Slant Magazine

40. D'Angelo, "Untitled (How Does It Feel)." The most rhetorical question in R&B since "What's Going On" (which likewise tellingly left out the question mark), D'Angelo's exclusively subtitled return from the residue of brown sugar babe is an intimidatingly focused rendition of the age-old assurance, "You know you want this." No pressure though. You've got seven luxurious minutes to make up your mind. Meantime, you don't mind if he whispers to you a few words about your thighs, do you? Maybe a pitch-perfect transliteration of Prince's "Do Me, Baby" might seal the deal? How does it feel? As Halle Berry insisted in Monster's Ball, it make me feels goooood. EH

39. Hot Chip, "Over and Over." The main thing to understand about "Over and Over" is that it is not a criticism of repetition. Now, in context, placed against some of the decade's most delightfully leftfield disco, all walking bass and strutting organ and Speak & Spell, the lyric "Over and over and over and over, like a monkey with a miniature cymbal, the joy of repetition really is in you," delivered by Alexis Taylor's dulcet deadpan, really does sound like it's mocking routine. We're conditioned to expect cool singers in indie bands to mock routine. But this is a dance song about dancing, and as anyone who has attended a Hot Chip concert will tell you, the joy of repetition is real. Yes. Yes. Yes. DH

38. The Streets, "Let's Push Things Forward." There was a period during the last decade when nothing sounded more futuristic than London street music. British rappers filtered familiar sounds and rhythms through a foreign experience of race, class, and urban life, and hip-hop sounded alien in their strange English. The jolt of the new defibrillated the form. if Dizzee Rascal was the Pied Piper of this all-too-brief and bygone era, Mike Skinner was its Bard, and this song Skinner’s personal glossary. When he rhymed "'Round here we say birds, not bitches," over a beat that mashed rave bassline anxiety onto a one-drop organ pulse, it sounded like "Ghost Town" updated for boom times, and it was a revelation. DH

37. LCD Soundsystem, "All My Friends." Imagine you had a party and everyone came. Not just everyone you know now, but all the people from your past lives too. All the Christophers, Michaels, Juans, and Davids. All the Ashleys, Sarahs, Katies, and Elizabeths. Eli, Jillian, Daniel, Danielle, Jabari, Joseph, Josh, Ryan, Adrianne, Ariel. The friends you played foursquare with, the friends you broke up with, and the friends you have. You would be with all of them and you would be dancing. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. "I wouldn't trade one stupid decision," James Murphy sings over a piano riff so chaotic it creates its own order, "for another five years of life." Me neither. DH

36. Madonna, "Hung Up." "Hung Up" employs a ticking clock to represent fear of wasted time, but Madonna isn't singing about aging or saving the world—she's talking about love. It had been years since Madge sounded this vapid. With its pitched-upward vocals, infectious arpeggio sample from ABBA's "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)," and the bridge's unironic, archetypical key change, the track decidedly points to the past, and it proved that, 20 years into her career, Madonna was still the one and only Dancing Queen. SC

35. Spoon, "The Way We Get By." The coolest thing Spoon ever did, delving into juvenile delinquency with an eye for the absurd, elevating acts of mischief into the stuff of Rat Pack movies. Its status as the theme song for The OC played as too obvious, but on its own, the song remains as good as it ever was, thriving off the subtle build of the piano, suffused with little jokes and lyrical feints. The lyrical slant, which might play as silly were Britt Daniel not so devoted to play it straight, ultimately makes the song, imbuing its unruffled posture with a slightly incongruous bent. JC

34. Kanye West featuring Jamie Foxx, "Gold Digger." "Gold Digger" proved that Kanye West can drop the bloated sense of self-importance and make a hip-hop record that's fun simply for the sake of being fun, and it accomplished that at the precise moment when he needed people to be willing to get back on his bandwagon. Even with the egregious cameo from an attention-whoring Jamie Foxx in full Ray Charles costume, it's funny and good-natured, and it remembers that any song that instructs someone to "go 'head, get down" had better actually make them want to. JK

33. Madonna, "Don't Tell Me." Madonna's Y2K-era dalliances with electronica could oftentimes verge on the theoretical, so it's a tad ironic that the one hit from her Orbit-Mirwais daze that still packs fully loaded pistols is also the most engrossed in chemistry-set beat science. "Don't Tell Me" is first and foremost a concoction: two parts corn pone, one part glitch, with reliable disco strings to serve as the catalyst. What seals the deal, though, is that lyrically Madonna's on board too. Tell the peanut butter of acoustic guitars to stay away from the chocolate of digital bass drones, but don't tell Madonna she can't eat both and spit back manna. EH

32. The Chemical Brothers, "Star Guitar." Hold on a second. Let me check my notes. According to Slant's list of the 100 Greatest Dance Songs, "Star Guitar" is the Chems's "most well balanced blend of their LSD-tipped psychodelic hallucinations and frenzied, bass-popping big beat…[it's] all about the duo's careful layering of sonic elements around a monolithic squelch-synth line, distorted into dazzling Technicolor with an epic amount of reverb." Sounds good to me, though certainly not as good as the song's piston-firing phaser beats, surging acid synths, and yelping crescendos. "Star Guitar" is "Hey Boy Hey Girl," "Asleep from Day," and "The Private Psychedelic Reel" all distilled into one lethal dose. EH

31. Eminem, "Lose Yourself." On the heels of The Eminem Show, which revealed an artist who was becoming astutely aware of the state of hip-hop and politics and his place in both, "Lose Yourself" was the beginning (and the beginning of the end) of Eminem the mature rapper. While Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers were cartoonish and violent exaggerations of Eminem's persona, respectively, it was the fictional 8 Mile character Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith Jr., which was based on the artist's life and who provides the perspective here, that seemed the most authentic. A testament to the power of art to lift even the most hopeless of souls out of despair, the unlikely inspirational anthem won Eminem the respect of critics who had dismissed him as a menace to society. SC