Every #1 Hit From 2004, Ranked Worst to Best

I’ve been ranking every Billboard #1 hit from 1964, 1974, 1984, 1994, 2004 and 2014 from worst to best in each respective year. Last week, I ranked the 1994 crop and today we’re looking at 2004, the best batch of songs that we’ll rank this month. Out of 12 #1 hits, 11 of them are iconic and 10 are immovable, tectonic staples of the decade’s best year. But there are no duds here, not even the song performed by an American Idol winner (in later years, that will become a hindrance more than a benefit). Much like how Boyz II Men dominated 1994, 2004 marked the era of Usher, who spent a cumulative 28 weeks at #1 between February and December. The year also gave us some pretty great crunk&B gems, club-rap signatures and, of course, a few all-time slow jams. Gone, finally, are the trends of soundtrack songs and novelty ballads. Without further ado, here is every #1 hit from 2004, ranked from worst to best.

12. Fantasia: “I Believe”

My favorite relic from the 2000s: American Idol winners (and, sometimes, runner-ups) scoring #1 hits on the Hot 100 soon after their victories. Kelly Clarkson achieved it with “A Moment Like This,” and the show’s second season finalist Clay Aiken had it with “This is the Night.” Fantasia, who took home a win in season three, found chart immortality with “I Believe”—a powerful, well-performed soul ballad that, out of all of the American Idol winners’ debut chart-toppers, is probably the best. I don’t think it’s necessarily a great song—it sounds more like a novelty than it does some culture-shifting product—but it proves exactly why Fantasia beat Diana DeGarmo by a million votes: She’s one of the strongest voices to ever appear on the show.

11. Snoop Dogg ft. Pharrell: “Drop It Like It’s Hot”

It pains me to root against a song produced by the Neptunes, but “Drop It Like It’s Hot” is one of the most annoying rap hits of the 2000s. It’s iconic, don’t get me wrong, but you can only hear it in the background of so many Sun Drop soda commercials before it gets tedious. The track marked a renaissance for Snoop Dogg, who’d gone nearly 10 years without a Top 10 hit by the time “Beautiful” peaked at #6 in 2003. Capitalizing on that success, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” reached #1 in December 2004 and remained there for the rest of the year. It’s a good song, just oversaturated in the larger culture—but it nabbed a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group and, until Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” came out nine years later, was Pharrell’s biggest hit worldwide.

10. Usher: “Confessions Part II”

It might seem worrisome that an Usher song is this low on the list, but you could argue that 11 of the 12 entries here are great—and we have three other Usher songs to file, so he will get more than enough flowers. Out of the four songs he saw top the Hot 100 in 2004, I think “Confessions Part II” is the “worst”—though that means hardly anything, given that Confessions became one of the biggest albums of the decade. It’s a great song that’s smooth as hell, a true Pandora’s box of infidelity that does more finessing than confessing, but we’ll let Usher slide for that one. All braggadocious lyrics about getting a mistress pregnant aside, Jermaine Dupri and Bryan-Michael Cox’s production on “Confessions Part II” is hot, hot, hot. I heard this song for the first time 15 years ago when it was used in an early episode of Glee; it transfixed an entire generation.

9. Juvenile ft. Soulja Slim: “Slow Motion”

Juvenile’s Tiny Desk concert was a highlight of 2023 for me and, in his 10-part medley of hits, he snuck a bit of “Slow Motion” in there for good measure. In my heart of hearts, this is #1 on the list. But 2004 was such a strong year for music that it’s down here in the back-end of the ranking. Juvenile and Soulja Slim run the gamut here, delivering one of the strongest rap choruses of the 2000s (“Uh, I like it like that / She working that back / I don’t know how to act / Slow motion for me, slow motion for me / Slow motion for me, move it slow motion for me”). “Slow Motion” was the first #1 hit for both artists, and the seventh posthumous chart-topper after the Notorious B.I.G. cracked the top spot with “Mo Money Mo Problems” seven years prior. Soulja Slim’s sudden death in 2003 lingers throughout the song, which became a de-facto tribute to the late MC because of circumstance. Beyond the tragedy that preceded the song’s release in March 2004, “Slow Motion” is just that damn good.

8. Usher: “Burn”

A #1 hit for eight non-consecutive weeks, “Burn” is so, so good. You could argue that it’s the best song off of Confessions, an ironically-titled track about a flame that’s gone out. As far as R&B ballads are concerned, few from the 2000s reach the same emotional climax as “Burn.” The song makes a reference to “My Boo” while showcasing Usher’s perfectly achy falsetto vocal, and it’s a break-up song that, even at its most cliché, is a slow jam for the ages. Very few contemporary verse-chorus soul tracks have ever marked as highly as “Burn,” and Rolling Stone’s Laura Sinagra described that excellence so well that I wish I’d thought of it myself, writing that “Burn” “convincingly marries resolve and regret, but when it comes to rough stuff, there’s still no ‘u’ in p-i-m-p.”

7. Ciara ft. Petey Pablo: “Goodies”

For seven weeks between September and October 2004, no song meant more to the pop zeitgeist than Ciara’s “Goodies.” It’s one of the best crunk beats I’ve ever heard, thanks to producer Lil Jon, who co-wrote the song with Ciara, Sean Garrett, LaMarquis Jefferson and Craig Love. The genre wasn’t an underground secret anymore, and suddenly Atlanta’s chokehold on club music was being packaged in Top 40 pop stardom. “Goodies” is a freaky-good, empowering lick that made Ciara the princess of crunk&B, as Lil Jon’s drum-machine beat and whirring key bloops was simplistic yet fully intoxicating. “Goodies” was originally called “Cookies,” thanks to Ciara and Garrett conceiving it as a riff on the “Who Took the Cookie?” children’s novelty song, but Lil Jon was an opponent of the title, changing just one word yet changing the history of the Hot 100 in the process. There is nothing flashy about “Goodies”; it carries a context similar to some of Janet Jackson’s subtler compositions, registering as a sensual, charismatic triumph without too much heavy lifting involved. The product is one of a now-out-of-style genre’s greatest releases.

6. Usher and Alicia Keys: “My Boo”

The early-to-mid 2000s was an apex for pop and R&B duets. Just a year before Usher and Alicia Keys teamed up for “My Boo,” the Hot 100 rewarded the tandems of Jennifer Lopez/LL Cool J, Beyoncé/Jay-Z, Ludacris/Shawnna and Beyoncé/Sean Paul. “My Boo” is one of the best pairings of the decade, capitalizing not just on Usher’s chart domination but on Keys’s recent successes, too. She’d put three consecutive singles in the Top 10 and “My Boo” was her sixth single to reach the Top 10 in three years. I mean, “My Boo” won the Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals Grammy and ruled the pop world for six weeks—and somehow, it’s still only the third-most-successful single from Confessions. Nevertheless, it’s gone platinum five times and remains not just one of the greatest songs of the 2000s, but a career highlight for both Usher and Keys.

5. OutKast ft. Sleepy Brown: “The Way You Move”

After OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” concluded its reign at #1, another OutKast song took over: “The Way You Move.” It’s a track that gets overshadowed by its massive, generational predecessor, but I don’t want to discredit just how great “The Way You Move” is. Sleepy Brown’s “I love the way you move” chorus is, quite possibly, my all-time favorite element of any OutKast song ever. It’s terrific, sensual and catchy as all get-out. There are days when “The Way You Move” is better than “Hey Ya!,” and it’ll forever be a crime that it only spent one week at the top of the Hot 100. It certainly is one of Big Boi’s greatest performances. Sure, “The Way You Move” was unseated from #1 by an objectively better song, but a tune as freaky as this one belongs in a museum.

4. Twista ft. Kanye West & Jamie Foxx: “Slow Jamz”

Before Kendrick Lamar sampled Luther Vandross’s “If This World Were Mine” in 2024, Twista, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx re-imagined his great cover of Dionne Warwick’s “A House is Not a Home” into a slow jam rap powerhouse with a sped-up, chipmunk soul tempo. “Slow Jamz” appears both on Twista’s studio album Kamikaze and West’s debut record The College Dropout, but it’s Twista who gets to rightfully claim ownership over the #1 hit. It was the first chart-topper for all three artists and became Grammy-nominated. The story goes that West, who was recovering from a car crash that shattered his jaw, freestyled for Foxx at a party and, impressed by the young producer’s chops, the actor-singer invited him to his studio to record “Slow Jamz.” Foxx sang the “She said she want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross” line but West disliked how the hook turned the track’s genre into R&B instead of rap. But it was Twista who left the greatest impression, breaking a then-world record for the fastest rap, spitting through 598 syllables in just 55 seconds—though his career floundered after “Slow Jamz” went big, and he started working in telemarketing to make ends meet. “Slow Jamz,” regardless, remains one of Kanye’s most nostalgic tracks, and the “A House is Not a Home” sample is still among the finest samples in rap history.

3. Terror Squad: “Lean Back”

Now this—this is a motherfucking TUNE. Few tracks have been so club-ready. “Lean Back” is the summer anthem to end all summer anthems, released into the sludgy June heat in 2004 and sent to the moon by that August. Terror Squad had never had a Hot 100-charting single before “Lean Back,” but that didn’t stop the track from hitting #1 on the pop, R&B and rap charts in America and going gold. Fat Joe and Remy Ma are at an all-time high, delighting through verse-chorus vibes and one of Scott Storch’s greatest beats. It’s a street-rap gem that started a trend for a dance that wasn’t even a dance (it was just a shoulder movement), and Fat Joe pays tribute to the culture by shouting out the late Big Pun, who was a one-time member of the group before his passing. “Lean Back” is just full of so much stank that you can’t help but let its crunk tempo enter you like the very craze it sparked.

2. OutKast: “Hey Ya!”

There is no component of “Hey Ya!” that feels outdated in the slightest. Is it even OutKast’s best song? Absolutely not. But it is, maybe, one of the greatest #1 hits ever written. The perfect blend of soul, funk, pop and hip-hop, “Hey Ya!” blends genres in ways that haven’t been replicated since. André 3000 wrote and produced the track himself, and he found himself inspired by rock bands like the Smiths and the Hives. He wanted to implement acoustic guitars with synthesizers and overdubs. André name-checks Beyoncé and Lucy Liu in the song’s breakdown, while the layered vocal harmonies of him and Big Boi singing “Hey ya!” over and over is so euphoric. From “shake it like a Polaroid picture” to “What’s cooler than being cool? Ice cold!,” “Hey Ya!” has some of the most quoted lyrics of the last 25 years. For the last three weeks of 2003 and the first six weeks of 2004, OutKast ruled the land with “Hey Ya!” Check anyone’s streaming playlists in 2023, and you’ll realize that the song hasn’t loosened its grip on the world one bit. How many #1 hits can claim to have such a generational reverence?

1. Usher ft. Lil Jon & Ludacris: “Yeah!”

I vividly remember spending a study hall period in my school’s computer lab downloading an MP3 of “Yeah!” on Grooveshark and playing it through one of those shotty, grey speakers. Usher’s magnum opus, which spent 12 consecutive weeks at #1, comes with a core memory for most people who heard it for the first time at a certain age. I was six years old when it went #1, but that crunk&B production still hit like a wall of bricks upon my discovery of the song some six, seven years later. Few songs capture Atlanta as well as “Yeah!,” and it’s the collage of Lil Jon’s beats and Ludacris’s steady, seductive rhymes that make it a booty-bopping, club panic masterpiece. It’s where crunk and R&B collide in addictive, carnal fashion. When I was assembling this list, there was no doubt that “Yeah!” would land at #1. In retrospect, few cultural trends feel as definitive or timeless as “Yeah!,” a track that, 20 years later, can still go out and get it. There’s a reason 26-year-old me is as entranced by it as teenaged me was when it spilled onto the dancefloors of many school formals. This is, simply put, one of the most important dance songs of the century thus far—a single put into a spotlight it still has yet to fully relinquish.