Slant Magazine

90. Arctic Monkeys, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor." The great thing about the Arctic Monkeys is how effectively they get away with being gigantic dorks. Their riffs are huge and they keep everything so speedy and detailed and frenetic that it can take your average listener quite a few spins to notice Alex Turner's relentlessly articulate lyrics. This song drove the Monkeys's first LP to become the fastest-selling debut in British history, and on the one hand, it's easy to understand why it was so popular: It was brand new and it already sounded like classic rock. On the other hand, in an age of grunting, it's encouraging that a song containing the Costello-esque lines "Your shoulders are frozen/Cold as a nun/But you're an explosion/You're dynamite" appealed so broadly. DH

89. Panda Bear, "Bro's." With its cavalcade of overlapping, largely random sound effects, this 12-minute doodle conjures an outlandish mood: Consider the one, of only four, lyrics repeated endlessly throughout ("Try and give me the space I need"), and you have a man taking a bit of a breather, hanging out by the side of a snowy country road with his bro, peering at roller coasters and shooting stars, the sounds of a woman laughing, or giving birth, in the distance. The song's beautiful sadness derives from its contemplation of life as something you either partake in or allow to pass you by. EG

88. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Zero." They're hardly the first band to look to the disco era for inspiration after backing themselves into a corner, but Yeah Yeah Yeahs were arguably the only band to do anything substantive with that inspiration. The way Karen O sneers and vamps her way through the hook on "Zero" puts to rest any lingering doubts that she's the finest frontwoman since Chrissie Hynde, but it's the song's explosive middle eight that transforms the single: Divide by zero and you approach infinity, and that's exactly what the song does. JK

87. Jamie Lidell, "Multiply." Soul had a paltry presence during the last decade, mostly relegated to affected touches on other songs, inspiration for Justin Timberlake, American Idol performances, or the occasional pop hook. You know things have changed in the genre when one of the best entries of the decade, maybe the most lasting after D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," came from a slight, bespectacled Englishman, whose dapper sense of style and knowledge of what makes a good soul song made "Multiply" effective while pushing across a different brand of innate cool. JC

86. Kanye West, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone." Too-obvious samples are one of Kanye West's biggest weaknesses, but he makes a wise choice by borrowing from what's probably the best James Bond theme for "Diamonds from Sierra Leone." And though his handling of political themes is invariably clumsy, his mastery at transposing first-world guilt into the personal sphere, an offensively clumsy move which forces brutally procured diamonds to occupy the same remorse-ridden sphere as all of his other vices, makes this a great track in spite of itself, one of his most lasting, remarkably flawed experiments. JC

85. The Pipettes, "Pull Shapes." In the '90s, for a while, it was fashionable to believe that history had ended—that the game of ideopolitical musical chairs had ended, with democratic capitalism in the winner's chair. Though the 21st century soon disabused people of this notion, in some ways this stealth mashup validates the hypothesis. Here we have a post-feminist-yet-still-Svengali'd girl group leading pretty boys into a dizzily exuberant Motown stomp. "I like to disco," they sing as strings ascend. "I like to rock n' roll," and a riff skronks in. "I like to hip-hop," and a turntablist cuts. In a post-everything jumble of a decade, when we danced to nearly everything, this was one of the best dances. DH

84. The Knife, "Silent Shout." Pac-Man and his red-bowed honey's wedding song? The metronomic production—minimalist but intense beats chasing each other as if in and out of love, or nightmares—is perfectly and surreally married to the equally disquieting lyrics, which recount a flashpoint in a person's life when their sense of complacency is shattered by a dream of falling teeth. Is that love or death on their horizon? Like much of the Knife and Fever Ray's music, or a Luis Buñuel film, the song seduces as it frightens. EG

83. Queens of the Stone Age, "No One Knows." Queens of the Stone Age may sometimes come off like just another rock group that spends most of their free time tuning their guitars to their Y chromosomes, but make no mistake, their punchy hit "No One Knows" is the pom-pom pumping "My Sharona" of the 2000s. Buttressed by some callisthenic drum-set spasms courtesy of Dave Grohl and a surly, nine-foot-high wall of guitar riffs, ginger thug Josh Homme spins his best guess at a sonnet, but it comes out more like a roaring "Best of My Love." The results: oddly touching. EH

82. Missy Elliott featuring Eve, "4 My People." Any of Miss E...So Addictive's succulent uppers could have made this list (namely, the retro disco boogie of "Old School Joint" and the Cybotron-meets-He-Man angst of "Whatcha Gon' Do"), but "4 My People" is still my favorite trip. The way Missy's rhythmic vocal rides Timbaland's stringy trance (which recalls the signature bassline from DJ Garth and E.T.I.'s "20 Minutes of Disco Glory") stirs up a hallucination of the singer actually riding Timbaland through the club, whipping her Ecstasy People as they throw space dust over her (and Eve's) head. EG

81. R. Kelly, "Ignition (Remix)." Less a remix than a repair job, R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" keeps the uneasy shuffle beat of the original but changes everything else, turning a one-note sex metaphor into something far better, a slyly perverse after-club romp, one of the only songs in memory where the announcement that this is a remix is the catchiest part of the hook. This is Kelly at his creepy best: unapologetic, drenched in sleazy innuendo, with little-to-no idea of how odd it all seems. JC