“Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani

"Hollaback Girl" is Gwen Stefani's great divider, the third single from her first solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. (2004), sent out in March 2005. She wrote it with Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who produced it as the Neptunes, and they pared it down to a bare frame of pop, hip-hop and post-R&B with its roots in the hip-hop and dance music of the 1980s. Paul Hunter's video cast Stefani as a cheerleader at a California high school and won Best Choreography at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards.

Nobody could agree on it. Some critics loved the minimal production, others found it embarrassing, and Maxim called it the most annoying song ever. It topped the Hot 100 for four weeks anyway, went to number one in Australia, and became the first digital download to sell a million copies in the US.

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