Dystopian Dance Mix Vol. 19: Boner Jams ’16

Well, folks, here it is: the dumbest thing we’ve ever published on Dystopian Dance Party. A couple of weeks ago, we floated the idea of a playlist of songs about penises; this idea gradually built steam until, before we knew it, it had become our official 19th Dystopian Dance Mix. It’s basically as if we both lost a bet with ourselves.

So, no, we’re not proud of this moment. But we’ll own it. Here are 19 songs about dicks. They might not all be winners, but they’re definitely all weiners.

…We’ll see ourselves out.

1. Royce da 5’9″: “My Friend”
(from Rock City, 2002)

Just in case you’re still confused about the level of discourse we’re dealing with here, allow veteran Detroit rhymeslinger Royce da 5’9″ to clear things up: his 2002 track “My Friend” begins with the sampled snatch of dialogue, “A man is defined by his…” followed by a resounding “boing!“–i.e., the internationally recognized sound effect for a boner. Catch his drift? The rest of the song is no more subtle, with eye-rolling phallic double entendres heavily indebted to the Fat Boys‘ “My Nuts” (sample rhyme: “Born at the same time in the same place / Twins with the same mom, but not the same face”) over an admittedly dope DJ Premier beat that samples Whodini‘s “Friends” and the Bar-Kays’ “Let’s Have Some Fun.” It is, unquestionably, stupid. But it only gets worse from here.

2. Fred Schneider: “Monster”
(from Fred Schneider and the Shake Society, 1984)

Take, for example, this (mercifully) buried gem from B-52s frontman Fred Schneider. Despite sounding exactly like a B-52s song from the early ’80s, “Monster” was released on Schneider’s 1984 solo album–presumably because his bandmates passed on the idea of a chorus comprised entirely by screams of feigned horror at the size of the, um, “monster” in Fred’s pants. Though, come to think of it, that’s Kate Pierson singing on the track and appearing in the music video, so congratulations to Cindy Wilson for her good taste, I guess. Oh, yeah: “Monster” also features its co-producer, P-Funk‘s Bernie Worrell, on the synthesizer, which…well, that actually kind of makes sense.

3. KISS: “Love Gun”
(from Love Gun, 1977)

If you read our guides to the best and (especially) worst of KISS, you probably noticed that frontman Paul Stanley likes to write songs about his dick; it’s pretty much his earliest and greatest muse. Well, this is one of the first–and, by default, the best–of Stanley’s odes to what he likes to call his “pistol,” his “six shooter of sex,” or, most troubling of all, his “UZI of ooze.” Does anybody else get the weird feeling he might be overcompensating for something?

4. Beyoncé: “Ego”
(from I Am… Sasha Fierce deluxe edition, 2008)

You’ve probably already noticed that the vast majority of the songs on this playlist are written by men. This is for two reasons: first, it’s a sexist world, and there’s just more popular music out there by men than by women, period; and second (/more importantly), dudes are way more in love with their penises than even the most hetero of women. Except, apparently, for Beyoncé, who in 2008 co-wrote and released this touching piano-driven ode to Jay-Z‘s dong. Oh, I’m sorry, did I say dong? I meant his “ego”–because, you know, it totally makes sense that people would complain that a man’s sense of self-worth is “too wide” and “won’t fit.” The cool thing about the song, however, is when Bey flips the chorus around and applies it to herself: “I got a big ego / Such a huge ego / But he love my big ego.” So, either she’s talking about the phallus in the Freudian sense, or she and Hov have a thing for pegging. Either way, a bold move for feminism!

5. 50 Cent featuring Olivia: “Candy Shop”
(from The Massacre, 2005)

Far be it from me to “no homo” a man who spends as much time with his shirt off as 50 Cent, but do these hypermasculine rappers have any idea how, well, gay they sound when they compare their members to lollipops? Again, I’m not judging here, but couldn’t they at least choose a type of phallic candy that wasn’t used prominently by Damon Wayons as Blaine Edwards of “Men on Films?” Apparently not, because on his 2005 hit “Candy Shop,” Fiddy famously invited us to–you guessed it–“lick the lollipop.” He also makes reference to his 2003 Lil’ Kim collaboration “Magic Stick,” which is an only slightly less homoerotic way to refer to one’s manhood. So, I guess what I’m saying is, come on out the closet, 50, don’t be afraid to be what you is!

6. Humble Pie: “One Eyed Trouser Snake Rumba”
(from Humble Pie, 1970)

It should come as no surprise that the band who named their seventh album, 1974’s Thunderbox, after a 17th century slang term for the toilet would also have an encyclopedic knowledge of penile euphemisms. And sure enough, we get a glimpse of their expertise on this 1970 slice of (literal) cock rock: “I got the key and you got the door,” frontman Steve Marriott crows, with way too much pride in his voice for a grown man making thinly-veiled references to his dingus, all while the band’s original guitarist Peter Frampton lays down hammering blues-rock riffs that are pretty much the precise musical definition of “phallic.” That’s right, folks: if you ever want to cut Mr. “Baby, I Love Your Way” down to size, just remind him that he used to play a song called “One Eyed Trouser Snake Rumba.”

7. Pixies: “Gigantic”
(1988 single, available on Wave of Mutilation: The Best of Pixies)

At least in slavery-haunted America, the discourse around dicks (dick-scourse?) often contains a latent racial element, as the people whose ancestors stripped African men nude and gawked at their bodies on the auction block seemingly can’t stop obsessing over just what it was they saw. This weird cultural obsession with black dicks (and their potential union with white women) was given a light-hearted airing-out by Kim Deal of Boston alt-rockers the Pixies with her 1988 songwriting debut “Gigantic.” A ribald, voyeuristic song, partly inspired by Sissy Spacek’s character’s affair with a Black teenager in the 1986 film Crimes of the Heart, it’s never quite clear the degree to which “Gigantic” is complicit with the racial stereotypes it invokes: when Deal sings “what a big black mess, what a hunk of love,” her tongue is certainly planted in cheek, but there’s a bit of a leer there as well. In any case, the song is certainly notable for a reason; how many other ’80s college rock bands can you name who wrote songs about both Surrealist cinema and weiners?

8. Aerosmith: “Big Ten Inch Record”
(from Toys in the Attic, 1975)

Here with a slightly less racially-charged reference to large schlongs is another Boston band, Aerosmith,  and the goofy closing track for their 1975 hard rock masterpiece Toys in the Attic. A straightforward cover of the 1952 Rhythm & Blues single by (the apparently aptly-named) Bull Moose Jackson, “Big Ten Inch Record” has a simple enough conceit: Steven Tyler sings about how much his woman loves his “big ten-inch,” only to reveal that the object in question is nothing less innocuous than a “record by a band that plays the blues” (geez, guys, get your mind out of the gutter!). All of which would work a lot better if I believed for a second that Tyler is packing ten inches, but hey, I guess they don’t make records in five-and-a-half-inch size.

9. The Doors: “Crawling King Snake”
(from L.A. Woman, 1971)

The blues, of course, boasts a long tradition of colorful metaphors for the male sex organ (just ask Led Zeppelin). One of the more on-the-nose examples of this tradition is the Delta blues standard “Crawling King Snake“: originally recorded by Big Joe Williams, it’s also been performed by the likes of John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. But it took the Bozo Dionysus himself, Jim Morrison of the Doors, to really beat us over the head with that whole “snake = dick” metaphor. Morrison handles the song’s double entendres with all the subtlety of a man who once infamously threatened a live audience of thousands with indecent exposure; by the time he starts telling us to “get on out there on your hands and knees,” it’s fair to wonder whether he missed the memo and somehow didn’t realize that a double entendre is supposed to have two meanings.

10. The Stooges: “Loose (Take 2)”
(1970 recording, available on 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions)

Speaking of beating us over the head with dicks, here’s Iggy Pop and the Stooges, who you might have thought were being explicit enough when Iggy boasted about how he “stick[s] it deep inside” on their 1970 proto-punk anthem “Loose.” And you’d be right–though the Dum Dum Boys apparently had to learn it the hard way, as earlier takes of the song made it absolutely clear just what it was Iggy was “sticking.” So if you’re a fan of Fun House–which is to say, if you like rock music–be thankful that Ig’s first lyrical instincts didn’t prevail; otherwise, we’d have spent the last 45 years singing along to lines like, “Well I’m flyin’ on a red hot weenie / Yeah I’m ridin’ on a big hot dog / Well it’s a thing that’s slick and greasy / Well it’s a thing that’s big and long.”

11. Missy Elliott: “Work It”
(from Under Construction, 2002)

Missy Elliott’s saucy 2002 crossover hit isn’t about dicks, necessarily, any more than it’s “about” Missy’s ba-donk-a-donk-donk or her preference for a shaved chocha. But it makes the list for its brilliant use of a trumpeting elephant sound effect to signify a large penis. Back when I first heard the song, I always assumed this was just the product of a clever radio edit, but nope: it’s there on the album version, too, and somehow it paints a more vivid picture than any word.

12. Dazz Band: “Joystick”
(from Joystick, 1983)

A particularly weird attempt to jump on the video-game bandwagon of the early 1980s, the Dazz Band‘s “Joystick” is all about the then-trendy comparison of Atari controllers and dongs, with singers Keith Harrison and Sennie “Skip” Martin imploring the listener to “take control of the stick” and promising that “love is just like a video game.” Even better, the album cover’s choice of a controller (see above) gives us a pretty good idea of what co-writers Bobby Harris’ and/or Eric Fearman’s actual members must look like: skinny, cylindrical, and about four inches long, with bright red buttons on top.

13. The Mothers: “Latex Solar Beef”
(from Fillmore East – June 1971)

Frank Zappa‘s satirical eye moved decidedly below the belt in the 1970s, as he turned from mocking the vacuity of the hippie counterculture to mocking the genital fixation of its bastard offspring, the contemporary hard rock scene. Some have argued that this shift to the sophomoric was beneath him, but fuck it: dick jokes are funny, and meta-dick jokes featuring Flo & Eddie on vocals are even better. Part of a near-album-length suite of songs detailing the squalid interactions between rock stars and groupies–including, most infamously, “The Mud Shark,” almost certainly the earliest public mention of the notorious “shark episode” involving members of Vanilla Fudge and Led Zeppelin–“Latex Solar Beef” is a note-perfect (and, again, literal) cock-rock sendup, with Eddie and the Phlorescent Leech (a.k.a. Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, formerly of the Turtles) lending their faux-operatic harmonies to suggestively nonsensical lyrics about reamers, steamers, and iridescent naughahyde pythons. But the real brilliance of the parody is that it isn’t even much of an exaggeration: as we saw with Humble Pie, plenty of “real” rock bands circa 1971 were singing about their “latex solar beef,” with a lot more earnestness than the Mothers.

14. Ying Yang Twins: “Duts”
(from U.S.A. Still United, 2005)

With all this talk about Mr. Happy, you’d almost think we’d forgotten about his two hairy helpers. But fear not: the Ying Yang Twins (who else?) have us covered, with this ode to something called “duts.” What are duts, you ask? Well, as D-Roc and Kaine helpfully explain, it’s a portmanteau for “my dick and my nuts,” for those occasions when you need to refer to the total package, as it were. How “duts” didn’t make it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 is beyond me, but hey; it still isn’t too late to add it to your own personal lexicon.

15. Jethro Tull: “Kissing Willie”
(from Rock Island, 1989)

If I had to establish an appropriate amount of time to spend contemplating Ian Anderson‘s “willie,” it would be somewhere between “absolutely none” and “not even a fraction of a second’s worth.” And yet Anderson seems unnaturally intent on drawing attention to that other flute he’s packing, from the Renaissance-era codpieces he insisted on wearing onstage in the 1970s to this 1988 single by his band Jethro Tull. I probably don’t need to explain this one to you, do I? Just watch the music video, and enjoy your decades of nightmares about Anderson getting a blowie from Marie Antoinette.

16. AC/DC: “Given the Dog a Bone”
(from Back in Black, 1980)

On the one hand, I feel like we’ve long since made our point about hard rockers’ obsession with their peenies, and at this point we’re just beating a dead horse(‘s dick). But on the other hand, I strongly believe that we would be remiss not to include a track by AC/DC, arguably the single rock band most responsible for turning genital euphemisms into an art form. And they really outdid themselves with “Given the Dog a Bone” in particular, packing the verses with gloriously unsubtle lines like “She’s blowing me crazy / Till my ammunition is dry.” Wait, is it possible that the “bone” is his dick and the “dog” is, you know, like, a bitch? That Brian Johnson; what a poet.

17. David Lee Roth: “Hot Dog and a Shake”
(from Skyscraper, 1988)

Along similar lines, we probably could have left this song off the playlist due to redundancy; but how could we possibly ignore David Lee Roth, a man who has literally made a career out of bouncing around on giant inflatable objects that resemble cocks (see photo)? So here’s “Hot Dog and a Shake,” a song about Diamond Dave’s favorite cheat day meal…ah, who am I kidding, it’s a song about his dick and some jizz, isn’t it? Yeah, I figured.

18. Blowfly: “A Child’s Dick”
(from The Weird World of Blowfly, 1971)

No, this isn’t an especially tasteless holdover from our statutory rape playlist; it’s an act of mourning, goddamn it! This Sunday, vintage soul songwriter and producer Clarence Henry Reid, better known by the moniker of his foul-mouthed alter-ego Blowfly, passed away at the age of 76. Once we heard the news, we knew we had to include him in this playlist; after all, being remembered in this way is pretty much exactly what Blowfly would have wanted. The challenge was in selecting just one song about dicks from his prolific and near-peerlessly filthy discography, which includes paeans to basically every sex organ and sex act known to man. Ultimately, we decided to go with a classic: this unfortunately-titled parody of Stevie Wonder‘s “With a Child’s Heart” from Blowfly’s self-released 1971 debut. It concerns Reid’s alleged struggles with the size of his member, leading to his girl walking out on him because his “joint was only one inch long.” Oddly enough, the little-dick lament isn’t as popular a topic for songwriters as the other end of the big-dick brag, but it’s an important subject to broach nonetheless. So thanks, Blowfly–for this, and for everything else. R.I.P.

19. Chuck Berry: “My Ding-a-Ling”
(1972 single, available on Have Mercy: His Complete Chess Recordings 1969 to 1974)

But really, could this dance mix have ended any other way? Rock’n’roll legend Chuck Berry had the only #1 hit of his career with this live cover of a novelty song by another way-overqualified performer, New Orleans Rhythm & Blues giant Dave Bartholomew; after that, it was all tribute shows with Keith Richards and planting hidden cameras in women’s bathrooms for Mr. Johnny B. Goode. And man, what a depressing way to go out: we’re (clearly) not above a saucy double entendre or two, but “My Ding-a-Ling” is just lame, like an even less knowing, more juvenile version of the previously-discussed “Big Ten Inch Record.” But hey, take heart: at least we’re only making you sit through the single edit, instead of the original 11-and-a-half-minute (!) version from The London Chuck Berry Sessions. I don’t know if Chuck’s “Ding-a-Ling” is a grower, but it definitely ain’t a shower.