J'ai la quéquette qui colle by Les Mules (1999)

In June 1999 two friends known as Steph and Moustache were driving to a become-a-star party in Normandy and made up a song about a sticky penis to pass the time, as one does. They recorded it, and it did what nothing French had yet done: it spread by e-mail and download, got picked up by radio, and became the ringtone of a nation before anyone had pressed a disc. The CD single followed on 3 July 2001, with a country version, two years after the song was already everywhere.

Downloads were reported from Canada, Japan and Argentina, countries with no particular interest in Normandy, which makes it the first French-language dick song to travel on the internet rather than on radio. The lyric is one refrain and a few verses of elaboration; the appeal is that it sounds exactly like what it is, two men in a car finding a word funny, and the word winning.

Its afterlife is as the French internet's chanson paillarde, the bawdy song every culture has, arriving by modem. Twenty-five years on it is the track French people over thirty-five know from a Nokia, and the one that proves the genre on this list needed no record label, only a good word for the thing, a car and a long drive.