Anaconda by Nicki Minaj (2014)

Anaconda is built on Sir Mix-a-Lot's 1992 hit Baby Got Back, which Nicki Minaj samples throughout, and its hook is his line about what the "anaconda" does and does not want. That is the phallic reference, and it is the chorus. Everything around it is Minaj: her exes, her body, her terms, delivered with the precision of someone who knows exactly how much of the sample she is leaning on and intends to keep leaning.

It peaked at number two on the Hot 100 in 2014, held off the top by Taylor Swift, broke Vevo's 24-hour viewing record on release and went eight times Platinum. The cover art alone generated a week of headlines. None of that had much to do with the snake in the title, which is the point: people stream it in enormous numbers for reasons that have nothing to do with herpetology or the premise of this list.

Its afterlife is as the borderline this list was built to handle. If it ranked by plays, Anaconda would sit at number one above Detachable Penis, which would break the page's own promise. It stays because the hook is the reference and is flagged because the song is not, and so it sits in the middle of the table: too big to leave off, not really about the thing, like a celebrity at a stranger's wedding.