“Love On Top” by Beyoncé

Beyoncé went vintage on "Love On Top", the giddy throwback from her 2011 album 4. She wrote it with The-Dream and Shea Taylor and produced it with Taylor, drawing on the headspace she was in while playing Etta James in Cadillac Records, and it wears its Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston and Jackson 5 moves proudly, with the Superpower Horns blaring.

It's a love song for someone she can ring any time, even when they've given her grief and made her work, until at last they put her first, and it climbs through four key changes, her voice soaring as the chorus repeats on the way out. She sang it at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards and closed by revealing her pregnancy, which sent it surging; it spent seven weeks atop Billboard's R&B/hip-hop chart and won her a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

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