VILLAGE PEOPLE · 1978
A glittering disco anthem born from the cruising culture of late-1970s Manhattan, "Y.M.C.A." smuggled queer code into the heart of mainstream pop. Nearly five d…
MARVIN GAYE · 1971
— In 1971, Marvin Gaye walked into Hitsville U.S.A. and dismantled the Motown hit factory from the inside. "What's Going On" was never supposed to exist: Berry …
ABBA · 1974
On April 6, 1974, four Swedes in glittering platform boots walked onto the stage of the Brighton Dome and rewrote the rules of European pop. "Waterloo" was a Na…
OTIS REDDING · 1966
A song written in 1932 by three British and Irish tunesmiths as a polite Tin Pan Alley ballad was hauled, three decades later, into a sweaty Memphis studio and …
JOHN DENVER · 1971
— In 1971, a folk singer from Roswell, New Mexico named John Denver released a song about a place he had barely visited, written largely by two East Coast songw…
LYNYRD SKYNYRD · 1974
A three-chord Southern rock anthem written in 1974 as a pointed reply to Neil Young's "Southern Man" and "Alabama," Lynyrd Skynyrd's signature song is both a lo…
STEVIE WONDER · 1972
In 1972, a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder wrestled control of his career from Motown, plugged a brand-new Hohner Clavinet into a fuzz pedal, and accidentally invente…
BEN E. KING · 1961
— In the spring of 1961, a 22-year-old singer named Benjamin Earl Nelson — better known as Ben E. King — walked into a Manhattan studio to record what was suppo…
SAM & DAVE · 1967
In the long, hot summer of 1967, as American cities burned and civil rights anger boiled over, two Black singers from Miami stepped into a Memphis studio and re…
SANTANA FT. ROB THOMAS · 1999
A 52-year-old guitar legend, a 27-year-old pop-rock frontman, and a song that nobody quite asked for became the unlikeliest comeback story of the late 1990s. "S…
OTIS REDDING · 1968
Otis Redding's final single, recorded just days before his death in a December 1967 plane crash, became the first posthumous No. 1 in U.S. chart history. Writte…
THE CLASH · 1982
Released in 1982 on Combat Rock, The Clash's most playful single is also their most haunted — a punk-rockabilly hybrid written by a band already coming apart at…
EARTH WIND & FIRE · 1978
A glittering disco-funk anthem cooked up in a Los Angeles studio in the autumn of 1978, "September" has quietly become one of the most-played songs on earth. Be…
ARETHA FRANKLIN · 1967
In 1967, Aretha Franklin took a swaggering Otis Redding blues number about a tired husband begging for some appreciation when he got home, and rewrote its DNA i…
SANTANA · 1970
A cha-cha-chá written by a Cuban bandleader in 1963 New York, reborn seven years later in a San Francisco recording studio as a psychedelic rock anthem. Santana…