

And her music didn’t obey rules either - nobody could duplicate the Missy-Tim mojo. “It was something hypnotic about those records.” Missy and Tim took over the radio in the late Nineties, just two kids out of Portsmouth, Virginia, blowing minds with their own unique space-funk sound.She didn’t obey any of the rules for female stars at the time. “Oh yeah, man, we was on some futuristic stuff for sure,” Missy Elliott told Rolling Stone in 2020, on her musical chemistry with Timbaland. chart topper, and it would continue to enchant new generations - and even return to the charts - for decades to come. “Right away I liked the fact that I was doing something with a dance beat, because that made it a little unusual for me.”The second single on Fleetwood Mac’s blockbuster album Rumours, “Dreams” would become the band’s only U.S. “I sat down on the bed with my keyboard in front of me, found a drum pattern, switched my little cassette player on, and wrote ‘Dreams’ in about 10 minutes,” she continued. “It was a black-and-red room, with a sunken pit in the middle where there was a piano, and a big black-velvet bed with Victorian drapes,” she told Blender.There she reflected on the thunder and rain of her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, whose guitar parts slice through the song’s mystical beat. In the face of a lover telling her to go her own way, Stevie Nicks penned the ethereal “Dreams.” During the Rumours sessions in Sausalito, California, Nicks spent an off day in another room of the Record Plant that was supposedly used by Sly and the Family Stone. “Hey Ya!” was the most universal pop smash of the early 2000s, the first song to be downloaded 1 million times on iTunes. At one point it was called “Thank God for Mom and Dad,” a title that makes plain its complicated lyrics about the challenges of keeping a romantic relationship afloat.On Twitter, in 2021, Outkast even called it “the saddest song ever written.” In 2003, however, most of that was lost on a world that simply wanted to dance, party, and shake it like a Polaroid picture. We recorded the skeleton part, with the intro and the first verse and hook, all in one night.”The song would end up going through numerous permutations one key assist came from former Cameo member Kevin Kendricks, who laid down the synth part and bass. “He had the bulk of it already conceptualized in his head,” said recording engineer John Frye. André 3000 began writing the song on acoustic guitar, bashing out some chords that he wanted to sound like the Smiths and the Buzzcocks.

The result is a more expansive, inclusive vision of pop, music that keeps rewriting its history with every beat.Ībout as radical as fun can get, “Hey Ya!” is funk, pop, rap, and rock spun into something otherworldly yet immediately lovable via Outkast’s one of a kind Stankonian vision. More than half the songs here - 254 in all - weren’t present on the old list, including a third of the Top 100. Where the 2004 version of the list was dominated by early rock and soul, the new edition contains more hip-hop, modern country, indie rock, Latin pop, reggae, and R&B. They each sent in a ranked list of their top 50 songs, and we tabulated the results. Ward to Bill Ward - as well as figures from the music industry and leading critics and journalists. To create the new version of the RS 500 we convened a poll of more than 250 artists, musicians, and producers - from Angelique Kidjo to Zedd, Sam Smith to Megan Thee Stallion, M. So we’ve decided to give the list a total reboot.

But a lot has changed since 2004 back then the iPod was relatively new, and Billie Eilish was three years old. It’s one of the most widely read stories in our history, viewed hundreds of millions of times on this site. In 2004, Rolling Stone published its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
