The Good & The Ugly: 2004

Welcome back to more of The Good & The Ugly. Last time, I talked about 2003, the year of 50 Cent and fantastic Neptunes and Timbaland production. Now, we reach 2004, the best year on the charts I’ll cover during this entire series. For every bad song on this list, there were roughly 5 other great songs in its place. With this in mind, I had a surplus amount of honorable mentions that probably would’ve made the best list any other year. The following are the songs to barely miss the list: Outkast- “Roses”, Britney Spears- “Toxic”, Jay-Z- “Change Clothes”/”Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, Nelly- “Over & Over”, Ciara- “Goodies”, Petey Pablo- “Freek-a-Leek”, Alicia Keys- “You Don’t Know My Name”/”If I Ain’t Got You”, J-Kwon- “Tipsy”, Twista- “Overnight Celebrity”, Kanye West- “All Falls Down”/”Through The Wire”/”Jesus Walks”, Lloyd Banks- “On Fire”, Juvenile- “Slow Motion”, Maroon 5- “This Love”/”She Will Be Loved”, Chingy- “One Call Away”, Linkin Park- “Numb”, Ludacris- “Splash Waterfalls”/”Stand Up”, Ying Yang Twins- “Salt Shaker”, Destiny’s Child- “Lose My Breath”, Lil Jon- “Get Low”, and Snoop Dogg- “Drop It Like It’s Hot”. I didn’t feel great about cutting any of these off the top 5. Even then, I had to make an exception for one artist.