“Formation” by Beyoncé

Beyoncé surprise-released "Formation" on February 6, 2016, played it at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show the very next day, and later tucked it onto her sixth album, Lemonade. It came together in layers: Pluss built the beat, Swae Lee freestyled the hook and Beyoncé wrote the verses, producing with Mike Will Made It, while Big Freedia chimes in with a jolt of New Orleans bounce.

It's a lean, strutting trap-and-bounce track in which Beyoncé celebrates her culture, her success and her identity as a black woman from the South, and critics heard it as personal and political at once. Melina Matsoukas shot the New Orleans-set video, which Rolling Stone later ranked the greatest of all time. The song topped the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll for 2016, won the Grammy for Best Music Video, and became an anthem for Black Lives Matter and the 2017 Women's March.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.