JoJo — Leave (Get Out)

'Leave (Get Out)' arrived in February 2004 as the debut single from Joanna 'JoJo' Levesque's self-titled first album. The song handed a scorned-woman kiss-off — pack your bags, take your lies with you — to an actual middle-schooler who could genuinely sing it, and the mismatch was the magic: every hook landed twice, once as pop songcraft and once as the fantasy of every thirteen-year-old who wanted to fire somebody from their life with that much authority.

When it hit #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Top 40, JoJo became the youngest female solo artist ever to top American pop radio, at age thirteen. The single climbed to #12 on the Hot 100, went RIAA Gold that October on the strength of over half a million downloads, and ruled the after-school TV ritual: the video spent fifty days on MTV's Total Request Live — including two at #1 — before being retired from the countdown, another youngest-ever mark. For the back half of 2004 the song was simply unavoidable, blasting from clock radios, mall speakers, and every sleepover in America.

JoJo scored again with 'Too Little Too Late' in 2006, then spent years famously trapped by label disputes that kept her early catalog off streaming until she re-recorded it — which only deepened the original single's status as a sealed time capsule. For a generation, those first three piano-and-strings seconds are 2004 in a bottle.