This list is part of Turning the Tables, an ongoing project from NPR Music dedicated to recasting the popular music canon in more inclusive - and accurate - ways. This year, our list, selected by a panel of more than 70 women and non-binary writers, tackles history in the making, celebrating artists whose work is changing this century's sense of what popular music can be. The songs are by artists whose major musical contributions came on or after Jan. 1, 2000, and have shifted attitudes, defied categories and pushed sound in new directions since then.

Our list includes songs performed by women and non-binary artists. The use of the term "Women+" is part of our engagement in a movement to recognize a wide spectrum of gender identities coming to greater light in the 21st century.

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152.
DJ Sprinkles,
"House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own" (2008)

Queer philosophizer, deep house revisionist, and general polymathic multi-hyphenate Terre Thaemlitz has spent an entire career posing critical correctives to the failures of house music's canon, aiming to unspool the ideas that've guided the cozy, utopian ideas largely surrounding dance music and recalibrate them in the realities of the LGBT hardship that shaped and defined its course. The centerpiece of Thaemlitz's house classic-wouldn't-even-begin-to-describe-it, Midtown 120 Blues, is DJ Sprinkles par excellence: pearlescent, hypnotic, and spiked with lines of inquiry. - Mina Tavakoli

More: Hear a profile of Terre Thaemlitz

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