"Beautiful Girls" — Sean Kingston

"Beautiful Girls" was the debut single from Sean Kingston, a 17-year-old Jamaican-American singer, released May 26, 2007 ahead of his self-titled first album. Producer J. R. Rotem lifted the unmistakable bassline and chord sway of Ben E. King's 1961 classic "Stand by Me" and let Kingston float a lovesick reggae-pop melody over it — a three-minute bridge between the oldies station and Top 40. It opened at the top of Billboard's digital songs chart with 260,000 downloads and rode to No. 1 on the Hot 100, making Kingston the first artist born in the 1990s to top that chart. It was No. 1 in the UK for four weeks and hit the summit in Canada and beyond: the consensus song of summer 2007.

The word doing the heavy lifting was also the controversy. A pop chorus built on "suicidal" sat uneasily on youth radio — Radio Disney wouldn't play it until Kingston re-recorded a cleaned-up version with the lyric changed, added to their playlist that September, and at least one station dropped the original over the suicide references. None of it slowed the song; if anything, arguing about the lyric kept it in the air even longer.

It remains Kingston's signature song and one of the defining one-song time machines of the 2000s — the official video has piled up over 1.5 billion YouTube views, most of them from people who hear four bass notes and are instantly back in 2007.