“Get Ur Freak On” by Missy Elliott

"Get Ur Freak On" was the lead single from Miss E... So Addictive, Missy Elliott's third album, in 2001, and it still sounds like a transmission from somewhere else entirely. She wrote and produced it with Timbaland, and the pair built it on bhangra, the music and dance of Punjab: a six-note melody picked out on a tumbi, with tabla carrying the rhythm and the bassline. Jimmy Douglass engineered and mixed it.

Missy rides that skittering loop like it's a dare, and it paid off: number seven on the Hot 100 and her first solo top-10 hit in Britain. A remix with Nelly Furtado became a club hit, her Super Bowl XLIX halftime show sent the original back onto the Hot 100 in 2015, and in 2025 Rolling Stone named it the greatest song of the 21st century.

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