Captain Hook by Megan Thee Stallion (2020)

Captain Hook is three minutes of fast-talking Hot Girl bravado from Suga, the EP Megan released in March 2020 while fighting her own label in court for the right to release anything at all. The verses are about drinking, dancing and taking what she wants. The hook is about the geometry of what she wants, and it names the pirate, which turns a children's villain into a technical specification.

It reached number 74 on the Hot 100, which undersells it badly. The Skaibeauty TikTok dance went viral within days, lockdown spring turned it into a national pastime for people with nowhere to go, and the song has since gone two times Platinum. Megan directed the video herself, a detail Rolling Stone led with and one that suits a song in which she writes the specification and signs off the final product.

The afterlife is a shift in what gets measured. Rude Boy asked whether it was "big enough"; Captain Hook wants to know which way it points. A decade apart, the two songs are the clearest record of pop moving from size to shape, with a woman holding the clipboard both times and the men, presumably, holding still.