36. Madonna, “Hung Up”
“Hung Up” employs a ticking clock to represent fear of wasted time, but Madonna isn’t singing about aging یا 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
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 مکئی 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 مونگفلی, مونگ پھلی مکھن of acoustic guitars to stay away from the chocolate of digital باس, گھنگھور drones, but don’t tell Madonna she can’t eat both and spit back manna. EH
25. Madonna, “Music”
From its generic عنوان to Madonna’s anonymous vocal performance, “Music” is a blank slate of a song. To wit, the song has had almost as many makeovers as Madonna herself. Okay, so not quite that many, but each of the performer’s tours during the last decade has featured a new incarnation of the song: Kraftwerk-inspired electronica, ’70s disco, and most recently, ’80s hip-hop (the اگلے logical embodiment would be ’90s house). If موسیقی truly is a universal language, then “Music”—in all of its meta reinventions and retro dialects—might be the best piece of evidence we have that موسیقی really does make the people come together. SC