2002: #2 - "Work It"

While we're on the subject of songs that heavily borrow from classic hip hop without being a tired retread... "Work It" was the song that prompted many (well, three or four) people to ask me, "Hey, what's that sample?" Usually they were referring to the "Peter Piper" loop (itself a sample of "Take Me To the Mardi Gras" by semi-obscure jazz-fusion artist Bob James), but there's also a nearly unrecognizable Blondie hook in there, too.

"Work It" also has the official distinction of being Billboard's longest running #2 song that never reached #1. Oddly, it's kept out of the DOTY top slot by the same song that stifled it on the charts. Unofficially, it's one of the top five oddest sounding #2 song in chart history, and the strangest of all Missy's hits, which is certainly saying something. It's basically a bunch of very subtle percussion elements, siren wails, deep keyboard rumbles, onomatopeia, lyrical non sequiturs - the most noteworthy of which often punctuated by stops and starts in the rhythm track - and backwards vocal hooks, all thrown together, and then wrapped up in the end by the aforementioned Run D.M.C. sample, but, thanks to Timbaland and Missy, it works.

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