It’s a desperate, masochistic request; drones are gods, essentially, and her narrator has chosen to embrace their limitless power.What makes “Drone Bomb Me” so potent is that this fatalism is not weakness.

Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never’s production is defiantly colorful despite the grim backdrop: The synths swell and twinkle, the drum programming chitters and slaps. Its guttural brass line, ferocious breakdown, and vocal sample lifted from Julie McKnight’s 2002 club anthem “Home” combine to erect an imposing electronic music monument. “It’s easy to ignore trouble/When you’re living in a bubble,” Hayley Williams sings, but this is the sound of the bubble of youth freshly burst, of beginning to smash your rose-tinted glasses, of not looking back.

When Japandroids frontman Brian King graduated college, he watched his friends from small town British Columbia, Canada quickly settle into normalcy—weddings, mortgages, babies—and thought, In 2014, Cash Money Records co-founder Birdman, one of the keenest A&R men in rap history, brought together two buzzing Atlanta artists—infectious eccentric Young Thug and malleable crooner Rich Homie Quan—for a feel-good jam of perfect synergy. –Puja PatelNew York City’s subway system is typically associated with maddening delays, twitchy vermin, and, occasionally, A month after that impromptu party, the bubbling anthem, which first hit the internet in the spring of 2010, was finally certified platinum in America—cosmic justice for a song that never touched the At its core, the song is an exploration of contradictions: between the mechanized backbeat and Robyn’s all-too-human vocals; between a dancefloor’s collective catharsis and the isolation of being trapped inside your own skin; between the despair of the heart and the resilience of the body. Simone once said, “We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore.” When Beyoncé performed “Formation” at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show, the day after its release, wearing the bandoliers of the Black Panthers, it felt like she was ready to take the reins and be seen doing so.In the unforgettable video, Beyoncé crouches on a cop car submerged alongside houses in New Orleans devastated by natural disaster, the scene interspersed with images of people dancing in the dark—it’s the no-fucks vibrancy of a culture that persists when the systems surrounding them have been sucked into the muck and left to languish. –Evan RytlewskiGiven the kaleidoscope of egomania and petty grievances that make up Kanye West’s world, the most immediately surprising thing about “Ultralight Beam” is that he barely appears on it. Lorde/LMFAO/YouTube

–Matthew SchnipperSkepta’s 2015 hit “Shutdown” serves as the decade’s ultimate London anthem: catchy enough to elevate slang to lexicon, hard enough to burst from the world’s weediest soundsystem, and worldly enough to shut down both the Arc de Triomphe and Central Park, as the rapper teases in the song. –Jordan SargentMuch of what makes Colombian singer J Balvin’s “Mi Gente” sizzle—that audacious drumbeat, that insistent five-note vocal melody—is lifted from Mauritian-French singer Willy William’s 2017 track “Voodoo Song,” which itself reinterprets a sample from the Indian composer Akassh. By the time it’s been buried under woozy synth combustion, it’s clear that the disorientation is the point.

Smuggling mystery into the mundane on neon-lit dancefloors, he shows us that nothing’s as plain as daylight would have us believe. Produced by Smokeasac, Peep’s closest and most intimate creative partner, the song begins pickled in that signature Peep weariness, but then a second song seems to yawn and wake up inside the first one. Here are our top 200 songs of the decade.For more about how we put together this list, read As sampled in Avicii’s “Levels,” Etta James’ relatively modest claim that “Oh, sometimes I get a good feeling” felt impossibly aspirational for a generation of entry-level millennials dumped into an indifferent economy. The disco groove is an immaculate, unironic homage to Nile Rodgers’ Chic, produced alongside the man himself, who plays guitar on the song. –Matthew TrammellUnlike most of Deerhunter’s catalog, “Desire Lines” has little to do with frontman Bradford Cox. On the Though every detail is in 4K, the screen flickers. It’s a song so ludicrous in its malevolence that even Skrillex started playing it in his sets, bringing the techno underground together with EDM’s fuzzy-boots set by way of a good, old-fashioned murder fantasy. Then again, that’d be another classic Terje prank. ANOHNI’s voice is full and resonant even as she solicits a grisly death. It does not matter at all how "catchy" this song is — its existence is a huge injustice to women everywhere.
It should feel normal, but it was thrilling to witness a woman governed only by her own rules, acting like a man.

That this fallen teen idol, the decade’s emblem of white male petulance and bad-boy behavior, was crooning for redemption and second chances in an age of #BlackLivesMatter protests—especially in the context of his enduring appropriation of urban culture—shouldn’t be lost on anyone. But the glittery production only deepens the sinister lyrical narrative: “Now it’s gonna be me and you,” Robyn concludes, having successfully manipulated her man into her arms. In the mid ’70s, not long after President Ford told the city to drop dead, Scott-Heron wrote a love letter simply called “New York City” extolling the place as beautiful and benignly energetic. –Sam Hockley-SmithThe proposal is simple and familiar: escape, hand-in-hand, from reality.
originally released “Bad Girls” on her Crucially, “Bad Girls” is no manifesto. It’s notable that Solange never belts, and the climax of “Cranes” isn’t a noisy ascension but a quiet one, right at the end: her voice, delicately scaling the mountain to reach Minnie Ripperton heights.At a time when power is something loud and dangerous and brash, “Cranes in the Sky” is an atypical song of revolution.