The 38 best songs about sex

FORGET ALL THOSE SAPPY LOVE SONGS. HERE'S THE TOP MUSIC ABOUT THE ACT ITSELF

Best Song About a Girl Rejuvenated by a Big Dick

•< Madonna, "Like a Virgin," 1984

As the film Reservoir Dogs begins, Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) announces, "Let me tell you what 'Like a Virgin' is about." The song's narrator, he says, is a hussy whose man has an enormous rod, and when the two of them copulate, "it hurts just like it did the first time. Hence, 'Like a Virgin.' " Madonna later gave Tarantino a signed CD, on which she had written, "To Quentin—It's about love, not dick."

Best Song About VD

'4 Procol Harum, "A Souvenir of London," 1973

Lots of musicians have sung about venereal disease, even in the operetta Candide, which includes two songs on the topic. In this oddly cheer­ful ditty, the British group describes an unlucky tourist who returns from London with the pox. The word leaking creates a disturbing image; the BBC banned the song.

3* Second-Best Song About VD

A The Coasters, "Poison Ivy," 1959

Did you think the song was about poison ivy? Hint: It's about a girl named Ivy. If you mess around with her, she'll "make you itch."

4* Third-Best Song About VD

<4 Kool Moe Dee, "Go See the Doctor," 1986

A rapper takes a girl home soon after meeting her, brags to his friends and three days later, while "drip drip drip­ping," howls in pain. It's both explicit and comic and ends with an endorse­ment of condoms.

Best Prince Song About Sex

< Prince, "Darling Nikki," 1984

Prince has recorded dozens of great songs about sex, and it pains us not to include "Head," about staining the gown of a bride on her way to the altar. But we'll praise this Purple Rain track about a girl sitting "in a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine," because it outraged Tipper Gore and caused her to form the Parents Music Resource Center after she found her 11-year-old daughter listening to it.

6. Best Imitation of a Prince Song About Sex

i Ween, "L.M.L.Y.P.," 1990

The title? It stands for "Let Me Lick Your Pussy," and some of the lyrics are borrowed from Prince songs. In con­cert, the twisted cult act Ween often ended shows with a 30-minute ver­sion of this funk jam. It was the band's "Stairway to Heaven."

Best Pedophile Song to Get Radio Airplay

•^ The Knack, "My Sharona," 1979

How could a fantasy about statutory rape make it to number one? The great guitar riffbounces like a braless prom queen and obscures the panting pro­nouncement "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind." Blues-men have long sung about lusting for schoolgirls, but "My Sharona" is the only paean to underage sex to make it onto President George W. Bush's iPod.

Best Song About Blue Balls

i The Beatles, "Please Please Me," 1963

In this ecstatic tale of heavy petting and discontent, John Lennon pleads with his girl for...maybe a blow job, maybe a hand job, but release of some kind. Comically, this is the song that lit the flame of Beatlemania and set girls screaming and eager to please a Beatle, or even all four of them. (By the way, "I Saw Her Standing There" is basically about pedophilia. The Beatles: perverts?)

9* Best Song About Masturbation

i Buzzcocks, "Orgasm Addict," 1977

Best Song About Anal Sex

Horn Basil, "Mickey," 1982

A chirpy New Wave track about a club girl pining for a vain guy who won't take her home because he's busy posing in the mirror. Horny and impa­tient, Basil resorts to a promise that's also a taunt: "Anyway you want to do it/I'll take it like a man." Mickey's chief interest, apparently, is not women.

XX* Second-Best Song About Anal Sex

i Ween, "Chocolate Town," 2003

X2* Third-Best Song About Anal Sex

i Deep Purple, "Knocking at Your Back Door," 1984

13. Best Song About

Sex Between an Elderly Couple

^ Howard Tate, "Look at Granny Run Run," 1966

14. Best Song That

Brags About Premature

Ejaculation

4 Motley Criie, "Ten Seconds to Love," 1983

15* Best Song That Complains About Premature Ejaculation

4 BWP, "Two Minute Brother/

Best Dancehall Duet About Rough Sex

i Vybz Kartel featuring Spice, "Ramping Shop," 2008

Dancehall songs are way filthier than American hip-hop, if you understand the patois. Here, over a thrilling elec­tronic beat, two Jamaican rappers bond over their massive egos: Spice brags about the tightness of her pussy, and Kartel counters, "Me cocky longer dan me Nike/Tell me wuh yuh like/Yuh waan me drive or yuh waan ride it like a bike?" Clever and oddly tender, it led Jamaica's broadcasting commission to ban songs about sex.

Best Sex Song That Doesn't Bother With Metaphor

i Notorious B.I.G., "Fuck You Tonight," 1997

The slow, sleazy R&B groove evokes Barry White, Hennessy and a water bed. But Biggie, the obese Brooklyn rapper, doesn't have seduction on his mind. "I'm fuckin' you tonight," he announces plainly. This song would make a great playlist with Akon's "I Wanna Fuck You," Noreaga's "I Wanna Fuck You," N.W.A's "I'd Rather Fuck You" and Beenie Man's "I'm Gonna Fuck You."

18. Best Song About Having Sex With a Hooker (and Not liking It)

4 Bruce Springsteen. "Reno," 2005

Best Song About Impotence

4 Freda Payne, "Band of Gold," 1970

The narrator of this glorious R&B melodrama is an unhappy newly-wed. On her wedding night she and her husband "stayed in sepa­rate rooms," and she implores him to return "and love me like you tried before." Tried? WTF? Maybe the bride had a case of vaginismus. (Look it up.) More likely the groom was incapable—Cialis didn't exist in 1970.

20* Second-Best Song About Impotence

4 Kid Creole and the Coconuts, "Mister Softee," 1980

There's nothing subtle or mysterious about this one. It's not about an ice cream truck.

2X* Third-Best Song About Impotence

<Elastica, "Stutter," 1993

A taunting, unsympathetic sneer from this female-fronted British quartet: "Is it something you lack/When I'm flat on my back?" Elastica's great first album added endorsements of lube ("Vaseline") and sex in and on top of automo­biles ("Car Song").

22* Fourth-Best Song About Impotence

4 Dead Kennedys, "Too Drunk to Fuck," 1981 Beer isn't always your friend, guys.

Best Song About Seducing a Virgin

i Rod Stewart, "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)," 1976

Seduction is sleazy, and so is Rod Stewart. In this bubble-bath ballad, Stewart plies a sexual novice with booze, guilt, pressure and metaphor ("Spread your wings and let me come inside"). The gist is this: "Just let me put the tip in."

Best Song About Sex Recorded When Your Grandma Was Young

i Lucille Bogan, "Shave 'Em Dry," 1935

In this filthy Depression-era blues song, Bogan alternately brags about her skills ("I would fuck you, baby, honey, I would make you cry") and tells her lover he has crabs in his ass. "I got somethin' between my legs'll make a dead man come," she boasts, which likely inspired Mick Jagger's similar lyric in "Start Me Up."

Best Song About Ejaculation

i Sparks, "Tryouts for the Human Race," 1979

26* Best Song About Trying to Get Your Girlfriend to Have Sex With Another Woman While You Film It

<N.E.R.D, "Tape You," 2002

Best Song About a Blow-Up Sex Doll

i Roxy Music, "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," 1973

Bryan Ferry has had one of the most enviable sex lives of any musician, but in this haunted dirge he imagines an inflatable doll is "the perfect compan­ion." He yearns to serve her, brings her to his mansion, changes her clothes every day, pledges eternal love—but like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, she betrays him. "I blew up your body/But you blew my mind," he sobs, and the track explodes into psychedelic tor­ment. Doll and man can never mate.

28* Second-Best Song About a Blow-Up Sex DoU

i The Police, "Be My Girl-Sally," 1978

Best R. Kelly Song About Sex

¦<R. Kelly, "In the Kitchen," 2005

The single-minded Kelly recorded songs with the titles "Bump n' Grind," "Freak Dat Body" and "I Like the Crotch on You" all on the same album. ("Feelin' on Yo Booty" came later.) His R&B romps often have a streak of out­rageous comedy, and his tallest tale, "In the Kitchen," isn't about Guy Fieri. Risking a grease fire, R. freaks his girl near the stove, "on the counter/By the buttered rolls." He even shouts, "Girl, I'm ready to toss your salad." Every healthy diet needs some roughage.

30. Best Song About Being a Deranged Male Prostitute

i Ramones, "53rd and 3rd," 1976

Best Song About Two Guys Having Sex

i Jeff Stryker, "Pop You in the Pooper," 2003

This Adult Video News Hall of Famer is unlikely to ever join the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but no gay-porn star has ever recorded a funnier or franker country song about butt-boning a straight guy.

Best Song About Two Teen Girls

4 Valeria featuring Aria, "Girl I Told Ya," 2007

Two girls have a sleepover that leads to explorations and gasping. Dad gets suspicious; the girls tell him nothing's going on. They're lying.

34.-36. Three Best Songs by Women Demanding Cunnilingus

4 SWV, "Downtown," 1992 4 Lil' Kim, "Not Tonight," 1996 ^Trina, "Tongue Song," 2000

37* Best Song by a Woman Demanding Cunnilingus and Anilingus

<Khia, "My Neck, My Back," 2002

Best Song About the Absurdity of Sex Songs

i Tenacious D,T" Her Gently," 2001

Jack Black is a master of the amorous science, and he offers this acous­tic ballad as a tutorial to lesser men: Sometimes you have to woo your girl before you penetrate her. Don't always fuck her hard, he says; occasionally

you can fuck her gently. And after that courtliness? "And then I'm gonna love you completely/And then I'll fuckin' fuck you discreetly/And then I'll fuckin' bone you completely/But then I'm gonna fuck you hard." Mrs. Jack Black is a lucky lady!

Best Song About Fucking the Police (Literally)

¦< Lil Wayne, "Mrs. Officer," 2008