Best Songs About Sex: 20 Down’n’Dirty Tracks About Getting It On

20: Soft Cell: Sex Dwarf (1981)

The song Sex Dwarf, from Soft Cell’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, started life in the seedy den of tabloid hysteria. The line “Luring disco dollies to a life of vice” was ripped straight from a News Of The World headline and, according to singer Marc Almond, gave the synth-pop duo the idea for a “bizarre pervy dance track”. This is certainly what Sex Dwarf became – no satin sheets or candlelight found here.

But it was the promo video which really cemented Sex Dwarf’s notoriety among the best songs about sex. In its original version, Sex Dwarf is an S&M orgy with additional chainsaws, animal carcasses and maggots! Using real sex workers from Soho (including a trans woman), and actor Tony Cooper as the titular little person, these are the type of real, varied bodies with desires that are rarely seen in pop videos. Never intended to be shown on TV (just as well, as it was banned outright), the clip nevertheless came under press scrutiny, and Soft Cell become the very focus of tabloid outcry that had inspired Sex Dwarf in the first place.

19: Billie Eilish: Lunch (2024)

“I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life,” Billie Eilish said in 2024, at the release of her single Lunch. “I realised I wanted my face in a vagina.” Lunch is squarely about that desire, chock-full of cute and saucy lines (“You need a seat? I’ll volunteer”).

One of the best songs of 2024, Eilish’s ode to licking and lapping was a huge hit. Its bass-y and rhythmic feel, combined with the sparse and specific lyrics, create an everyday erotic mood dripping with exploration and liberation. “That song was actually part of what helped me become who I am, to be real,” Eilish has said. “I wrote some of it before even doing anything with a girl, and then wrote the rest after.”

18: Lil’ Kim: Big Momma Thang (featuring Jay-Z and Lil’ Cease) (1996)

An unbelievably candid and filthy entry among the best songs about sex, Big Momma Thang is from Hard Core, an album that revolutionised female sexual empowerment in hip-hop and introduced the major rap skills of Lil’ Kim. On this track, as on so many others from that album, Kim is happy to be the ultimate fantasy woman – as long as her own desires are being fully met. “While you daydream and whine,” she spits (on one of the song’s few clean lines), “I just keep gettin’ mine.”

17: Francis Lai: Bilitis (1977)

The 70s saw an explosion of mainstream erotic cinema. From Emmanuelle to Deep Throat, sex films – especially those chronicling a women’s sexual journey – were now on the big screen, in soft focus, and almost respectable. Bilitis was a French film of this type, loosely based on an 1894 poem cycle called The Songs Of Bilitis.

Francis Lai created the soundtrack to the film, and the title track – with its gentle synthesiser redolent of naked bodies in hazy, hot days – gives off a heady erotic charge without uttering a word.

16: Robert Johnson: They’re Red Hot (1937)

They’re Red Hot was written and performed by blues legend – and influence on virtually every musician who came after him – Robert Johnson, and was part of the seven-month creative streak that begat Johnson’s legacy. One of his lighter moments, and firmly within the blues tradition of bawdy songs that delighted in innuendo, They’re Red Hot celebrated sex workers, and warned of the ever-present risk of sexually transmitted infection.

15: Big Daddy Kane: All Of Me (featuring Barry White) (1990)

One of the world’s most masterful rappers, Big Daddy Kane teamed up with the love god Barry White and created this sensual yet frisky standout among the best songs about sex. From Kane’s 1990 album, Taste Of Chocolate, All Of Me’s fusion of rap and bedroom R&B proved extremely influential on the decade to come. Purring out lyrics such as “I want to taste everything, from your lipstick to your toenail polish”, Kane anticipated such jams as D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar and Janet Jackson’s Any Time, Any Place.

More than 20 years later, he remembered making All Of Me with deep affection. “Meeting Barry White, hanging out with him, realising our birthdays were two days apart, liking the same food, drinking the same sort of stuff… I thought that was just amazing,” he said in 2012.

14: Roberta Flack: Feel Like Makin’ Love (1974)

The uncategorisable Roberta Flack is one of music’s great technicians as well as a brilliant creator. She understands how lyrics and music interact, and how her songs’ themes grow stronger as a result. This meant that, when she turned her musical hand to sex, she could evoke exactly what she wanted. Flack specifically worked on a soft dance beat, rather than a ballad styling, for Feel Like Makin’ Love because, as she put it, “I wanted it to move along without too much of a sentimental feeling.” The strategy worked, and the song became one of her biggest successes.

The genius of Feel Like Makin’ Love is that it reflects the beauty of sex with someone you love, without ever feeling smug or boastful. Lines such as “Wanting you with all my might” really get to the heart of a sexual connection between two people, and the impossibility of waiting when the mood is absolutely right.

13: Laura Branigan: Self Control (1984)

Everything in the mood of Self Control points to underground, casual sex: a woman who only lives for the night, seeking to surrender her daytime routines for the excitement of stranger lust, and finding it – over and over again.

If there were any doubts about the sexual theme of the song, its promo video blew them away. The clip is a fantasy ride of masks and writhing bodies, with added creepy details including a hallway of grasping hands and naked, strangely suspended mannequins. The visuals were a collaboration between Laura Branigan and Academy Award-winning director William Friedkin, known for The Exorcist and The French Connection. “We wanted to make it like a little movie,” a frank Branigan said in 1984, discussing the controversy. “So we sat down, and I told him my fantasies, and he came up with a few of his own.”

12: Marvin Gaye: Let’s Get It On (1973)

Let’s Get It On originated with producer Ed Townsend. Having struggled with alcohol use, Townsend first composed the song with a theme of overcoming addiction, adding in religious imagery to boot. But when he took it to Marvin Gaye, this was completely reworked. The two got their heads together, and the song became something else entirely: the paean to sexual congress known across the world.

A perennial among the best songs about sex, the track marked a new era for Gaye. Following the release of What’s Going On, in 1971, and his soundtrack album, Trouble Man, in 1972, Let’s Get It On and the album of the same name saw Gaye transform from a political prophet into an erotic icon. “Americans are a fairly closeted nation of people, especially sexually,” Gaye noted in 1984, during one of his final interviews. “It’s been said that I’m hypocritical in my music, that I preach love and peace and harmony and then I turn around and advocate sexuality. They don’t seem incompatible, do they?”

11: Donna Summer: Love To Love You Baby (1975)

Called by Time magazine “a marathon of 22 orgasms”, Donna Summer’s famous disco writher was 17 minutes of unforgettable aural steam. “Everyone’s asking, ‘Were you alone in the studio?’” Summer said in 1976. “Yes, I was alone in the studio. ‘Did you touch yourself?’ Yes, well, actually I had my hand on my knee. ‘Did you fantasise on anything?’ Yes, on my handsome boyfriend Peter.” Her producer, Giorgio Moroder, dimmed the lights to make Summer feel freer to perform the moans of ecstasy heard throughout.

Summer’s first hit, Love To Love You Baby gave the singer instant notoriety but also boxed her into a corner. She tried to escape from the overtly sexual image of the song numerous times throughout her career, and – while still proud of the track itself – found that she could not free herself from its shadow. “I have so much more to offer,” she asserted in 1976 – a sentiment she would go on to repeat over and over again.

10: Missy Elliott – Pussycat (2002)

Originally planned as the third single from Missy Elliott’s fourth album, Under Construction, in a remix featuring Lil’ Kim and Janet Jackson, Pussycat’s release was shelved when Elliott’s record label got cold feet over the track’s highly sexualised content. “Pussy don’t fail me now,” Elliott sings, as she pays tribute to the persuasive powers of her downstairs delight.

Elliott has specifically credited Pussycat to the influence of 70s and 80s soul music, particularly some of the era’s best songs about sex, as recorded by such stars as Marvin Gaye and The Temptations. “I remember when Sexual Healing came out,” she said in 2017. “It made me listen to a record like that and think of how to do records like ‘Pussy don’t fail me now.’”

9: Led Zeppelin: Custard Pie (1975)

The blues, so beloved of Led Zeppelin, was rife with inventive euphemisms for genitals, sex and fetishes. Lil Johnson wanted hot nuts from the peanut man; Blind Lemon Jefferson found all kinds of filth in the word “crochet”; and Bessie Smith definitely needed a little sugar in her bowl.

For this hard-rock number from Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album, Physical Graffiti, the group continue this tradition with Custard Pie – take a wild guess what that might be – which is “sweet and nice” and ready for chewing. By all accounts, the band members practiced what they sang about, though Custard Pie is more playful than some of their other songs about sex, and it proves that hard rockers can be whimsical as well as explicit.

8: Kate Bush: Feel It (1978)

Kate Bush’s albums are frequently suffused with an earthy eroticism of the kind that can be found in gestures and looks as well as in touch. As she sang on Symphony In Blue, from 1979’s Lionheart, “The more I think about sex, the better it gets.” When Bush grew older, she maintained this core conviction with songs such as The Sensual World, from the 1989 album of the same name, and Misty, from 2011’s 50 Words For Snow, which is about a tryst with a snowman.

Feel It, from her debut album, The Kick Inside, is a brilliant example of Kate Bush’s carnal craft. Evoking teenage experimentation (the act takes place after a party) as well as lust, the track is a tentative yet licentious dive into fleshy pleasures that more than earns a spot the best songs about sex. As Bush herself once said, “The communication of music is very much like making love.”

7: k.d. lang: Sexuality (1993)

From k.d. lang’s third album (which has the charged title of All You Can Eat), Sexuality is a highly sensual, liberating song of lesbian desire. With its narrator urging a woman to act on her queer impulses, listeners are impelled to “Free the hounds of chastity/Unleash your sexuality on me”.

lang had come out as gay a couple of years earlier, at a time when proud, public lesbian identity was a rarity. “I came out because I thought it was an important, responsible thing to do to open myself up to having people have a connection to what gay culture is,” she said in 2023. “I came out so people would have some relatability to it.” This openness meant lang did not have to be coy or ambiguous about the gender of her lovers on Sexuality; and this gives her lyricism, by turns suggestive and audacious, glorious free reign.

6: Buzzcocks: Orgasm Addict (1977)

Many of the best songs about sex are of couples (and sometimes more, as on I U She, by Peaches, or Christina Aguilera’s hints at group sex in Dirrty). And though there are some notable songs on female masturbation, songs of male self-pleasure are rarer.

Banned by the BBC, Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict is about the fun, shame, fantasy and exploration involved in masturbation. Although the band’s guitarist Pete Shelley claimed to find the song “embarrassing” in later years, Orgasm Addict’s brutal humour and honest acknowledgement of masturbation’s role in our lives is unparalleled.

5: Otis Redding: These Arms Of Mine (1962)

One of the greatest ever songs of sexual yearning, These Arms Of Mine gets across the particular intermingling of physical sensation and emotional connection in human sexuality, all through restrained implication. Written early on in Otis Redding’s career, and included on his debut album, Pain In My Heart, These Arms Of Mine was the “King Of Soul”’s first hit.

One of the best soul songs of the 60s, These Arms Of Mine came out in an era when sexuality on record was evolving from the 50s rock’n’roll roughness of Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Wanda Jackson into something that evoked both sensuality and subtlety. Early soul pioneers, such as Redding, developed a sound that would eventually birth some of the most stimulating and downright erotic music of all time. From Marvin Gaye to Ginuwine, sex has proved fertile lyrical ground for soul’s smoothest operators over the years, and it all began with Otis Redding.

4: Madonna: Justify My Love (1990)

Released on her bar-raising best-of, The Immaculate Collection, Justify My Love is among Madonna’s boldest tracks, sonically as well as sexually. Written by Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez as a document of their love affair, and with a beat sampled from Public Enemy’s Security Of The First World, the song features spoken and minimalist vocals from Madonna – but that only adds to its sensual charge, its hypnotic deep beats becoming harmonious with Madonna’s sexual vocal rhythm.

Cementing its place among the best songs about sex, Justify My Love was accompanied by one of Madonna’s greatest promo videos, a ravishing clip which moves the song decidedly from a one-to-one sexual relationship to something encompassing other people. The video was notable for its gender-fluid and androgynous imagery, making Justify My Love one of the most sexually inclusive promos ever made by a mainstream artist. Predictably, the video was deemed controversial, and banned by MTV, which Madonna found ludicrous. “When I did my Vogue video, there’s a shot of me where I’m wearing a see-through dress, and you can clearly see my breasts. They told me that they wanted me to take that out, but I said I wouldn’t, and they played it anyway,” she said. “I would like to address the whole issue of censorship on television.”

3: Prince: Soft And Wet (1978)

Prince’s debut single, Soft And Wet, set the scene for his career-long attitude to sex: a dedication to pleasure, both his own and that of his partner(s); a belief that sex is a cornerstone of human wellbeing; and a limitless lyrical skill in describing all manner of erogenous acts. Prince’s songs about sex could be gently stimulating (Kiss, If I Was Your Girlfriend), refreshingly direct (Sexy MF; Do Me, Baby) or downright humorous (Jack U Off, Horny Toad), but all had a strong conviction of shared sexual bliss.

There was no mistaking what Prince’s imagery was all about on Soft And Wet, and, in a pattern that would become familiar, he avoided explaining the meaning of his songs, right from his earliest days. “If people would just listen to the music,” he told label staffer Marylou Badeaux, “they’d know where my head’s at.”

2: Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Relax (1983)

Like many of the best songs about sex, Relax was controversial and subject to an airtime ban – this time, famously, by the BBC. But Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s debut single is one of the milder lyrical paeans to sex, and its banning had more to do with the fetishistic and proudly gay imagery in the song and its accompanying promo video. ZTT, Frankie’s label, took full advantage of the furore, producing an advert that proclaimed “They’ve tried to BAN IT. BURN IT. BAIT IT. But it keeps STICKING OUT!”

Unlike many of their contemporaries, members of Frankie Goes To Hollywood did not hide their sexual orientation, nor did they seek to overtly politicise it in their music, as Jimmy Somerville and Tom Robinson did. Frankie frontman Holly Johnson has instead referred to his form of political comment as “my fuck-you form of gay activism: ‘If you don’t like it, fuck off’”.

1: Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion: WAP (2020)

“Some people just don’t know what to do when a woman is in control and taking ownership of her own body,” Megan Thee Stallion has said. “I feel like for a long time men felt like they owned sex and now women are saying, ‘Hey, this is for me. I want pleasure.’” WAP (short for Wet Ass Pussy) was a collaboration by two of the best rappers working today, a deft and vigorous tribute to their own pussy power.

With lyrics that switch between a bracing frankness and ingenious metaphor, Cardi B and Megan created the hands-down winner among the best songs about sex. Accompanied by a video set in a house where even the door knockers have a sexual meaning, WAP fulfils Cardi B’s wish to make “a very, very nasty song… I have done records before, but this record is so nasty!”

Find out where WAP ranks among the best Cardi B songs.

Original article: 6 February 2024

Updated: 13 February 2025