Guns N’ Roses closed out Appetite for Destruction, their 1987 debut, with… well, a bang.
According to rock ‘n roll lore, during sessions in New York for “Rocket Queen,” the band flew in a stripper who had been dating drummer Steven Adler for a few months. He wasn’t at the studio that day, but Slash and Axl Rose were. The frontman made a proposition: Would she be willing to have sex in the vocal booth so they could record the sounds? She said she’d do it as a favor for the band, and all she asked in return was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. As they were laying down the blanket and setting up the microphone, she did ask everyone to leave the studio. Engineer Michael Barbiero set the faders and left his assistant in charge, but others snuck back in for a peep.
Nearly 40 years later, you can still hear their grunts and moans on the song’s bridge, as though goading Slash’s guitar riff. It’s outrageous, but it also fits the theme of the song, on which Rose boasts of his Mephistophelian ability to talk people into anything. “I’ve got a tongue like a razor, a sweet switchblade knife,” he sings by way of seduction. Oddly, it’s only on the final verse—after their tryst has ended—that his bravado falls away and Rose reveals himself to be, if only by his own estimation, a caring, clinging lover. “All I ever wanted was for you to know that I care.” In other words, the sex you hear in “Rocket Queen” isn’t entirely gratuitous, which with this band is something like a miracle.
From its earliest days, rock and roll allowed its artists and its audiences to voice desires they couldn’t say out loud. It was a vehicle for celebrations of sex and expressions of intense physical yearning, sometimes coded for the censors (“I’m a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store,” sang Big Joe Turner) and occasionally brazen (“One night with you is what I’m now praying for,” declared Elvis). Over the years rock and pop artists grew more sophisticated in their treatment of sex as lyrical subject matter and as something like a separate instrument in the mix. The act became a crucial part of the psychedelic, quasi-mystical questings of the 1960s, the hedonistic drive of the Me Decade, and the masculine entitlement of the Reagan era. Whether to create a bold artistic statement or to gin up controversy among the pearl-clutching set, artists have modified their rhythms and melodies with moans and whimpers, gasps and cries, shouts and grunts, oh’s and oooh’s and unnnhh’s.
So, just in time for Valentine’s Day, here’s a brief history of how rock incorporated the horizontal mambo as a musical style.
John & Jackie: “Little Girl” (1958)
Not much is known about this would-be hit from rock’s first wave. It may or may not have been sung by John Maus, who would achieve fame in the 1960s by changing his name to John Walker and founding the Walker Brothers. The identity of Jackie, who mimics a very spirited orgasm on the chorus, is lost to time. Also unknown: whether they thought they could actually get away with it. The single was apparently banned on jukeboxes, which may have contributed to the shuttering of the Aladdin label. Fortunately, Rhino included the song on its excellent 2006 box set Rockin’ Bones: 1950s Punk & Rockabilly, arguing that the decade of poodle skirts and sock hops was raunchier than you might think.
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin: “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus” (19… 69!)
In 1967 Serge Gainsbourg cut this duet with Brigitte Bardot, and the tales of their vocal booth intimacy were so widespread that the actress begged him not to release it, lest her boyfriend get jealous. Two years later, Gainsbourg recut the song with his girlfriend Jane Birkin, whose moans were so convincing that it inspired an urban legend that they actually had sex in the studio. That wasn’t true, but retailers were nevertheless forbidden from selling the single to anyone under 21. With its loping bass and humid strings, the music evokes the post-coital drift that follows an afternoon tryst, as the lovers grow dreamily philosophical (“You are the wave, I am the barren island”). Even if you don’t speak French, you’ll still blush.
Man: “Erotica” (also 1969)
A fine B-level psych band with a penchant for album-cover nudity and shameless pomposity (“And Castles Rises in Children’s Eyes”), Man are remembered primarily for one song on their ’69 debut, Revelation. Then as now, “Erotica” overshadows everything else they ever did, as it marries their hallucinogenic jamming with the heavy panting of an unnamed woman. Wisely, they let her take the lead, as though they’re letting her excitement guide their instruments. It was banned in the U.K. upon release, which only stoked its notoriety.
Led Zeppelin: “Whole Lotta Love” (what was happening in 1969?)
While it’s probably the most popular song on this list, “Whole Lotta Love” is also one of the more unusual, in that it’s a man rather than a woman moaning in our ears. Most rock songs are concerned with conveying female pleasure, often solely to reflect better on the male artist/lover. Here it’s Robert Plant moving toward orgasm, his utterations mixed in with tabla and theremin—as though that lengthy middle section was caught between astral projection and physical sensation. When Zeppelin refused to release it as a single, radio stations played the song anyway, more often than not omitting that infamous two minutes.
The Chakachas: “Jungle Fever” (1971)
The funkiest band to ever slither out of Belgium, the Chakachas had a minor hit with this instrumental, which along with Deep Throat helped to define “porno chic” in the 1970s. The band mixed wakkachikka guitars, a slinky rhythm section, and breathless flutes to create a supremely sleazy jam, thus setting the mood for X-rated soundtracks during the Golden Age of Porn. The ultimate flourish: A woman punctuates the boudoir rhythms with excited Spanish-language pleas (“no… no… no… síííííí…”), as if you didn’t already know what the song is for. The groove is soaked in so much sexual sweat that Paul Thomas Anderson couldn’t have made Boogie Nights without “Jungle Fever” on the soundtrack.
Donna Summer: “Love to Love You Baby” (1975)
The Citizen Kane of sex songs. This stone classic from the disco era might have been written by Giorgio Moroder and produced by Pete Bellotte, but Donna Summer commands the song from the first moment she opens her mouth. She coos the lyrics in between ecstatic sighs, until the lyrics blend with the moans and you can no longer tell which is which. It’s one of the most remarkable and influential vocals of the rock era, as Summer turns the song outward, as though music was the ultimate form of lovemaking.
Meat Loaf: “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” (1977)
I like to imagine that someone explained the concept of first base to Jim Steinman and he immediately sat himself down and wrote a mini-opera that literalizes the backseat-baseball analogy. It’s got Mr. Loaf as the teenage horndog (“we were barely 17 and we were barely dressed”) and the great Ellen Foley as the girl helping him steam up the windows. As the petting gets heavier, Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto begins an excited play by play, backed by some crowd noise and some rhythmic groaning. Meat steals second and third faster than Rickey Henderson, but he stops just short of home plate when Foley demands to know if it’s true love or just teen hormones. In the final act the song contorts into a crude Borscht Belt finale that’s far too cynical for its utter ridiculousness.
Yoko Ono: “Kiss Kiss Kiss” (1980)
To track her B side to John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over,” Yoko Ono wrapped herself in a blanket and turned off all the lights in the vocal booth. It was a means of creating an intimate space for an intimate song, shielding herself in order to sound unguarded. “Kiss Kiss Kiss” has a sing-song flair to it, especially her winking repetition of the word “kiss,” which gives the song a lived-in eroticism: It’s not about the excitement of a new lover, but the comfort of a familiar body next to yours. Her performance intensifies in the song’s final minute, as she moans “faster” and “harder” in Japanese and finally loses herself in the rapture. Balancing pop and avant garde, the song took on an overwhelming poignancy when her husband was murdered just weeks after its release.
Black Flag: “Slip It In” (1984)
There are a lot of reasons to celebrate the West Coast hardcore scene, but a healthy attitude toward sex isn’t one of them. Punks reverted to misogyny out of ignorance or laziness, and few could sing about sex and actually sound sexy (Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry being two exceptions). The riffs on Black Flag’s mid-’80s incel anthem are fierce, but they’re deployed in service of Henry Rollins’ distressingly aggressive vocals and Greg Ginn’s grimly bitter lyrics. The song is ostensibly about the groupies who said they wouldn’t fuck the band and then went ahead and fucked the band, and Black Flag are alarmed at the hypocrisy. The song ends with a couple getting down to it, but there’s no pleasure to be found anywhere.
La Toya Jackson: “Sexual Feeling” (1990)
Two years before Madonna released Erotica, La Toya Jackson recorded this dance orgy in Milan. The sighs and moans coalesce into beat, intensified by whoops of the popular “It Takes Two” sample, but the highlight is Jackson’s vocal performance, which mixes Italian and English non sequiturs (“Baby, don’t you dare dare touch it, you know what I mean?”) and single entendres (“Now come… come let me feel it deep down inside”). It sounds like the direct sexual and musical heir to “Love to Love You Baby,” updated to the safe sex era.
