Listen to 200 Bangers Selected by NPR
Usually, when I load a playlist with the most popular hits, I skip half of the tracks . I miss almost nothing on NPR ‘s new 200 Greatest Songs of Women of the 21st Century + playlist . Every song is good! Even country songs! And all of the top performers are female or non-binary. Highlights include Fuck the Pain Away by Peaches, Two Weeks by FKA Twigs, Drone Bomb Me by Anohni, Soy Yo by Bomba Estéreo, Help I’m Alive by Metric, and Good as Hell »» User Lizzo. There are also such mega hits as “Run Away With Me” and “Single Ladies”. This is a real song.
NPR selected these songs with a group of over 70 women and non-binary authors, selecting “artists whose main musical contributions came on or after January 1, 2000, and since then, they have changed attitudes, challenged categories and pushed sound in new directions. “You can watch a mini-review and music video for each song on NPR, or listen to it on Spotify or other streaming services .
NPR list is varied and easy to listen to, which is not repeated in the lists, such as the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” magazine Rolling Stone in 2003 . (Seventy-eight music groups have three or more albums on this list. Two of these groups are headed by women.) Most artists are listed only once on the NPR list, and no artist is listed more than three times. So you don’t have to miss Dylan’s hundreds of songs.
For more, including 20th century music, try NPR’s 2017 list of The 150 Greatest Female Albums . And read NPR’s Turning the Tables series on the growing influence of women in music.