The 10 least sexy songs about sex

‘Sex Type Thing’ – Stone Temple Pilots

When talking about the biggest names in grunge, Stone Temple Pilots have always been slightly on the fringes of the scene. Although they had a lot in common with acts like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, their origins in San Diego a few months after ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ broke either felt like the cheapest cash-in possible or a really bad joke put on by a wannabe hair metal act trying to compete with the flannel shirt crowd. While Scott Weiland was able to be equally as authentic as any of his grunge contemporaries, it didn’t exactly get off to the greatest start.

Since people like Cobain were incredibly vocal about their stance against the mistreatment of women, hearing Weiland take on the role of an abuser throughout ‘Sex Type Thing’ is extremely off-putting. From the first line of the song onward, he practically sounds like one of the dangerous “ladies men” that sit at the other side of the pub who will ultimately try to slip something in someone’s drink and keep them in a personal dungeon.

Even if Weiland meant everything to be a complete satire, it still wasn’t enough to win over most of the grunge crowd, despite him trying his best by donning a dress when he came out to perform the tune live. There’s always room for some social critiques in rock and roll, but it’s all in the delivery most of the time, and Weiland may have flown too close to the sun on his first step to the plate.

‘It’s So Easy’ – Guns N’ Roses

No one in Guns N’ Roses was going to earn points for chivalry throughout their time together. They embodied everything that sex, drugs and rock and roll stood for, and that normally meant making tunes that weren’t always that respectful to the opposite sex. If ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ made us understand that the band was the cool kind of dangerous, ‘It’s So Easy’ helps remind us why we might have wanted to keep Axl Rose at a distance if we ever came across him in public.

Although anyone can listen to the chorus of Rose talking about everyone trying to please him, the first line of the tune about him creepily eyeing up your sister and if she’s ready to fornicate comes off as way too predatory. The breakdown is where it gets truly awkward, though, where he aims to depict his girlfriend in the sickest way possible and sees her only as someone who’s useful in granting his most graphic sexual fantasies.

Even though the whole point behind Guns N’ Roses’ first album was about how dangerous it sounded to the public, it’s not like Rose was an upstanding citizen in every sense of the word. He had already been hot and heavy with drummer Steven Adler’s girlfriend during the recording of the album, so it’s not that far a leap in logic to think that he actually believed every word he was singing.

‘Your Body is A Wonderland’ – John Mayer

There’s a fine line that comes with playing it cute when talking about sex. Most people can try their way to tiptoe around the topic to get things past the censors, but it gets a bit awkward when people are able to write a song about getting hot and heavy with something that preschoolers can also sing on their way to class. But even during John Mayer’s prime, he was already starting to look more than a little bit punchable when writing ‘Your Body Is A Wonderland’.

Which is strange to say about the person who has become the modern version of yacht rock for many people. While Mayer can certainly make fantastic guitar solos when he wants to, hearing him use words like ‘bubblegum tongue’ to describe his other half is more than a little bit cringy, as if he took everything that he saw on a Hallmark card and decided to make it sound dirty.

Then again, it’s hard to look at the song as anything more than a timestamp for why this era of Mayer’s career was so abhorrent. We know now that this is the same person that would one day manage to hold his own with the remaining members of the Grateful Dead, so hearing him sing a song that sounds like every douche at a party trying to strum his way into a girl’s pants has a certain stench coming off of it.

‘For Her’ – Fiona Apple

Not every song about sex is meant to be the easiest thing to listen. From the beginning of hair metal’s reign, some of the biggest names of the time were writing tunes that toed the line of what was considered good taste, and when looking at the greatest tunes in Warrant’s playbook, it’s not like all of them were trying very hard to be romantic wordsmiths. Fiona Apple was never going to write straightforward songs like that, and anyone who came to Fetch the Bolt Cutters for her traditional ballads was in for a major surprise on ‘For Her’.

Since everyone was listening to this album in the midst of quarantine, hearing her sing about overcoming an abusive relationship felt like an audible horror movie coming to life. While it’s clear that she’s taking aim at someone who screwed her over in the verses, the breakdown is among one of the darkest things to come out of a mainstream artist, as she talks about separating from her former partner and the heinous acts he did to her after years together.

Even without the harsh language, hearing the final harmonies spookily overlap on top of each other is enough for us to get the picture. Everything had started as an innocent tale of someone dropping someone to the curb, but it’s hard to get over this kind of abuse without experiencing the loss of innocence that comes directly afterwards.

‘Closer’ – Nine Inch Nails

By the time Nine Inch Nails were on top of the world, Trent Reznor was absolutely pissed. He had worked all of his life to be able to play the music he loved, and now that he managed to get to the top of the industrial rock mountain, he ended up feeling even more lonely than he was before. While his only way out was for him to force his audience to watch him bleed, it didn’t need to get as graphic as it did on The Downard Spiral.

Despite being the equivalent of watching a psychological horror movie throughout every second, ‘Closer’ is one of the most overtly unsexy songs ever made. The beat certainly has that seductive feeling about it, but listening to Reznor talk about wanting to get closer to God by abusing this person in every way he knows how should have been gross for anyone within earshot. It’s just a shame that not everyone took the hint.

While Reznor intended the song to be something that was horrifying to listen to, that didn’t stop the song from becoming one of the anthems in strip clubs across the world when it started gaining traction. It certainly is sexy for a certain definition of the word, but anyone who sees this as their go-to sex jam is ten times more likely to have some sort of dungeon at home with bodies of his previous victims.

‘Do What U Want’ – Lady Gaga

There is never a wrong way for someone to approach their take on a sex jam. While all art is considered subjective, it’s equally as hard to judge anyone’s sexual preferences not knowing what they are into. Even if someone saw Lady Gaga as one of the finest songcrafters of her time, they still may have had some reservations about ‘Do What U Want’ if they looked at the credits for more than two seconds.

If you look at only the music, though, this seems like a firm critique of people who only look at pop stars at the surface level. Since the whole album was meant to be a more artistic piece than what Gaga had been used to, this could have been a great way for people to see the horrors that women face in the industry. It’s a solid idea for a song, but why the hell would anyone want someone like R Kelly near this kind of tune?

While it’s easy to forgive and forget since all of the allegations surrounding him in Surviving R Kelly hadn’t come to light yet, people still knew that he was into some freaky stuff, so why the hell would anyone with good taste allow him on a song as he talks about doing what he wants with someone’s body? We already know what the man is capable of when given total control, and even if he was playing a character, every news story that came out about him made any good merit of this song virtually obsolete.

‘Marvin Gaye’ – Meghan Trainor and Charlie Puth

And now we come to the last songs that are actually attempting to be sexy. Most people can try their best to make a tune that sounds more than a little bit erotic, but it’s all about striking the right tone when it comes to making something sound seductive or off-putting. And listening to Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor sing ‘Marvin Gaye’, you’d swear both of them had never heard about the concept of sex in their lives.

While there’s nothing wrong with being a little bit coy with innuendo, the fact that they aren’t even hiding what the tune is about doesn’t work well with the squeaky-clean music behind them. Not every sex song has to necessarily be sleazy, but hearing this song paired with the video of them performing in a school gymnasium makes them look like two of the cool younger teachers trying to explain sex to kids.

But while it’s not a bad idea to write a song about safe sex, invoking the name of one of the greatest sex jam authors of all time wasn’t necessary. Most people have struck out trying to write something that was a bit more sexy than what they were known for, but even if Puth and Trainor had the best intentions, leave ‘Let’s Get It On’ out of this.

‘Daddy’ – Korn

Sex is not always a laughing matter when it comes to song lyrics. Anyone can try to put a little bit of juvenile humour in their tunes regarding sex, but there are many people out there who have complicated feelings about everything because of their background. And while Korn has had many moments that were hard to listen to, hearing Jonathan Davis leave nothing to the imagination when talking about his traumatic sexual assault is still one of the most intense metal songs of all time.

While most of the band’s debut dealt with Davis going through the deep recesses of his mind, ‘Daddy’ wasn’t even a song that was supposed to unfold like it did. The band had the backing track ready to go, but when the frontman stepped into the vocal booth, he went on for over ten minutes about how he was abused as a child and how his parents never believed him, including moments where he is heard weeping in the studio.

It’s nice to see that Davis was able to overcome his demons for the rest of the world to hear, but for anyone who has experienced something like this, there needs to be some sort of content warning before diving into everything. Still, it’s better for someone to let out all of their pain on a record rather than taking it out on themselves.

‘Polly’ – Nirvana

From day one, Kurt Cobain was not messing around when calling for the protection of women at Nirvana shows. The whole point behind his music was to make songs that people could relate to, and that included taking aim at anyone who tried to take advantage of someone. As if the liner notes to Incesticide didn’t make everything abundantly clear about Cobain’s women’s rights values, ‘Polly’ was one of the hardest looks into what makes a man do something so heinous in the first place.

After reading a report about a woman who was sexually tortured after a Seattle concert and getting away, Cobain wrote ‘Polly’ from the point of view of the torturer. Even though he is speaking from the perspective of this sick man, the real horror of the song is seeing him sound so lackadaisical, practically approaching this woman’s pain with the same tone he would have if he were making himself a cup of coffee.

And when that horror became real at Nirvana shows, Cobain was usually the first to shut everything down, usually calling out members of the audience who were being disrespectful and referring to any sexual abusers as ‘plankton’ in the press when asked about it. While it’s still insane to hear a song this progressive land on one of the most celebrated records of the 1990s, it’s sad that most people haven’t bothered taking its lesson to heart.

‘Iowa’ – Slipknot

Nothing about Slipknot really screamed sex in any way. They certainly had their groupies as all rockstars do, but no one was exactly going into a track like ‘Disasterpiece’ or ‘The Heretic Anthem’ with the hope of getting turned on, unless you consider critiques of religion or shooting someone in the head particularly arousing. But even for a band that made the most intense music of the 2000s, a song like ‘Iowa’ was too scary for most of the band to revisit too often.

While the music itself is already pretty off-putting, hearing Corey Taylor take himself into the darkest places he can during the verses is enough to make someone’s skin crawl. The premise of the tune is already a bit macabre as he comes across a corpse, but you all have seen the title of this article, so it’s bound to get gross incredibly fast, especially when Taylor gets into the screaming portion of the tune.

None of the screams are disingenuous, either, with the frontman eventually cutting himself up after singing the song while naked in the middle of the control room. Although sex jams are already an acquired taste depending on what everyone enjoys, this is about as close to an anti-sex jam as someone can get. And for anyone who hears one of their friends play this at full volume, be sure to check on them to make sure they’re doing alright.