“What’s wrong with being sexy?” asked Nigel Tufnell in This Is Spinal Tap, and this legendary misunderstanding addressed a lingerie-wearing elephant in metal’s room. Metal has never been a terribly sexy form of music, our priorities tending towards depictions of death, war, horror, Satan, and the bleak realities of a world gone mad. So, whenever metal does broach the subject of sex, the results can vary from disconcerting to downright excruciating, and hence, frequently, very funny. We ran the stats to determine which bands are the worst offenders.
Venom
This Tyneside trio basically invented thrash and black metal, but that doesn’t excuse their regular indulgence in lyrics apparently cribbed from porn mag letters pages. 1982’s Teacher’s Pet was an early warning, with its fist-biting Sid The Sexist gang chant of “Get your tits out for the lads”, plus these sensitive couplets:
“Pulled me down towards her mound/Teacher tasted sweet
Sixty-nine, I don't mean lines/This was teacher’s treat
Played hide and seek with teacher’s mouth/Her lips were warm and wet
Now today I've had my way and teacher won't forget”
Quite, um naughty(?), but at least teacher was an enthusiastic participant; by 1985’s Voyeur, Cronos was singing about peeping through ladies’ windows:
“Virgin little schoolgirls, dirty little nurse
Teachers, whores and chambermaids all lifting up their skirts
Sister’s in the bathroom, getting nice and clean
Telescopic vision, he's bursting at the seams”
Elsewhere, Venom regularly shared an obsession with what lies between a woman’s thighs:
“All I wanna do is open you up wide
Put some great white muscle in between your thighs” - Muscle, 1987
“She's got a fire raging in between her thighs
I got a hose to put it out, try this for size” - Skool Daze, 1989
“Silk stockings, black high heels, skirt so tight you won't believe your eyes
The way she swallows you, you'll wonder what she's got between her thighs” - Playtime, 1991 (it’s probably a vagina, mate)
Anvil
Lips and Co’s entire 1981 debut Hard N’ Heavy is virtually a concept album about sexual retardation in the adolescent male (Bedroom Game, Oooh Baby, School Love, Bondage), but 1983’s Butter-Bust Jerky introduced a fairly original lyrical concept, celebrating the titular practice:
“Dip your fingers in the butter/Spread it all across your chest
In between one another/You know what I like best
Push 'em close together/The tighter the better...
If she can fill a D cup/It's good enough to keep me up”
Anvil’s libidinousness was slightly affected by the mid-80s AIDS epidemic; by 1988’s Safe Sex their smut came with a message about contraception that hid its social responsibility behind ludicrous metaphors:
“Arrows in the quiver when you're ready to deliver/Weenie wrap to collect the sap”
“If I abstain, I'll go insane... Give me sleaze and not disease”
“Yank it, crank it, piggies in a blanket/Clean your gun when it's all done”
By 1996, it seems Lips wasn’t getting any at all. Hence the tender ode to self-love 5 Knuckle Shuffle:
“Stroke it, stroke it really hard/I wanna watch it blow a yard...All I wanna do is shake my stick/Pullin' my pecker really does the trick”
Lips’ enthusiasm for female anatomy took a virtually worshipful turn in 1997, with Show Me Your Tits perhaps his most desperate sounding lyric yet, alongside celebratory feminist anthem Hair Pie (“It's got the taste that can't be beat/More than a man’s treat/Knee high in hair pie”).
W.A.S.P.
The early legend was that W.A.S.P. stood for We Are Sexual Perverts (Blackie confronted the acronym mystery with the quip “We Ain’t Sure, Pal”). Whatever the truth, they launched with arguably the most confrontationally randy tune in rock history. 1984’s Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) begins with Blackie boasting about owning porn (“I’ve got pictures of naked ladies lying on their beds”), before presenting a situation that feels more like a hypothesis than a guarantee:
“I’ll do whatever I want to, to ya/I'll nail your ass to the sheets
A pelvic thrust and the sweat starts to sting ya/I fuck like a beast”
The single caused such a hoo-hah that on second album ditty Ballcrusher Blackie replaced the word ‘fuck’ with a guitar slide (“Before I go leave her in her dust/I'm gonna **** till she can't stand up”). After this censorious interference, Blackie tried his hand at innuendo on 1986’s Shoot From The Hip - and failed, majestically:
“Cock the hammer slowly and aim it at your love
Put my barrel in your holster like a velvet glove...
Hot and sticky, here it comes
I got the bullet, load it up, slide it into place
My emotions coming down all across your face”
After fleeing the world of smut to try his hand at Pete Townshend-style rock operas with a social conscience, in his mid-forties Blackie returned W.A.S.P. to the world of sleaze with 1999’s Helldorado, yielding such delicate gems as Don’t Cry (Just Suck) (“Come on and do me until I'm red, like a dick on a dog”) and Dirty Balls:
“I wanna do you like the wicked bitch you are
Call me a bastard, a real bad attitude
Shove it in their faces, show my dirty ooh”
Well.
Methods Of Mayhem
You might have expected to find Mötley Crüe in the running, but in truth none of their sex lyrics are quite explicit or egregious enough. However, when Tommy Lee formed Methods Of Mayhem in 1999, within one single he’d outdone Crue’s entire career for cack-handed smut, as Get Naked attests:
“Clitorises are fearin’ me, it's bigger than Ron Jeremy
Cause it's them ass cheeks that make my ass weak
And I've been runnin' with the blue balls since last week...
Fuck the cunt games you girls can't complain
And I ain't leavin' til you're sleepin’ on the cum stains”
Hed PE
Of all the nu metal superstars bringing back shit smut in the new millennium, Hed PE took the soggy biscuit. Frontman Jared Gomes is the poet laureate of bad sex lyrics, producing such jizzy pearls of wisdom as 2005’s Amerikan Beauty:
“I'm lookin for a big butt to squeeze on these nuts
...Now ya put on these heels and ya arch your back
And I’ma crack ya ass in half with my eight-inch staff”
And from the same album, the delightful CBC - which stands for ‘Cum Bitch Cum’. Charming.
“I'll make a slut cum nine times
Then I'll say "Can we make more babies?"
Can I get that pussy from behind?
Can I make these pussy lips smoke like clubs from the 80s?”
He outdid himself with this ingenious couplet from 2006’s Let’s Ride:
“Can I hit that, can I rip that, can I lick that, can I get that from behind?
I'm murderin' and stabbin' so much vag I'm wanted for vagicide”
However, by 2007 Jared was hitting his mid-forties, surely too old to get away with such aggressively pervy lyrics. So on Mirrorballin’ he introduced a poetic romanticism worthy of Keats: “Hey shorty come on over tonight/And I’ll eat your little pussy underneath the moonlight.” Awww, how lovely.
