'00s Dance

The first decade of the 21st century is over, but this overview of the post-millennial club soundscape packs enough juice for 1,000 years of grooves and moves. Our sonic palette covers the full range, from the ear-bending ethereality of Layo & Bushwacka!'s 2002 club smash "Love Story" to Kylie Minogue's robo-sexy signature "Can't Get You Out of My Head" and the mellow electro-funk of Daft Punk's "Digital Love." Fatboy Slim resurrects Jim Morrison for "Sunset (Bird of Prey)" and samples a line of Angela Bassett's dialogue in Strange Days for "Right Here, Right Now," and Missy Elliott channels that bhangra beat into "Get Ur Freak On."

If God is a DJ, let the worship continue in Next Steps.

You can slip into some of these grooves casually, like you're easing into a jacuzzi, but others impel you to hit the ground running, and stoke you into a hot funk before you have time to draw breath: one such is "Bingo Bango" by Basement Jaxx, which samples the Latinate brass of Bolivar's "Merengue" for your instant salsification; another is the retro-electrifying "Jacques Your Body Makes Me Sweat" by Les Rhythmes Digitales. The Streets — Mike Skinner — blurs the line between UK garage and British hip-hop with "Has It Come to This?" while Shapeshifters do incredible things with brass and strings on the 2004 disco house release "Lola's Theme."

Whirl like a dervish into the beat vortex of our Deep Cuts.

As we groove into the Deep Cuts selection of our '00s Dance Essentials, the first decade of the 21st century reveals itself as nothing less than the most rhythmically diverse era in the history of mankind, accommodating a millennium's worth of irresistible beats. That said, all preconceived notions of dance music are re-filtered through the refracting prism of Isolée's micro-house: "Beau Mot Plage" creates a cascade of robotic pizzicato to futuristic effect without ever sacrificing the boogie. Belgium's Ian Van Dahl, meanwhile, takes a more direct route to dance-floor euphoria with "Castles In the Sky" — an angelic vocal plus a warm sea of Balearic synth equals . . . genius.

This starter decade of the 21st century — the zeroes, the noughties, call it what you will — has mashed up enough styles and grooves to leave our great dance-floor nation dazed, confused and blissed-out for years to come. Benny Benassi ("Satisfaction") has plugged us directly into his super-charged grid of electroclash, where we've begged him to crank up the voltage on his sonic cattle-prod; Mylo has seduced us into believing that the seeds of the future can be found in the Latin-disco exotica of Miami Sound Machine ("Doctor Pressure"); Fedde le Grand has given Detroit house a shiny Euro upgrade ("Put Your Hands Up for Detroit"); and David Guetta has sealed his nouveau-superstar DJ status with 2009's Akon-collab, "Sexy Bitch."