Are you team Beyoncé — or Lady Gaga? We asked an expert panel for their ultimate pop playlist. Did they miss anything?
The idea was simple — gather a jury to pick their favourite songs of this century, tot up numbers, pick a winner. The execution was arduous. There was just so much choice. Pop's second century is one of unbridled variety. Streaming has created a pick'n'mix attitude to how we listen. In a way that explains the absence from our list of big acts such as Ed Sheeran. When all his songs take up slots in the Top Ten, it can be hard to pick out a favourite.
So who made the cut? Most votes went to Kanye West, Rihanna and Beyoncé as hip-hop and R&B cemented its dominance of the culture. You only have to look at who has headlined Glastonbury in the past decade to see that shift, along with another change — solo acts over bands. There are only two groups in our top ten, seven in the list. The industry lost revenue thanks to streaming and it is cheaper to push a solo artist on tour.
Streaming, though, has demystified pop to make it less snooty. Only six of our top 21 made it to No 1 in the UK charts. When we had to buy music physically, we were limited in what we heard and that created tribes. Now tribes are largely gone. Every jury member but one picked hip-hop. Every member but one picked rock. But eventually they reached a consensus.
21. George Ezra — Shotgun
698m Spotify streams, 2018
"I've been riding shotgun underneath the hot sun" — in the list of the greatest songs of the 21st century? Well, it's lodged in your head, isn't it, which is what the best pop does. Music is remembered by the time it soundtracked and Shotgun, for so many, was the music of lockdown. Joe Wicks workouts. A big desire to be outside. Of all the songs here, this will endure — just ask any parent of primary school-age children.
20. David Bowie — Blackstar
25m Spotify streams, 2015
The sprawling title track from Bowie's final studio album maintained the singer's mystique right to the end — and beyond. What are the lyrics saying (never mind the video)? Is the title a reference to Elvis Presley's song Black Star, which contains the line "When a man sees his black star, he knows his time . . . has come"? Kele Okereke of Bloc Party is an admirer: "What he accomplished creatively throughout his career has always been applauded, but turning his impending death into such mesmerising art is more than just entertainment — it's inspirational."
19. The Strokes — Someday
248m Spotify streams, 2001
Guitar music was in the pits when the Strokes arrived yet, via tight jeans and tighter riffs, the New Yorkers started a revolution. Someday is their debut album's best song. "They were the band that made everyone want to be in a band," Greg James says. "They were also the band every other band wished they were. This is their quintessential song. Laid-back nostalgic swagger, cheery guitars, melancholy lyrics, just the right amount of angst. And so cool."
18. Kanye West — Runaway
279m Spotify streams, 2010
The second single from the troubled rapper's last uncontentiously brilliant album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Runaway's simplicity was its calling card. Built around an insistent piano motif, the song was equal parts diatribe — "Let's have a toast for the douche bags" — and mea culpa ("You been puttin' up wit' my shit just way too long"). Little did he or we know that the latter line would come to sum up his recent recordings and behaviour.
17. Amy Winehouse — Love Is a Losing Game
147m Spotify streams, 2007
When she sang this at the Mercury music prize ceremony in 2007, Winehouse achieved that hitherto unimaginable awards show feat: she silenced the room. A highlight of the singer's 50 million-selling album, Back to Black, Love Is a Losing Game both looked back on and anticipated Winehouse's romantic travails, and so makes for a poignant listen. "This is the kind of song that makes you never want to fall in love again," Miquita Oliver says. "The mess that is created when you really love someone is the scariest stuff we can experience."
16. Taylor Swift — Blank Space
734m Spotify streams, 2014
Swift has, in many ways, been the dominant pop force of a century that has seen huge change in her industry. Never more so than in rerecording her back catalogue, to right the wrongs of old management. Beyond all that, though, the songs are extraordinary. Best of the bunch? The sheer effortless cool of Blank Space. Driven by synths and a pulse beat, it continued the artist's transition from teenage country singer to pop powerhouse.
15. Elbow — One Day Like This
82m Spotify streams, 2008
"One Day Like This is a ridiculously good song," Chris Evans says. "Released in 2008, it was swiftly voted one of the best songs ever just one year later." When Britpop ended in a blizzard of cocaine and exhaustion, guitar anthems with singalong choruses became old hat. Coldplay and Travis filled a gap, but soon became as derided as they were adored. Step forward Elbow, who funnelled innate normality into a schmaltzy arms-aloft chant, declaring singer Guy Garvey's open-hearted love.
14. Rihanna — We Found Love
831m Spotify streams, 2011
Rihanna's hit Diamonds nearly made this list, as did her Umbrella. Both huge, with exceptional choruses. But there is something that little bit more modern and era-defining about We Found Love, in which the DJ Calvin Harris channelled the endorphine rush of EDM, electronic dance music that was ascendant at the time, with this pop titan to create something timeless and uplifting.
13. The White Stripes — Seven Nation Army
1bn Spotify streams, 2003
After a couple of well-received indie albums, the former couple Jack and Meg White went global on the back of this song. It has the most recognisable riff of the decade, so immediate it has turned into a terrace chant. And a soundtrack for Jeremy Corbyn. The bellowed lyrics and simplicity of the thumping drum create an effect that, especially live, is almost tribal. Indeed, it was so life-changing that Jack has spent much of his career since desperately trying to not have such a big hit again.
12. Radiohead — Idioteque
45m Spotify streams, 2000
The glacial, frenetic sound of the best band in the world deciding they did not want to be that big any more — Idioteque is the electronic highlight of Thom Yorke and co's game-changing Kid A, which came after the guitar-based OK Computer. "Uncomfortable, confusing, seismic, motorik, groovy, spooky angular WTF future dystopia massive banger," Shaun Keaveny says, which sums up Yorke's prescient millennial paranoia, and the oddest song at a wedding disco.
11. MGMT — Time to Pretend
270m Spotify streams, 2007
MGMT are Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, two retro-futurist psych warriors (read: college potheads) who briefly became Generation MySpace's favourite new band, thanks to this moment-defining indie-synth anthem about rock star excess and ennui. Sadly we never got to find out whether the lyrics ("I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and f*** with the stars") were satire or a mission statement — this was the band's dizzying height and they have yet to top it.
10. Lady Gaga — Bad Romance
692m Spotify streams, 2009
Lady Gaga did not so much arrive on the scene as erupt via a couple of huge early singles, Paparazzi and Poker Face. Bad Romance showed her at her most ambitious — and weirdest — yet. "It blasted into 2009 like an alien space attack from another pop dimension," Peter Robinson says. "The song referenced three Hitchcock films, went French for a bit and cemented Gaga's first imperial phase. Not bad for something written on a tour bus."
9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs — Maps
123m Spotify streams, 2003
Such simplicity — a razor-sharp riff, rolling drums and the singer Karen O begging: "Wait, they don't love you like I love you." It is spine-tingling. She wrote it in 20 minutes based on an email she sent to her boyfriend, complaining that she didn't see him enough. "Is it possible to pack any more intensity into a declaration of love for someone?" Jo Whiley asks. "This is what the perfect song sounds like." So great, Beyoncé sampled it in her song Hold Up a few years later.
8. Eminem — Stan
537m Spotify streams, 2000
Eminem came to fame as a brat; Slim Shady this, misogyny that. But by his second album his writing had evolved and, in songs like The Way I Am, was able to unpick issues smartly in four-minute raps. Stan was the standout — a blistering and moving short story of fandom, with Dido on chorus, that packs gripping lyrical nuance and wit — and shocks — into a marvel that took rap to a mainstream it has never retreated from.
7. Lana Del Rey — Video Games
476m Spotify streams, 2011
Few singers have arrived seemingly so fully formed, yet the lead-up to the New Yorker's 2011 breakthrough as Lana Del Rey was characterised by frustration and false starts: a debut album appeared and was then pulled, forcing the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant to take stock and dig deep. The result is this extraordinary slice of pitch-black, highly stylised pop noir with a video to match, which set out the femme fatale stall LDR has been trading from ever since.
6. Kendrick Lamar — Alright
334m Spotify streams, 2015
How can a song that is musically all over the place and out of step with the times become the soundtrack to a year and a protest movement? The central refrain to this remarkable single — "We gon' be alright" — from the Californian's third album, To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), was adopted by Black Lives Matter as an expression of both hope and defiance. Elsewhere on the track Lamar's lyrics are unflinching as he spits his rapped reportage over serpentine jazz sax and clattering beats.
5. Arctic Monkeys — I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
277m Spotify streams, 2005
Alex Turner was a teenager when he wrote this, with lyrics so advanced some assumed he had older help. It is a racket of youth from a band that went on to do increasingly interesting work — but this remains their most invigorating song. What a thrill, with one line, "Oh, there ain't no love, no Montagues or Capulets/ Just banging tunes and DJ sets" managing to capture the feeling of being young, out and covered in beer.
4. Lorde — Green Light
464m Spotify streams, 2017
A brilliantly odd pop song. The chorus arrives late, then it's sort of all chorus. In a century of shortening attention spans, when success is reliant on people streaming over and over, it was some statement by Lorde to follow her huge-selling debut album with a single that doesn't get going until 50 seconds in. This is, after all, the era when film trailers begin with a three-second tease of a later explosion, in case you get bored. The last part of Green Light, though, is all huge release. It is about heartbreak, but exhilarating. Lorde was 20 when this came out and she looks back on the era sadly. "That was a really fraught time," she says. "I was gripped by angst every night." Out of the darkness, though, came this ray of light.
3. Robyn — Dancing on My Own
241m Spotify streams, 2010
The ultimate sad banger, the Swedish singer's greatest work is a devastating account of a woman in a club observing her ex embracing their new partner. Like so many of the great moments in dance music, the song balances euphoria and melancholia, the soundscape effervescent, the lyrics bleak and imploring. When Robyn sings, "I'm in the corner, watching you kiss her/ I'm right over here, why can't you see me?" your heart bleeds, even as the music rushes you along. Despite feeling broken, the woman in the song is determined to stay and dance. Many have deployed this one-two but few have come close to such perfection.
2. Beyoncé — Crazy In Love
693m Spotify streams, 2003
Talk about starting as you mean to go on. Launching her solo career with a bang in 2003, Beyoncé flew free of Destiny's Child and in the first flush of new love celebrated her nascent relationship with Jay-Z, who makes a blistering cameo. The driving four-to-the-floor drums and giddy brass on the chorus sampling the band Chi-Lites backed a vocal that sounded like a royal decree. In a sense it was: the crowning of the new queen of R&B, her king by her side. Innocent times, before "Becky with the good hair" and the elevator incident cast a shadow on the musical monarchy.
1. Outkast — Hey Ya!
834m Spotify streams, 2003
As anyone who has been at a party when this song comes on will confirm, Hey Ya! is a go-to floor-filler that tears down the barriers between musical tribes. The first single to be released from the Atlanta hip-hop duo's fifth album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the song's handclaps, brisk two-step beat, synth brass, woozy backing vocals and call-and-response exchanges are the only sonic adornments to André 3000's off-the-cuff scat and lyrics. Musically Hey Ya! encompasses rap, power-pop, psychedelia and electro, but it is too spry and promiscuous to categorise — which is arguably the key part of its allure.
Great dancers have a ball with the song's swaggering staccato rhythm, but it is also a never-spurned opportunity for some epic bad dancing (OK, dad dancing), as sloshed adults channel their inner David Brent while their offspring cringe. Shout-outs to Beyoncé and Lucy Liu, and the wonderfully nutty couplet, "Lend me some sugar/ I am your neighbour" only heighten its absurdist appeal while obscuring the fragility of the relationship the song addresses. A global smash, Hey Ya! presaged hip-hop's ascendancy over pop as the new century advanced. Pure joy, distilled in a song.
The jury
Chris Evans presents Virgin Radio's breakfast show; Greg James hosts Radio 1 Breakfast; Jo Whiley presents an evening show on Radio 2; Clara Amfo hosts Future Sounds on Radio 1 and BBC3's upcoming streetwear competition The Drop; Kele Okereke is the frontman of Bloc Party and has five solo albums; the former BBC 6 Music DJ Shaun Keaveny hosts the subscription-only Community Garden Radio; Peter Robinson is a journalist and editor of the pop blog popjustice.com. Holly H is the TikTok star behind the podcast Planet Weirdo on Amazon; Olivia Neill hosts the podcast Inner Monologue; Miquita Oliver presented Popworld, now she hosts The Sunday Times Culture Show; Krissi Murison is a former editor of the NME and edits The Sunday Times Magazine; Dan Cairns is The Sunday Times's music editor and Jonathan Dean is a senior writer on the paper.
© The Times of London
