100 Greatest Songs of All Time

Queen

No pop single has ever dared more. Six minutes of opera, hard rock, and balladry stitched together by Freddie Mercury's impossible voice — it should not work, and yet it remains the most thrilling record in the rock canon.

Marvin Gaye

Gaye fought Motown tooth and nail to release this anti-war masterpiece. The result is the most humane record in American popular music — silk-smooth and quietly devastating.

Bob Dylan

Six minutes of electric fury and righteous contempt that split popular music into a before and an after. Dylan told the folk purists to go to hell and became the voice of a generation in the same breath.

Aretha Franklin

Otis Redding wrote it, but Aretha Franklin made it hers with an authority no one has matched before or since. Not a cover — a conquest.

Nirvana

Kurt Cobain accidentally wrote the anthem for a generation that didn't want anthems. The guitar riff heard round the world; the defining document of early-90s disillusionment.

Chuck Berry

The creation myth of rock & roll in under three minutes. Berry's furious guitar and the story of a country boy playing "like ringing a bell" invented the template every rock band since has followed.

Sam Cooke

Written after Cooke was turned away from a Louisiana hotel, this soul ballad became the sound of the civil rights movement — aching, dignified, and prophetic.

The Beach Boys

Brian Wilson spent six months and $16,000 building the most sonically ambitious pop single ever recorded. Sixty years on, it still sounds futuristic.

The Beatles

Paul McCartney woke up with the melody in his head and called it "Scrambled Eggs." Over 2,200 artists have covered it since. The most recorded song in history, and still the best version.

Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix arrived from another dimension in 1967 and proceeded to redraw every boundary a guitar had. This opening statement of that revolution remains jaw-dropping after 50 years.

Stevie Wonder

The clavinet groove alone earns its place; Wonder's vocal performance elevates it to something approaching perfection.

Johnny Cash

Cash turned Trent Reznor's self-lacerating lyrics into a meditation on mortality so honest that Reznor himself admitted he could no longer listen to his own version.

Michael Jackson

The bassline, the beat, the paranoid brilliance of the vocal — everything locks into place like a precision mechanism. The King of Pop at his absolute peak.

Eagles

Part California Gothic, part existential horror story. Don Felder's iconic guitar intro draws you in before Don Henley reveals there may be no exit.

Led Zeppelin

The most requested rock radio song of all time is also an entire journey compressed into eight minutes — quiet wonder building to thunderous release.

Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen's teenage escape fantasy is built like a cathedral: epic, yearning, and forged from the belief that music could save your life.

The Beach Boys

Paul McCartney once called this the greatest pop song ever written. Brian Wilson's orchestration is baroque perfection.

Otis Redding

Recorded days before Redding's death in a plane crash, this reflective masterpiece became his only No. 1 hit — posthumously.

The Rolling Stones

Merry Clayton's shattering backing vocal elevates this dark apocalyptic groove into something genuinely terrifying and magnificent.

Prince

Prince surveyed the crumbling Reagan-era world — AIDS, gang violence, drug addiction — and made the most prescient pop song of the decade.

The Beatles

Lennon's dreamlike descent into childhood memory, laced with backward tape loops and Mellotron — the Beatles at their most adventurously beautiful.

Elvis Presley

Elvis took Big Mama Thornton's blues and turned it into something ferocious and new — the moment the establishment started to panic.

The Ronettes

Phil Spector's Wall of Sound at its most irresistible; Ronnie Spector's vocal is pure desire.

The Beatles

Lennon's most personal lyric married to a harpsichord-like piano solo — a perfect meditation on memory and love.

The Who

Daltrey's stuttering defiance and Entwistle's thunderous bass announced a new youth culture that had no interest in politeness.

The Doors

Seven minutes of psychedelic blues-rock anchored by Ray Manzarek's organ and Morrison's magnetic baritone.

Simon & Garfunkel

A poem about modern alienation set to folk-rock perfection — never more relevant than today.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen spent years perfecting this sacred/secular hymn; it has since been covered by hundreds and belongs to everyone who has ever loved and lost.

Johnny Cash

The mariachi brass, the boom-chicka-boom rhythm, the fire of love — Cash at his most joyfully unhinged.

Dolly Parton

The urgency of Parton's plea to a woman not to steal her man is one of popular music's great vocal performances.

Radiohead

Radiohead's six-minute suite of shifting time signatures and apocalyptic imagery announced that rock could still be genuinely strange.

The Clash

A dystopian warning shot fired over the Thames — the Clash sounding urgent, angry, and completely alive.

Guns N' Roses

Slash's guitar intro is one of the most recognisable in rock; Axl Rose's vocal delivers on every promise it makes.

Journey

The underdog anthem to end all underdog anthems — karaoke favourite, sports stadium staple, and genuinely great song.

Kate Bush

Bush's request to God to swap her place with her lover's is one of the most inventive pop songs of the 1980s, confirmed by its 2022 revival.

The Killers

Two decades after release it still charts in the UK weekly — a paranoid love song so catchy it became a generational anthem by accident.

Fleetwood Mac

Stevie Nicks wrote it in 10 minutes, and its cool, aching heartbreak has never gone out of fashion.

The Who

Pete Townshend's synthesizer intro and the explosive chorus — "teenage wasteland" — remain the apotheosis of the rock anthem.

Toto

Dismissed at the time as soft rock, now recognised as an impeccably crafted pop song about longing and distance.

a-ha

The pencil-sketch video helped, but the song itself — all soaring falsetto and synth arpeggios — would have found its audience regardless.

John Lennon

Naively utopian, deliberately provocative, and impossible to dismiss — Lennon's secular hymn to peaceful coexistence.

Eminem

The most viscerally effective motivational rap song ever written — Eminem sounding like a man with nothing to lose.

Queen & David Bowie

Two titanic egos, one unforgettable bassline, a duet about human compassion that transcends both careers.

Prince

No bass guitar anywhere in the mix — just Prince's brilliance filling every gap.

Michael Jackson

The bassline, the Vincent Price monologue, the horror-film grandeur — pop music as cinematic event.

Bob Dylan

Three verses of rhetorical questions that became the conscience of a generation.

David Bowie

Bowie and Eno's Berlin-era masterwork — a love song for the Cold War, recorded in the shadow of the Wall.

Bruce Springsteen

Routinely misread as patriotic; actually a blistering indictment of how America treated its Vietnam veterans.

Al Green

The warmest, most inviting piece of soul music ever committed to tape.

Adele

The voice, the drums, the barely contained fury — Adele announced herself to the world as an elemental force.

Pearl Jam

Eddie Vedder's raw anguish over a relationship ending; one of grunge's most emotionally naked moments.

Tracy Chapman

A working-class escape narrative that pierces the heart every single time.

The Cranberries

Dolores O'Riordan's searing protest against IRA violence, with a distinctive vocal delivery that became iconic.

Beyoncé

The brass hook, the Jay-Z verse, Beyoncé in total command — a coronation disguised as a pop single.

OutKast

Andre 3000's genre-defying burst of joy — part new wave, part funk, entirely irresistible.

Rihanna

The song that turned Rihanna from star to superstar — sparse, unforgettable, impossible to shake.

Lady Gaga

Gaga's maximalist manifesto — hooks layered upon hooks, all in service of pop perfection.

Kendrick Lamar

A production masterclass from Mike Will Made It, a lyrical clinic from Lamar — rap music at its most authoritative.

The Weeknd

80s synth-pop filtered through a 21st-century sensibility — the most-streamed song in Spotify history for good reason.

Adele

Just piano, voice, and heartbreak — yet it stopped the world.

TLC

A sharp, swaggering declaration of female self-respect that remains one of the great R&B singles.

Billie Eilish

Pop subversion at its finest — quiet, odd, and absolutely unavoidable.

Lorde

A teenage New Zealander dismantled hip-hop excess with a song recorded in a bedroom.

Taylor Swift

The definitive version of Swift's most devastating lyric — a masterclass in emotional detail.

Kendrick Lamar

The anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement — protest music with genuine swing.

Nirvana

Cobain's most hypnotic guitar figure, with a lyric about authenticity that still resonates.

David Bowie

Major Tom's lonely orbit: Bowie's theatrical debut as rock's great reinventor.

The Rolling Stones

Brian Jones's sitar transforms the Stones into something genuinely unsettling.

Creedence Clearwater Revival

Fogerty's three-chord fury against draft inequality — still the defining Vietnam protest song.

AC/DC

The greatest hard rock riff ever written, simple as a hammer and twice as effective.

Fleetwood Mac

The only song on Rumours credited to all five members — and the only one that truly sounds like all five.

Pink Floyd

Gilmour's second guitar solo is considered by many to be the greatest ever recorded.

Talking Heads

David Byrne's existential panic set to African rhythms — pop music as philosophical inquiry.

Blondie

The moment punk discovered disco and decided it was actually quite good.

Joy Division

Ian Curtis's farewell to the world — bleak, beautiful, and permanent.

The Police

Sting's obsessive surveillance ballad, frequently misidentified as romantic.

Soft Cell

A synth-pop reimagining of a Northern Soul obscurity that became one of the defining songs of a decade.

Bonnie Tyler

Jim Steinman's operatic excess perfectly matched by Tyler's voice-shredding performance.

Amy Winehouse

A soulful, sardonic refusal that introduced the world to one of the most distinctive voices of the century.

Roberta Flack

One of the great vocal performances — controlled, intimate, devastating.

ABBA

Pure pop euphoria — ABBA at their most joyful and most technically accomplished.

Daft Punk

Nile Rodgers's guitar, a Pharrell hook, and the feeling that everything is going to be fine.

Pharrell Williams

The most simply, irresistibly effective feel-good song of the 21st century.

Olivia Rodrigo

Gen Z's great heartbreak song — stadium-sized emotion, bedroom-pop intimacy.

Glass Animals

The slow burn that became one of the longest-charting songs in Billboard history.

Harry Styles

A perfect pop song about a man in crisis that managed to be the biggest hit of 2022.

Taylor Swift

Swift's most nakedly confessional lyric, delivered with a pop production to match.

Post Malone

Post Malone collapses genre boundaries and finds something genuinely moving in the wreckage.

Dua Lipa

The disco revival single that dominated 2021 and deserved to.

Lil Nas X

The genre-defying record-breaker that proved country, rap, and TikTok could coexist.

Gotye ft. Kimbra

An art-pop breakup song that somehow became the biggest hit in the world.

Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars

Unashamed retro funk executed so well it sounded contemporary.

Drake

The soft-spoken superstar's most generous gesture — a hit that felt like a gift.

Kendrick Lamar

A career-defining diss track that reminded the world what rap beef used to feel like.

Sabrina Carpenter

The sharpest pop hook of 2024, delivered with irresistible wit and style.

Arctic Monkeys

The riff that made a generation fall back in love with guitar music.

Amy Winehouse

The title track of the century's greatest soul album — grief set to widescreen production.

Beyoncé

A political statement, a cultural reckoning, and an absolute banger.

Frank Ocean

Understated, beautiful, and unlike anything else — Frank Ocean announcing a singular talent.

Lauryn Hill

The most emotionally honest song on one of the greatest albums ever made.

What is the greatest song of all time?

By most critical measures and cultural impact, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen (1975) stands alone — a six-minute rock opera that redefined what a pop song could be.

What song has been covered the most times in history?

"Yesterday" by The Beatles holds the record with over 2,200 recorded cover versions — more than any other song in history.

What was the first rock and roll song?

Most music historians point to "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry (1958) or "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley (1954) as the first definitive rock and roll records.

What is the most streamed song of all time?

"Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd held the record as the most-streamed song on Spotify for several years, though streaming records are constantly being broken.