As a genre, pop has always been nebulously defined, so while we’ve broadly speaking excluded rock, country and hip-hop (though elements of all those things appear), you’ll find R&B jams, dance-floor fillers and insanely catchy earworms not even the snootiest of snobs can deny. And so, for this list, we’ve taken a long listen to some of the biggest bangers of the last 20-plus years and did what feels nearly impossible: we’ve ranked them. It’s an age we’re absolutely still living through, with little sign of letting up. A complicated series of cultural shifts that can largely be attributed to the internet kicked in: suddenly the bottom fell out of the market for guitar-based music, and suddenly it was sophisticated pop production that was getting the audiophiles drooling. But for all the units shifted, in the twentieth-century pop never seemed to be the zeitgeist artform of the day: the Beatles weren’t pop Pink Floyd weren’t pop Dolly Parton wasn’t pop NWA weren’t pop.Īt the dawn of the new millennium, all the rules for pop went out the window. Sure, there were a few certified geniuses like Michael Jackson or Madonna. Time was, ‘pop’ meant manufactured acts whose music erred towards the disposable.

The beatles tell me why 45