Is Minnie Riperton’s ‘Inside My Love’ the sexiest song of all time?
There are some tunes with a definite sexy edge to them. Immediately we’re thinking of Prince’s oeuvre and the bass-heavy R&B tunes that dominated the pop charts of the early 2000s. Yet perhaps the sexiest of all is Minnie Ripperton‘s 1975 classic cut ‘Inside My Love’.
The track was written by Riperton herself, along with her husband and collaborator Richard Rudolph and the producer Leon Ware who would earn acclaim for producing the ultra-sensual I Want You by Marvin Gaye a year later. ‘Inside My Love’ arrived on Adventures in Paradise, although it didn’t achieve broad commercial success given the explicit sexual content of its lead single.
The song tells the story of two lovers engaging in a loving and sexual embrace. The lyrics of the song are highly explicit in their sexual content. Riperton sings beautifully: “You can see inside me / Will you come inside me? / Do you wanna ride inside my love?” Yet it is the mood of the song that really conveys its sexuality; that gorgeous electric piano tone and slow-and-sultry drumbeat are what depict the two former strangers getting to know one another physically.
Rudolph noted that radio stations at the time had shunned the song, as it was just too damn sexy to play across the airwaves. He noted in the liner notes to Adventures in Paradise: “There were programmers at stations that wouldn’t play the song because they felt it was too risqué, which was absurd! If you really look at the lyrics, it’s about a much more spiritual trip. There is a duality, but we always believed that to truly have love and to express that love physically, you have to have the other side of it – the emotional side. ‘While we’re here / The whole world is turning…'”
He added, “That is one of my favourite lyrics of all time. When we performed it live, people would fall out. They could never believe it when Minnie held that note. Minnie would introduce it by saying, ‘This is the song that got me banned. But I got a letter from a nun who said that she didn’t think anything was wrong with it at all. In fact, she kinda got off on it…'”
Indeed, the song is not crude in its sexual content; there is a definite element of spirituality to the lovemaking (presumably between Riperton and Rudolph). This is love, not mere sex. Although, of course, radio DJs could not reasonably pass it off as such. Ware later added, “All I can say is we understood that that was going to happen when we wrote the song. Minnie was just as daring as I was.”
Later, in 1993, A Tribe Called Quest would sample that iconic Rhodes piece in ‘Lyrics to Go’, revitalising the tune and sharing its unrivalled sexiness with a new generation of lovemakers. Revisit Riperton’s iconic classic below.
