds hard and defiant, abandoning her former girlish sweetness for a steely determination; hence the near-violence of her “um-be-rella-ella-ella,” as impacting and stirring as a war cry. It’s not sensual, but, “Said I’ll always be your friend/ Took an oath, I’m a stick it out till the end,” remains one of modern pop’s most romantic and affecting promises. –Tim Finney

Listen: Rihanna: “Umbrella” [ft. Jay-Z]

Radiohead: “Everything in Its Right Place” (2000)

As we near decade’s end, let’s take a moment to pity the poor, patient believers who– when the 00s were but 10 months old– plunked down a dozen or so dollars for Radiohead’s fourth album, Kid A, hit play, and waited for their favorite band to rock out. Sure, Thom Yorke had struggled with fandom and fame touring behind the monumental OK Computer, but what was this shit? If everything was really in its right place, where were the fucking guitars, which they had vowed anyone could play (except themselves, suddenly)? And whose crackling old keyboards were those? And why did rock’s razor-sharp voice suddenly sound as if it’d been broken into bits by a centrifuge? Luckily, every band didn’t follow this song’s lead, but "Everything in Its Right Place"– a sharp-tongued kiss-off that stood on the shoulders of different giants, like krautrock, Stockhausen, and Squarepusher– poured new possibilities into several previously hermetic circles. And it was too hypnotic to dare apologize. –Grayson Currin

Listen: Radiohead: “Everything in Its Right Place”

Daft Punk: “Digital Love” (2001)

Only Daft Punk could’ve gotten away with a song this innocent, this oblivious to cool, this unafraid of coming right out and saying what it means. In interviews about “Digital Love”, Daft Punk have mentioned Supertramp as an inspiration, but the first time I heard it I thought immediately of the theme to “The Greatest American Hero”, one of the squarest TV themes of the early 1980s. I suspect the references will be different for everyone comes into contact with the song, which says something about “Digital Love”’s uncanny knack for tapping into pop’s collective unconscious. You hear it and you’re 10 years old again, standing in the vicinity of a radio and thinking about a person you’ve got a crush on, who looms somewhere just out of reach. It’s a love song to the power of music itself, accentuated by the broadcast-style filtering in its first half and the explosive guitar solo in its second. And let’s face it: when you’re young and lonely and by the radio, your feeling for the music and the yearning it inspires counts as much as anything. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Daft Punk: “Digital Love”

LCD Soundsystem: “Someone Great” (2007)

For a guy who habitually neglected to write lyrics before recording, James Murphy turned into a pretty smart songwriter on LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver. On “Someone Great”, he chooses his words carefully and studiously avoids mawkishness or easy sentiment, fully aware that heady introversion can make a song like this all the more affecting. The synthy whir and clockwork drum pattern, not to mention the glockenspiel that shadows his stoic lyrics, suggest the steady passing of minutes, hours, and days marked by intractable absence, and that main scribbly motif strained subtly on its final high note, giving “Someone Great” its warmest approximation of human despair. If most songs about death– either of a loved one or of a relationship– strive to be all heart, Murphy still processes emotions through his head and feet. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: LCD Soundsystem: “Someone Great”

Kelly Clarkson: “Since U Been Gone” (2005)

Songs about wresting your self-respect back from a bad lover have an unfortunate tendency to turn into shrill, one-sided attacks. All-American belter Kelly Clarkson, however, had a much less petty take on self-empowerment: “Your loss, sucker. I’m still gonna live my life. And better than ever before.”

So, sure, “Since U Been Gone” gave us one of the most blunt rallying cries of the last ten years, a perfectly realized sing-along chorus that will be a karaoke staple for years. But it’s fair to say that no one, even her early post-TV partisans, figured on an “American Idol” winner turning out such a great rock song, let alone a 21st-century indie rock pastiche given a world-conquering pop glaze by Swedish impresario Max Martin. But homage to certain new millennium New York bands isn’t why the song transcends. It’s Clarkson’s go-for-broke performance, those reality show-honed pipes finally put to expressing the unfiltered joy of newfound freedom. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Kelly Clarkson: “Since U Been Gone”

The Walkmen: “The Rat” (2004)

Somebody is pissed, somebody else is reeling from remorse, and everybody’s going full throttle on what has become the signature Walkmen hyperjam. Hamilton Leithauser, unhinged even on a good day, just flies right off the handle and the rest of the band doesn’t slack for a second. Forget secret weapons; everything’s out in the open here and all the more dangerous for it. And Bows & Arrows ain’t the half of it: This is a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of relentless drums, bass, and guitar. It all comes together with the whiz-bang aplomb of a Scorsese picture– of course remorse is all that’s left when it’s over. Even so, “The Rat” doesn’t need a context or backstory or string of descriptive metaphors to completely knock you over. It’s a headrush of a song that succeeds entirely on its own merits, like the ultimate emo anthem for an alternate dimension where girls don’t exist (sorry, ladies), music is a form of violence, and emo actually means raw, unbridled emotion and nothing more. –Matthew Solarski

Listen: The Walkmen: “The Rat”

R. Kelly: “Ignition (Remix)” (2002)

You have to work very hard indeed to sound this casual. “Ignition (Remix)” is a lazy, buzzed collage of a night on the town put together with a craftsman’s eye. The same trick– making meticulous detail sound almost improvised– is what made “Trapped in the Closet” so shockingly successful and replayable. Here R. Kelly isn’t telling a story so much as throwing out images, but the template is similar: a chassis of easy-rolling steppers’ music that can respond to the slightest change in the singer’s mood.

Not a phrase is wasted: When the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle started a message board thread on 100 reasons for this song’s greatness, every single fraction of “Ignition (Remix)” got its own nomination (and the list went well beyond 100). Personal favorites– the cork-and-glasses onomatopoeia of “Cris-tal poppin’”; the five table-rapping beats that summon the chorus; and, inevitably, “bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce.” Every decade brings us songs whose purpose is simply to bottle the feeling of the best night out it’s possible to enjoy. Call it a service to history: if, as seems likely, future generations judge the 00s as an era of bubble-fuelled idiocy, we will at least be able to point to “Ignition (Remix)” and say, “Yes, but just hear how great it felt.” –Tom Ewing

Listen: R. Kelly: “Ignition (Remix)”

Hercules and Love Affair: “Blind” (2008)

It goes without saying that “Blind” captivates any dancefloor. The real story is that Hercules and Love Affair’s Andrew Butler should be applauded for anticipating just how brilliant a disco diva Antony could be, and how physically tactile his quavering voice might sound in a club setting. “As a child I knew that the stars could only get brighter,” he sighs, and rarely before has innocence lost seemed so tragic. “Blind” doesn’t mourn the loss of childhood, but childhood’s dreams of a future in which lasting and meaningful connections might be forged. You dance in response because there is nothing else worth doing, and no other way to understand others that will work any better. A bleak vision, and yet it feels of a piece with all of dance music’s finest expressions of hopeless, unrequited devotion. “Blind” pays homage to this legacy of disco and primitive house, but also offers its own tremulous rejoinder, “What if I don’t just feel alone tonight, but every night?” In doing so, it doesn’t introduce existential angst to the dancefloor so much as reveal how its creeping fear was always already there.. –Tim Finney

Listen: Hercules and Love Affair: “Blind”

Annie: “Heartbeat” (2004)

A few great records were made this decade about the memory of dancing: In this one the dance is a stand-in for everything joyful and special about a lost moment. With its urgent builds, “Heartbeat” wills that dance to start again; with her serene delivery, Annie knows that it can’t really. An Internet sensation before that meant much actual success, for most of the 00s Annie made ginger attempts to step from being “our” pop star to being everyone’s. The subsequent success of Robyn and M.I.A. suggests this was no pipe-dream, but since most of Annie’s best songs from “Chewing Gum” to “Anthonio” are exercises in beguiling diffidence it’s not wholly surprising she never managed it.

And it hardly matters: hit-laden or not, very few catalogues contain anything as bewitching as “Heartbeat”, a piece of disco handicraft as intimate as it is giddy. Annie’s final verse, taken quiet and half-spoken as the song peaks, is like eavesdropping on a secret wish. As soon as she finishes it the song blows out like a birthday candle. “I won’t forget.” Stardom be damned, neither will we. –Tom Ewing

Listen: Annie: “Heartbeat”

The Rapture: “House of Jealous Lovers” (2002)

For a lot of people, “House of Jealous Lovers” was so inextricable from a time (2002) and a place (New York City) that by the time it saw an official album release, it was seen as a hell of a wake for the dance-punk movement that came and went with a speed that was pretty impressive even for indie sub-genres. Me, I didn’t know about any of that shit. In October 2003, I was in a Georgia college town while struggling with an iffy Internet connection– I bought Echoes on a recommendation and played Track 6 on a damn near continuous loop and had to find out who the hell these guys were. I can’t be the only one.

However emblematic it is of its DFA-led scene or whatever, sweet Jesus, what a song. All those lame bandwagon acts, the failure of this scene to catch on commercially– the Rapture don’t need to answer for any of that. You need no investment in its importance to find infinite pleasure in that bassline and Luke Jenner’s fearlessly off-key hooks. Even the cowbell hasn’t gotten old. Point being, I can’t imagine ever hearing “House of Jealous Lovers” without wondering if we maybe should give this dance-punk thing another shot, like, right now. –Ian Cohen

Listen: The Rapture: “House of Jealous Lovers”

The Knife: “Heartbeats” (2002)

No matter which iteration of “Heartbeats” you may prefer – the original recording from Deep Cuts, the dance remix by Rex the Dog, the achingly sentimental arrangement from the Silent Shout live disc, or even the cover versions by José González and the Scala choir– the essence of the song is always the same. The tune is strangely immutable, as if no interpretation, however radical, could possibly upset its precise balance of desire and nostalgia. As malleable as “Heartbeats” may be, it is best heard sung by Karin Dreijer Andersson, who invests her cryptic lyrics about a brief, intense love affair with a passion and vulnerability seemingly at odds with her metallic, otherworldly tone. Andersson’s words suggest as much pleasure as pain, but her voice lingers in between, where lust and terror overlap in a moment of profound intimacy.

Though the chorus suggests a deep sense of loss and regret, the emphasis is placed on the fleeting connection, which is presented as a sort of magical inevitability. Indeed, there is magic in every note of the song, manifesting itself just as much in the melody as in specific details, such as the subtle decay in the neon-hued synth tones of the original, or the cavernous spaces separating the arpeggiated notes of the live arrangement. Whether performed plaintively or joyously, each version of “Heartbeats” is a miracle in its own right, highlighting a different aspect of the same incredible, life-affirming experience. –Matthew Perpetua

Listen: The Knife: “Heartbeats”

Jay-Z: “99 Problems” (2003)

With respect to “Hard Knock Life” or “I.Z.Z.O.”, this was Jay-Z’s complete crossover moment, the single that catapulted him out of hip-hop superstardom into everyone’s vernacular. In retrospect, it sounds very much like he knows it; listen to the way his hushed lines at the beginning build into something more sure-footed over time. By the outro, he’s beaming in the direction of producer Rick Rubin, as if the song’s hugeness is now a foregone conclusion. To be fair, Jay-Z pretty much always sounds like he’s attending his own coronation, but in the context of “99 Problems”’s stadium-huge guitar inhalations and exhalations, that exuberance feels especially infectious.

And don’t forget the context. Before Jay-Z and Beyoncé were officially a thing, they spent months playing coy with the media. Speculation reached boiling point with the serendipitously-aligned releases of a blatant affirmation in the form of “Crazy in Love” and a blatant denial in the form of “99 Problems”. Of course, everyone knew the story by then, but the fact that this played out the way it did (i.e. with two monstrous singles, the other of which he featured on, playing call and response at the top of the charts) is as much a testament to Jigga’s PR savviness as anything else; you don’t reach this level on music alone. –Mark Pytlik

Listen: Jay-Z: “99 Problems”

LCD Soundsystem: “Losing My Edge” (2002)

If the songs on this list were chosen solely by how they captured the zeitgeist in independent music, “Losing My Edge” would be an easy #1. The most audacious debut single of the 00s, "Losing My Edge" captured the anxiety of trying to use your taste in music as a badge of cool in the era when all music is available to anyone who can afford a broadband connection. Over a beat borrowed from Killing Joke’s “Change”, James Murphy alternates a lament about being eclipsed by "The kids coming up from behind" with tall tales of early encounters with Can, Suicide, Captain Beefheart, and other icons of hipster scum. The worst thing about this new generation of interlopers? “They’re actually really nice,” Murphy says, which makes them even more difficult to hate.

But while he laid out the essential facts of music fandom in our age and also articulated the central absurdity of forming a band in a time of such excess (What do you do when everything has been done?), Murphy then managed to transcend it all. Yep, we’re fucked: there’s nothing new under the sun, and unlike the kids, we don’t have the advantage of not knowing. So what next, then? You go for it, make music anyway, and do it so well that no one cares what you actually know and whom you’re borrowing from. Which is what he did the rest of the decade. –Mark Richardson

Listen: LCD Soundsystem: “Losing My Edge”

OutKast: “Hey Ya!” (2003)

What’s cooler than being cool? How about ebullient songs about life-cracking misery? Those are pretty cool. How about lyrics so sharp that nearly every line in them becomes a catchphrase? And hard funk grooves in weird power-pop time signatures? And presentations of black male sexuality that basically come down to being really clever and funny? Those are cool also. Actually, you know what was really cool? You remember the moment in the fall of 2003 when “Hey Ya!” came out and it sounded like André 3000 had cracked the code and made a record that sounded like everything on the radio and nothing anyone had heard before, and it seemed like the walls between rock and R&B and hip-hop were about to topple and from then on there would just be this enormous pool of popular music that everyone could swim around in? And then there was the equally brilliant paradigm-smashing video for it, and then after that somebody did that “A Charlie Brown Christmas” cut-up video that’s still funny more than five years later? And we all thought that OutKast had come into their true power and had a million more amazing hits in front of them, and didn’t notice that they’d basically already broken up even though to this day they keep insisting that they’re a going concern despite the fact that they don’t tour together and barely appear on each other’s records? God, that was cool. Ice cold. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: OutKast: “Hey Ya!”

Gnarls Barkley: “Crazy” (2005)

Any successful artistic collaboration is going to rely to some degree on serendipity, but Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” seems an especially uncanny intersection of timing and talent. Though the partnership between producer Danger Mouse– fresh off the success of The Grey Album, his Jay-Z/Beatles mash-up– and Goodie Mob rapper/soulman Cee-Lo Green seemed like an intriguing match-up from the start, it hardly seemed like a recipe for an instantaneous worldwide smash hit. Yet from the time it first appeared on the group’s website, “Crazy” became the virtual definition of a viral hit single, eventually becoming the first song to reach #1 on the UK charts solely through download sales.

Perhaps the song’s immediate commercial success is a reflection of the spontaneity with which it was recorded. In a 2006 interview, Danger Mouse told Pitchfork that Cee-Lo’s entire vocal for the song had been recorded on the first take, a claim that might seem outlandish if “Crazy” didn’t sound quite so vibrant and alive. Based on a sample from a vintage spaghetti western soundtrack, Danger Mouse’s production is spare and compact, giving Green all the space he needs to fully inhabit the song. And it remains a joy to hear the way Green seizes the moment, his spirited vocal managing to sound both exuberant and wistful, and it quickly becomes clear that other artists might spend a career in the studio and never capture a similar moment of such casual magic. –Matthew Murphy

Listen: Gnarls Barkley: “Crazy”

Arcade Fire: “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” (2004)

Funeral is a great record top-to-bottom, and it really does work brilliantly as an album, with its interludes, recurring themes, and consistently affecting songs. But sometimes it’s just too intense to absorb all it once, and at times like this, you can just play just the album’s opening track, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”, which encapsulates everything great about the record in one five-minute slab of yearning.

“Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” is a fantasy of teenage escape, imagining a world without parents and adult sadness, in a town buried in snow with tunnels connecting two of the characters. The lyrics paint a surreal and compelling picture, but there’s just as much meaning in the crack of Win Butler’s voice, who is bound so tightly with angst that his singing just sort of escapes in yelping waves. There’s the resonance of the piano, sounding like a creaky old upright playing 100 years ago. And there’s the song’s ecstatic build, all the voices and instruments– and there are a lot of them– joined together in a communal sing-along that both celebrates and mourns. It’s all just so much, man, that sometimes five minutes is all you can take. So "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" is there for you, until next time. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Arcade Fire: “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”

Animal Collective: “My Girls” (2009)

Leaked in late 2008, right in the middle of an ongoing economic meltdown, “My Girls” was perfectly of its moment, decrying materialism for simpler joys: “I don’t need to seem like I care about material things like social status/ I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls!” They don’t sing those lines; they exclaim them amid a whirl of synth beeps and sine waves that started from chaos and coalesced into an exuberant stomp.

It may be a strangely sentimental point for an indie group with avant-noise roots to make, but it also signaled another sea change in a decade full of them for Animal Collective. If previously they donned masks and adopted nicknames to hide their identities, coming across as way too esoteric to play to the rafters, on “My Girls” the band step forward as pop stars of their own making, managing the impossible feat of straddling so many different audiences: indie nerds, jambanders, your parents. They could end up being Phish or Arcade Fire or maybe both, but this song is the key to their future: effervescent, heartfelt, inventive, original, and gutsy enough to suggest that we don’t need a stable economy to be rich. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Animal Collective: “My Girls”

Radiohead: “Idioteque” (2000)

I’m pretty certain when Paul Lansky was composing his primitive computer piece, “Mild und Leise” in 1973, he didn’t reckon that 27 years later four chords from that work would cause thousands of listeners to spend the succeeding decade spontaneously breaking out in chills whenever they encountered them. Superficially, "Idioteque" is just another of Radiohead’s miraculous efforts on Kid A to harness the power and strangeness of several decades’ worth of experimental music and recontextualize it inside of a four- or five-minute “rock” song by a multi-platinum band with tremendous melodic gifts and a spectrally majestic singer.

Yet somehow, “Idioteque” has always stood apart, inevitably eliciting greater screams when introduced in concert than any other song that isn’t a long-forgotten, heavily-fetishized B-side. Despite originating from the birth pangs of the technological revolution, “Idioteque” remains one of Radiohead’s most forward-feeling songs, thanks to its abstracted drum patterns and assorted spritzing gadgetry. Perhaps above all else, it captures the philosophical essence of Radiohead– oblique existentialist lyrics that nonetheless unmistakably suggest confusion, helplessness and menace, wedded to a song structure that similarly refuses to offer solace, comfort or explanation. –Joshua Love

Listen: Radiohead: “Idioteque”

Missy Elliott: “Get Ur Freak On” (2001)

“For those of you who hated,” Missy taunted at the beginning of “Lick Shots”, “you only made us more creative.” By that standard, the song that followed it on Miss E... So Addictive must’ve meant that her and Timbaland were the most-loathed artists of 2001. Eight years after it hit the top ten of Billboard’s Hot 100, “Get Ur Freak On” still sounds like an audaciously leftfield stroke of genius, a song that succeeded wildly in its goal to push futurism, global style, and flat-out hyper-manic absurdity to equally lofty heights. Timbaland’s flair for the accessibly exotic reached its peak here with his bhangra-meets-jungle beat and 50s B-movie sci-fi synths, replacing the stagger-step trap breaks of drum’n’bass with a burbling tabla and subsequently creating a uniquely slippery dance track that bumps hard without a single kick drum.

Missy makes a hell of a case for herself as one of the era’s all-time great hip-hop surrealists with her performance here, turning on a dime from sing-song chanting to left-field cartoon opera notes or unhinged screams, all with a voice that’s somewhere between coyly sexy, tear-the-club-up cocky and Spike Jones chaotic. Reclaiming the word “bitch” as a synonym for badass, turning the vocal non-sequitur into an art and big-upping the kind of game-changing otherness that “got the radio shook like we got a gun,” “Get Ur Freak On” has long since established itself as an integral part of the evolution of pop music in the 21st Century– but don’t hold your breath waiting for the day it’ll sound ordinary. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Missy Elliott: “Get Ur Freak On”

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: “Maps” (2003)

Part of what made “Maps” so disarming was that nothing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had recorded, up to that point in their then-short career, even hinted that their hall-of-fame single would also be one of the most tender ballads of the decade. Suddenly the jagged art-punk and Karen O’s beer and bile-fueled sneer was put on pause. And in their place was a swooning plea for a lover to reconsider leaving, set to chiming guitar.

Which is not to say the song fails to, you know, rock the fuck out at the appropriate moments. “Ballad” here means intent more than form. Guitarist Nick Zinner’s feedback-charged bridge is epic and somehow tasteful. It’s noisy without harassing the ears, and abetted by drummer Brian Chase’s charging cymbals.

But O is the real star, the semi-obscure concerns of her verses obviated by the most emotionally naked chorus in a long time. When her voice rises, nearly cracking on “wait, they don’t love you like I love you” before that bridge, you don’t even need to be a native English speaker to catch the last-ditch longing she’s unashamedly revealing in public. And if you think that kind of transparency is easy to pull off without tipping into drivel, there’s decades of failed pop to prove you wrong. –Jess Harvell

Listen: Yeah Yeah Yeahs: “Maps”

Daft Punk: “One More Time” (2000)

A pool filled with cotton candy Jelly Belly’s at a 10-year-old’s birthday bash. The most drunk-uncle moment at your cousin’s wedding. A dozen cartoon kittens flipping their tails double-time with the boom. Winning both "The $10,000 Pyramid" and "Jeopardy!" on the same day. Aliens touching down on earth only to give every man, woman, and child their own ghettoblaster. This song sounds like many things. It is not prudent. But it is wise. Because– remember– it’s called "One More Time". Not "Forever" or "Infinity" or "17 More Times". This is it. There is an end. The feelings will wear off. But not before the beautifully faceless Romanthony gurgles his way into your chest, knees, brain. Not before Daft Punk distill 25 years of pop and house into five and a half minutes of first-time joy. Not before you lose any and all sense, breath, scream, beg, cry, break, heal, pump, kick, and beam wider than your mouth knows. So keep repeating because you won’t last. "One More Time", of course, will. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Daft Punk: “One More Time”

Beyoncé: “Crazy in Love” [ft. Jay-Z] (2003)

If someone told you that the sheet music for “Crazy in Love” was just a lot of exclamation points on a staff, you would believe them, right? From its first moments on til the end, its enormous beats and blaring fanfare pummel everything its path like a brutal force of nature, leaving us all with a clear choice to either turn away or submit to its indomitable power. It’s fitting that this sound would be the basis of Beyoncé Knowles breakthrough hit, as it is the ideal showcase for the singer’s forthright persona and her gift for vocal performances that manage an improbable balance of poised professionalism and feral emoting.

Amazingly, “Crazy in Love” isn’t even Knowles at full blast– she comes much harder on later hits such as “Get Me Bodied” and “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It”– but the sheer force of her presence is enough to overshadow a strong cameo appearance by the freakishly charismatic Jay-Z and nearly erase the memory of her former bandmates in Destiny’s Child. She was no stranger to stardom before “Crazy In Love,” but after its blockbuster success, there was no question that Beyoncé had arrived as the definitive female R&B singer of her era, and had become the clear successor to a lineage of superstars including Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, and Diana Ross. –Matthew Perpetua

Listen: Beyoncé: “Crazy in Love” [ft. Jay-Z]

M.I.A.: “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)” [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy] (2007)

M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” united people like few other songs this decade, suggesting that given the right synergy of personality, topicality, and marketing, something like a mass audience could still gather around even the unlikeliest of phenomena. Riding the wave of Barack Obama’s outsider popularity, “Paper Planes” felt unusually relevant for pop music in the age of “American Idol”. Here was another outsider, this one a Sri Lankan Tamil raised in London who won over listeners with global-minded beats and revolutionary chic. The third single off her second album, Kala, “Paper Planes” rode from its hipster dance-music niche into broader consciousness on the back of the trailer to Pineapple Express, then made an extended cameo in Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning film that was the late-00’s other great border-hopping underdog story.

The song alone is stunning enough, with its skanking sample of the Clash’s “Straight to Hell”, its cash registers and gunshots, its chorus. Every sound tells a story, and every sound bled perfectly at a time of war(s), economic crisis, and a global hunger for change. Artists from Built to Spill to 50 Cent covered or remixed it; T.I. and Jay-Z sampled the song for their “Swagger Like Us” (which, going to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, missed M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” chart peak by one point). The song’s viral spread– appropriate, given the border-hopping lyrics and the backdrop of global flu pandemic scares that M.I.A. referenced on her “Bird Flu”– makes it hard to identify any one version as the definitive one, which only testifies to its status as a kind of cultural fact. Push vs. shove however, we’ve always been partial to this one, where Diplo fills in the song’s few cracks with verses by Bun B and Rich Boy. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: M.I.A.: “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)” [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy]

LCD Soundsystem: “All My Friends” (2007)

James Murphy started the decade chastising indie rock for becoming a name-dropping echo chamber of the same tired influences milked again and again. Boy, good thing that’s all changed, huh? But Murphy still did us all a service by eroding indie’s senseless aversion to dance music, using his DFA label and LCD Soundsystem to inject a cocktail of synths and syncopation that the scene has permanently assimilated. Helpfully, after complaining in “Yeah” that “everybody keeps on talking about it, nobody’s getting it done,” Murphy took his own advice and started (mostly) showing rather than telling.

On “All My Friends”, Murphy is no longer worried about losing his edge– he’s not even looking for it any more. There’s a Pink Floyd reference, for Pete’s sake. And while the song’s skeletal structure may be virtually unchanged from the steady build of the band’s first singles, the ingredients have been reshuffled: Instead of building off a drum beat, the core of the song is a jumbled piano loop that sounds discordant and uncomfortable until it’s surrounded by a steadily growing army of percussion and the happiest guitar riff Murphy’s ever allowed. By the end, the piano has become euphoric and confident without changing a lick, a neat thematic trick to accompany Murphy’s bittersweet lyrical acceptance of growing old. “All My Friends” survives the high-wire act of growing mature without getting boring, which just might be the lesson Prof. Murphy can teach his peers in the next decade. –Rob Mitchum

Listen: LCD Soundsystem: “All My Friends”

OutKast: “B.O.B.” (2000)

So you’ve spent the past five days clicking through pages of this countdown only to find out that the best single of the 2000s was released just 10 months into the decade. (To the ensuing nine or so years of music: thanks for showing up.) And that it’s the very same song that topped Pitchfork’s Best Songs of 2000-2004 list from five years ago. Now you know how your parents feel when they tune into a long-weekend classic-rock radio countdown for the inevitable valedictory spin of “Stairway to Heaven”.

But really, do we have any other choice? “B.O.B.” is not just the song of the decade– it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title– aka “Bombs Over Baghdad”, a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later– is only the start of it. In “B.O.B”’s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords (“Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS”), personal anecdotes (“Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo”) and product placements (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”) that read like the world’s first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover’s re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black).

Of course, there is a downside of being ahead of your time– upon its release, “B.O.B.” didn’t even dent the Billboard Hot 100, and merely peaked at No. 69 on the Hip-Hop/R&B Chart. But unlike OutKast’s subsequent number one singles (“Ms. Jackson” and “Hey Ya”) “B.O.B.” is too disorienting and exhausting an experience to ever succumb to over-saturation, and its majesty has never been diminished by ironic cover versions from cred-hungry rock bands. Because even after a decade that’s seen the act of copying music become as easy as a mouse-click, and the process of performing simplified for toy video-game guitars, the future-shocked ferocity “B.O.B.” is something that just cannot be duplicated. –Stuart Berman

Listen: OutKast: “B.O.B.”

201. The New Pornographers: “The Laws Have Changed” [Matador; 2003]
202. Belle and Sebastian: “I'm Waking Up to Us” [Matador; 2001]
203. Ricardo Villalobos: “Fizheuer Zieheuer” [Playhouse; 2006]
204. Spoon: “Everything Hits at Once” [Merge; 2001]
205. Lily Allen: “Smile” [Capitol; 2006]
206. Bat for Lashes: “Daniel” [Astralwerks; 2009]
207. Outkast: “The Whole World” [ft. Killer Mike] [LaFace; 2001]
208. Kylie Minogue: “Love at First Sight” [EMI; 2002]
209. The Clientele: “Since K Got Over Me” [Merge; 2005]
210. Cat Power: “Lived in Bars” [Matador; 2006]
211. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: “Timorous Me” [Lookout!; 2001]
212. The Beta Band: “Squares” [Regal/Astralwerks; 2001]
213. Yeah Yeah Yeahs:“Y Control” [Interscope; 2003]
214. Freeway: “What We Do” [ft. Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel] [Roc-A-Fella; 2003]
215. M.I.A.: “Bucky Done Gun” [XL; 2005]
216. Sleater-Kinney: “Jumpers” [Sub Pop; 2005]
217. Yeasayer: “2080” [We Are Free; 2007]
218. Bloc Party: “Banquet” [Wichita/V2; 2004
219. Lil Mama: “Lip Gloss” [Zomba; 2007]
220. Ekkehard Ehlers: “Plays John Cassavettes, Pt. 2” [Staubgold; 2001]
221. Fuck Buttons: “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” [ATP; 2008]
222. Three 6 Mafia: “Sippin' on Some Syrup” [Loud/Relativity; 2000]
223. Beach House: “Apple Orchard” [Carpark; 2006]
224. The National: “Abel” [Beggars Banquet; 2005]
225. Dntel: “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” [ft. Ben Gibbard] [Plug Research; 2001]
226. Le Tigre: “Deceptacon (DFA Remix)” [DFA; 2001]
227. Björk: “Pagan Poetry” [Elektra; 2001]
228. Phoenix: “1901” [Glassnote; 2009]
229. Joanna Newsom: “Sprout and the Bean” [Drag City; 2004]
230. The Mountain Goats: “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” [Emperor Jones; 2001]
231. Jarvis Cocker: “Running the World” [Rough Trade; 2006]
232. Destiny's Child: “Jumpin’ Jumpin”” [Columbia; 2000]
233. Air: “Playground Love” [Astralwerks; 2000]
234. Electric Six: “Danger! High Voltage!” [XL; 2002]
235. Sally Shapiro: “I'll Be by Your Side” [Paper Bag/Discokaine; 2006]
236. Elliott Smith: “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free” [7” version] [Suicide Squeeze/Domino; 2003]
237. Cut Copy: “Out There on the Ice” [Modular; 2008]
238. Estelle [ft. Kanye West]: “American Boy” [Atlantic; 2007]
239. The Dismemberment Plan: “Face of the Earth” [DeSoto; 2001]
240. Clipse “Zen” [Re-Up Gang; 2008]
241. Les Savy Fav: “The Sweat Descends” [Frenchkiss; 2004]
242. Dirty Projectors: “Rise Above” [Dead Oceans; 2007]
243. Fischerspooner: “Emerge” [International Deejay Gigolo/Ministry of Sound; 2001]
244. The Hives: “Hate to Say I Told You So” [Burning Heart/Epitaph; 2000]
245. Girls Aloud: “Biology” [Polydor/Universal; 2005]
246. Lupe Fiasco: “Kick Push” [Atlantic; 2006]
247. Broadcast: “Pendulum” [Warp; 2003]
248. Liars: “Plaster Casts of Everything” [Mute; 2007]
249. Amadou & Mariam: “Sabali” [Because Music; 2008]
250. The Thermals: “A Pillar of Salt” [Sub Pop; 2006]
251. Eminem: “Without Me” [Interscope; 2002]
252. Bright Eyes: “The Calendar Hung Itself” [Saddle Creek; 2000]
253. Caribou: “Melody Day” [Merge; 2007]
254. Radiohead: “Reckoner” [self-released/XL; 2007]
255. At the Drive-In: “One Armed Scissor” [Grand Royal/Virgin; 2000]
256. M83: “Kim & Jessie” [Virgin; 2008]
257. The Flaming Lips: “Fight Test” [Warner Bros.; 2002]
258. Rachel Stevens: “Some Girls” [Universal; 2004]
259. Neko Case: “I Wish I Was the Moon” [Bloodshot/Matador; 2002]
260. Of Montreal: “Disconnect the Dots” [Polyvinyl; 2004]
261. Sonic Youth: “Incinerate” [Geffen; 2006]
262. Mastodon: “Blood & Thunder” [Relapse; 2004]
263. Coldplay: “Yellow” [Parlophone; 2000]
264. Baby: “What Happened to That Boy?” [ft. Clipse] [Cash Money; 2002]
265. Jim O'Rourke: “Good Times” [Drag City; 2001]
266. Bright Eyes: “First Day of My Life” [Saddle Creek; 2005]
267. The Beta Band: “To You Alone” [Regal; 2000]
268. Common: “The Light” [MCA; 2000]
269. The Decemberists: “The Engine Driver” [Kill Rock Stars; 2005]
270. Damian Marley: “Welcome to Jamrock” [Universal; 2005]
271. Arcade Fire: “Intervention” [Merge; 2007]
272. Nas: “One Mic” [Columbia; 2001]
273. Smog: “Dress Sexy at My Funeral” [Drag City; 2000]
274. The MFA: “The Difference It Makes”(Superpitcher Remix) [Border Community; 2004]
275. Broken Social Scene: “Stars and Sons” [Arts & Crafts; 2002]
276. The Darkness: “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” [Atlantic; 2003]
277. Earth: “Coda Maestoso in F (Flat) Minor” [Southern Lord; 2007
278. Madvillain: “America's Most Blunted” [Stones Throw; 2003]
279. Alan Braxe and Fred Falke: “Rubicon” [Vulture; 2004]
280. The Fiery Furnaces: “Here Comes the Summer” [Rough Trade; 2005]
281. The Books: “Take Time” [Tomlab; 2003]
282. Luomo: “The Present Lover” [Digital Disco version] [Force Tracks; 2002]
283. Godspeed You Black Emperor!: “Storm” [First Movement]
284. Wiley: “Wearing My Rolex” [Asylum; 2008]
285. Ryan Adams: “Come Pick Me Up” [Bloodshot; 2000]
286. ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: “Another Morning Stoner” [Interscope; 2002]
287. Chromatics: “In the City” [Italians Do It Better; 2007]
288. Fabolous: “Breathe” [Desert Storm/Atlantic; 2004]
289. PJ Harvey: “Good Fortune” [Island; 2000]
290. The Exploding Hearts: “Modern Kicks” [Dirtnap; 2002]
291. Missy Elliott: “Pass That Dutch” [Elektra; 2003]
292. Deerhunter: “Spring Hall Convert” [Kranky; 2007]
293. Aphex Twin: “Avril 14th” [Warp; 2001]
294. Constantines: “Night Time (Anytime It's All Right)” [Sub Pop; 2003]
295. Grandaddy: “The Crystal Lake” [V2; 2000]
296. Johnny Cash: “The Man Comes Around” [Universal; 2002]
297. David Byrne and Brian Eno: “Strange Overtones” [Todomundo; 2008]
298. Stars: “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” [Arts & Crafts; 2004]
299. CSS: “Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” [Sub Pop; 2006]
300. Iron & Wine: “Upward Over the Mountain” [Sub Pop; 2002]
301. The Shins: “Kissing the Lipless” [Sub Pop; 2003]
302. Black Dice: “Cone Toaster” [DFA; 2003]
303. Mystikal: “Shake Ya Ass” [Jive; 2000]
304. Destroyer: “The Sublimation Hour” [Misra; 2001]
305. Loretta Lynn: “Portland, Oregon” [ft. Jack White] [Interscope; 2004]
306. Dr. Dre: “The Next Episode” [ft. Kurupt, Snoop Dogg, and Nate Dogg] [Aftermath/Interscope; 2000]
307. Wolf Parade: “Shine a Light” [Sub Pop; 2005]
308. Gorillaz: “Feel Good Inc.” [Virgin; 2005]
309. Midlake: “Roscoe” [Bella Union; 2006]
310. Okkervil River: “For Real” [Jagjaguwar; 2005]
311. Sticky: “Booo!” [Ministry of Sound; 2001]
312. The Go! Team: “Ladyflash” [Memphis Industries; 2004]
313. The Wrens: “She Sends Kisses“ [Absolutely Kosher; 2003]
314. Metro Area: “Miura“ [Environ; 2001]
315. Ratatat: “17 Years” [Rex/Audio Dregs/XL; 2003]
316. Neko Case: “Hold On, Hold On” [Anti-; 2006]
317. Squarepusher: “My Red Hot Car” [Warp; 2001]
318. The Notwist: “One With the Freaks” [City Slang/Domino; 2002]
319. Guided by Voices: “Chasing Heather Crazy” [TVT/Matador; 2001]
320. Ciara: “Promise” [LaFace; 2006]
321. Four Tet: “Smile Around the Face” [Domino; 2005]
322. Wu-Tang Clan: “Uzi (Pinky Ring)” [Columbia/Loud; 2001]
323. The Raptur: “I Need Your Love” [Strummer/Universal; 2003]
324. The Twilight Sad: “Cold Days From the Birdhouse” [FatCat; 2007]
325. Sean Paul: “Like Glue” [Atlantic; 2002]
326. Yeah Yeah Yeahs:“Cheated Hearts” [Interscope; 2006]
327. Vampire Weekend: “Walcott” [XL; 2008]
328. Isolée: “Schrapnell” [Playhouse; 2005]
329. Caribou: “Hendrix With KO” [Leaf/Domino; 2006]
330. The Roots: “The Seed 2.0” [MCA/Island; 2002]
331. Andrew Bird: “Fake Palindromes” [Righteous Babe; 2005]
332. Aeroplane: “Whispers” [Wagram; 2008]
333. Death Cab for Cutie: “A Movie Script Ending” [Barsuk; 2001]
334. Grizzly Bear: “While You Wait for the Others” [Warp; 2009]
335. Max Tundra: “MBGATE” [Domino; 2002]
336. Röyksopp: “Eple” [Wall of Sound; 2001]
337. The National: “Mistaken for Strangers” [Beggars Banquet; 2007]
338. The Decemberists: “O Valencia!” [Capitol; 2006]
339. Sonic Youth: “The Empty Page” [Geffen; 2002]
340. Herbert: “Something Isn't Right” [Kranky; 2000]
341. Fleet Foxes: “Blue Ridge Mountains” [Sub Pop; 2008]
342. Franz Ferdinand: “Do You Want To” [Domino; 2005]
343. The Microphones: “The Glow” [K; 2000]
344. Lil Wayne: “Hustler Musik” [Cash Money/Universal; 2005]
345. Antony and the Johnsons: “Aeon” [Secretly Canadian; 2009]
346. Super Furry Animals: “Juxtaposed With U” [Epic; 2001]
347. Bonnie “Prince” Billy: “Cursed Sleep” [Drag City; 2006]
348. Aesop Rock: “Daylight” [Definitive Jux; 2001]
349. Beanie Sigel [ft. Melissa] “Feel It in the Air” [Roc-A-Fella; 2005]
350. Man Man: “Van Helsing Boombox” [Ace Fu; 2006]
351. Rich Boy:“Throw Some D's” [ft. Polow Da Don] [Interscope; 2006]
352. Maxïmo Park: “Apply Some Pressure” [Warp; 2005]
353. Stars of the Lid: “Requiem for Dying Mothers (Part 1)” [Kranky; 2001]
354. Tinariwen: “Matadjem Yinmixan” [World Village; 2007]
355. Deerhoof: “Milk Man” [Kill Rock Stars; 2004]
356. Jason Forrest: “10 Amazing Years” [Sonig; 2004]
357. Japandroids: “Young Hearts Spark Fire” [Polyvinyl; 2009]
358. Cat Power: “I Found a Reason” [Matador; 2000]
359. Young Jeezy:“Go Crazy” (Remix)[ft. Jay-Z] [Def Jam; 2005]
360. Boards of Canada: “In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country” [Warp; 2000]
361. Smog: “Rock Bottom Riser” [Drag City; 2005]
362. Sigur Rós: “Vaka (Untitled 1)” [XL; 2007]
363. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth” [Clap Your Hands Say Yeah/Wichita; 2005]
364. Elliott Smith: “Everything Reminds Me of Her” [DreamWorks; 2000]
365. Gwen Stefani: “What You Waiting For” (Thin White Duke Remix) [Interscope; 2004]
366. Matthew Dear: “Dog Days” [Spectral Sound; 2003]
367. Frightened Rabbit: “The Modern Leper” [FatCat; 2008]
368. Together: “So Much Love to Give” [Roulé; 2002]
369. Primal Scream: “Swastika Eyes” [Astralwerks; 2000]
370. Lumidee: “I'll Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” [Universal; 2003]
371. Cam’ron: “Get 'Em Girls” [ft. Sarah Hindes] [Roc-A-Fella; 2004]
372. Camera Obscura: “French Navy” [4AD; 2009]
373. Cannibal Ox: “The F-Word” [Definitive Jux; 2001]
374. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: “Young Adult Friction” [Slumberland; 2009]
375. Röyksopp: “What Else Is There?” [Astralwerks; 2005]
376. El-P: “Stepfather Factory” [Definitive Jux; 2002]
377. Soulwax: “NY Excuse” [PIAS; 2004]
378. Blur: “Out of Time” [Virgin; 2003]
379. Goldfrapp: “Strict Machine” [Mute; 2003]
380. Rex the Dog: “I Look Into Mid-Air” [Kompakt; 2004]
381. Crime Mob: “Knuck If You Buck” [Warner Bros.; 2004]
383. Girls: “Hellhole Ratrace” [True Panther; 2008]
384. Boards of Canada: “Music Is Math” [Warp; 2002]
385. Four Tet: “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth” [Domino; 2004]
386. Konono No. 1: “Paradiso” [Crammed Discs; 2004]
387. Cortney Tidwell: “Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up” (Ewan’s Objects in Space Remix) [K7; 2007]
388. Sigur Rós: “Hoppípolla” [EMI; 2005]
389. Junior Boys: “High Come Down” [KIN; 2004]
390. The Long Blondes: “Once and Never Again” [Rough Trade; 2006]
391. King Khan and the Shrines: “Welfare Bread” [Vice; 2008]
392. B15 Project: “Girls Like Us” [Relentless; 2000]
393. Lightning Bolt: “Dracula Mountain” [Load; 2003]
394. The Streets: “Blinded by the Lights” [679/Vice/Warner; 2004]
395. Death From Above 1979: “Romantic Rights” [679/Sound Virus/Vice; 2004]
396. Nathan Fake: “The Sky Was Pink” (James Holden Remix [Border Community; 2004]
397. Queens of the Stone Age: “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret” [Interscope; 2000]
398. The Chemical Brothers: “Star Guitar” [Astralwerks; 2002]
399. Amy Winehouse: “Tears Dry on Their Own” [Universal; 2007]
400. Boris: “Ibitsu” [Diwphalanx/Southern Lord; 2003]
401. The Walkmen: “In the New Year” [Gigantic; 2009]
402. My Morning Jacket: “Off the Record” [RCA; 2005]
403. Freeway [ft. Peedi Crakk]: “Flipside” [Roc-A-Fella; 2003]
404. Dinosaur Jr.: “Almost Ready” [PIAS; 2007]
405. Superpitcher: “Tomorrow” [Kompakt; 2001]
406. Nine Inch Nails: “The Hand That Feeds” [Interscope; 2005]
407. Girls on Top: “We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends” [Black Melody; 2000]
408. Magik Markers: “Taste” [Ecstatic Peace!; 2007]
409. Sunn O))): “It Took the Night to Believe” [Southern Lord; 2005]
410. Women: “Black Rice” [Jagjaguwar; 2008]
411. Wilco: “Handshake Drugs” [Nonesuch; 2003]
412. Scritti Politti: “The Boom Boom Bap” [Rough Trade; 2006]
413. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” [Mute; 2004]
414. Simian Mobile Disco: “It's the Beat” [12” version] [Wichita; 2007]
415. Alicia Keys: “You Don't Know My Name” (Reggae Remix) [J; 2003]
416. Jens Lekman: “The Opposite of Hallelujah” [Service/Secretly Canadian; 2005]
417. High Places: “From Stardust to Sentience” [Thrill Jockey; 2008]
418. Ce'cile: “Hot Like We”[Kingstone; 2008]
419. Klaxons: “Golden Skans” [Because/Rinse/Geffen; 2006]
420. Schneider TM: “The Light 3000” [City Slang; 2000]
421. Lambchop: “Up With People” [City Slang; 2000]
422. Santogold: “Lights Out” [Downtown; 2008]
423. The Delgados: “All You Need Is Hate” [Mantra; 2003]
424. Turbulence: “Notorious” [XL; 2006]
425. Björk: “New World” [One Little Indian; 2000]
426. Bob Dylan: “Mississippi” [Columbia/Sony; 2001]
427. Patrick Wolf: “The Magic Position” [Loog/A&M; 2007]
428. Yo La Tengo: “Last Days of Disco” [Matador; 2000]
429. Gossip: “Standing in the Way of Control” [Kill Rock Stars; 2005]
430. Mastodon: “Sleeping Giant” [Reprise; 2006]
431. Death Cab for Cutie: “The New Year” [Barsuk; 2003]
432. Sugababes: “Overload” [London/Warner; 2000]
433. DJ Khaled: “We Takin' Over” [ft. T.I., Akon, Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Birdman, and Lil Wayne] [Koch; 2007]
434. Madonna: “Don't Tell Me” [Maverick/Warner Bros.; 2000]
435. Golden Boy with Miss Kittin: “Rippin Kittin” [Illustrious; 2002]
436. Devendra Banhart: “A Sight to Behold” [XL; 2004]
437. Shackleton: “Blood on My Hands” [Skull Disco; 2006]
438. Lady Sovereign: “Ch-Ching (Cheque 1, 2 Remix)” [Chocolate Industries; 2005]
439. Beirut: “Elephant Gun” [4AD; 2007]
440. The Libertines: “Time for Heroes” [Rough Trade; 2002]
441. Sufjan Stevens: “For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fathers in Ypsilanti” [Asthmatic Kitty; 2003]
442. Menomena: “Wet and Rusting” [FILMguerrero/Barsuk; 2006]
443. Explosions in the Sky: “First Breath After Coma” [Temporary Residence; 2003]
444. Be Your Own Pet: “Adventure” [XL; 2006]
445. Ricardo Villalobos: “Que Belle Epoque” [Frisbee Tracks; 2000]
446. M. Ward: “Chinese Translation” [Merge; 2006]
447. Mylo: “In My Arms” [Breastfed/RCA/V2; 2005]
448. Lil’ Kim [ft. Mr. Cheeks]: “The Jump Off” [Atlantic; 2003]
449. Jackson and His Computer Band: “Utopia” [Warp; 2005]
450. My Morning Jacket: “Golden” [RCA; 2004]
451. Scissor Sisters: “Mary” [Polydor; 2004]
452. Jay Reatard: “Always Wanting More” [Matador; 2008]
453. Fucked Up: “Crusades” [Jade Tree; 2006]
454. Songs: Ohia: “Didn't It Rain” [Secretly Canadian; 2002]
455. Bonnie "Prince" Billy: “Wolf Among Wolves” [Drag City; 2003]
456. Doves: “Black and White Town” [Heavenly/EMI; 2004]
457. Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton: “Doctor Blind” [Grönland/Last Gang; 2006]
458. Sleater-Kinney: “Far Away” [Kill Rock Stars; 2002]
459. The Honeydrips: “Fall From a Height (The Field Way)” [Sincerely Yours; 2007]
461. Scarface: “On My Block” [Def Jam; 2002]
462. Sun Kil Moon: “Carry Me Ohio” [Jetset; 2003]
463. Black Kids: “I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You” [self-released; 2008]
464. Voxtrot: The Start of Something” [Cult Hero; 2005]
465. Cee-Lo: “I'll Be Around” [ft. Timbaland] [Def Jamaica/Arista; 2003]
466. Saint Etienne: “How We Used to Live” [Mantra; 2000]
467. Rjd2: “Let the Good Times Roll Pt. 2” [Definitive Jux; 2002]
468. The Strokes: “What Ever Happened?” [RCA; 2003]
469. DJ Shadow: “You Can't Go Home Again” [Island/MCA; 2002]
470. Orchestra Baobab: “Bul Ma Miin” [Nonesuch; 2002]
471. Crystal Castles: “Alice Practice” [Merok/Last Gang; 2006]
472. Comets on Fire: “Wild Whiskey” [Sub Pop; 2004]
473. The Concretes: “You Can't Hurry Love” [Licking Fingers/EMI; 2004]
474. Wolf Eyes: “Human Animal” [Sub Pop; 2006]
475. Kid Cudi vs. Crookers: “Day 'N Night (Remix)” [ARS; 2009]
476. Ward 21: “Petrol” [Greensleeves; 2003]
477. Dodos: “Fools” [Frenchkiss; 2008]
478. Pantha Du Prince: “Asha” [Dial; 2007]
479. Brightblack Morning Light: “Everybody Daylight” [Matador; 2006]
480. Darkstar: “Need You” [Hyperdub; 2008]
481. The Roots: “Don't Feel Right” [Def Jam; 2006]
482. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side” [Mute; 2001]
483. Platinum 45 [ft. More Fire Crew]: “Oi!” [Go! Beat/FTL; 2002]
484. Múm: “Green Grass of Tunnel” [FatCat; 2002]
485. Ali Farke Touré: “Yer Bounda Fara” [Nonesuch; 2006]
486. Spiller [ft. Sophie Ellis-Bextor]: “Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)” [Positiva; 2000]
487. Jaylib: The Red” [Stones Throw; 2003]
488. Jesu: “Silver” [Hydra Head; 2006]
489. Kano: “Reload It” [679; 2005]
490. Closer Musik: “Departures” [Kompakt; 2002]
491. Viktor Vaughn: “Saliva” [HipHopSite.com; 2003]
492. St. Vincent: “The Strangers” [4AD; 2009]
493. Goldfrapp “Lovely Head” [Mute; 2000]
494. Blonde Redhead “Equus” [4AD; 2004]
495. Weezer: “Island in the Sun” [Universal/Geffen; 2001]
496. Akufen: “Deck the House (Herbert's Stop Like This Mix)” [Force Inc.; 2002]
497. Woods: “Rain On” [Shrimper/Woodsist; 2009]
498. Unwound: “Scarlette” [Kill Rock Stars; 2001]
499. N.E.R.D.: “Run to the Sun” (Electronic version) [Virgin; 2002]
500. The Big Pink: “Velvet” [4AD; 2009]