The only politics in the first single from Green Day's imminent three-album blitz are the sexually urgent kind, and the sole whiff of opera comes when Billie Joe Armstrong sings, "Oh love/ Won’t you rain on me tonight?" – a neat allusion to the climax of the Who's Quadrophenia. Otherwise, this song is a tight, addicting bundle of pop-hook class and crunchy-punk fundamentals. The entire first verse is Armstrong singing like the stark solo John Lennon – just a bright, strident vocal and crisply strummed guitar. But when Armstrong’s bandmates fall in around him, Green Day sound the way you originally loved ’em, and refreshed: heavier and hardened from their time in the trenches but back in the garage, ready for rapture.

Listen to "Oh Love":

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“1999”

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.