The Stroke by Billy Squier (1981)

The Stroke is a drum pattern, a riff with daylight in it and a one-word chant, which is the most efficient design a rock single has ever had. Squier cut it in 1981 for Don't Say No and it reached number 17 in the United States on a chorus that is less a lyric than an instruction. The verses are about being flattered, used and dropped. The chorus does not care about the verses, and neither does anyone singing it.

Squier has explained the song the same way since the week it came out: the "stroke" is the business stroking an artist's ego and stroking the cheque until the day it stops. There is no reason to doubt him. There is also no record of twenty thousand people thinking about A&R departments while shouting it, and the song has stayed on rock radio for four decades on the second reading, not the first.

Its afterlife is drums. Eminem built Berzerk on them in 2013 and handed the beat to a generation that had never heard the original. "The stroke meaning" is still typed into Google about 260 times a month in the United States, which is roughly the rate at which people discover the gap between what the writer meant and what the room hears, and side with the room.