Depending on who you’re talking to, sex is either the most natural thing on earth or a shameful sin that must be endured without pleasure to ensure the future of the human race.
Whether it’s being celebrated or censored, discussed openly or surreptitiously, done for procreation or recreation, you can be sure of one thing – if you mention it, you get people’s attention. (Hey, that’s just biology. Or chemistry. Or some sort of science thing.)
When the Billboard Hot 100 launched on Aug. 4, 1958, America wasn’t exactly in its most socially progressive era. You could sing about crushes, hand holding and even kissing on the radio, but you dare not mention the dirty. But since humans are wired to think about it regardless of social mores, songs that subtly tipped to the nasty penetrated popular music anyway.
Musicians spoke about it in coded slang terms, alluded to it in song lyrics (both poetic and crass) or implied it by singing the most innocent words in a suggestive tone. Heck, rock n’ roll – the youth culture music of the Boomer Era – is named after it (as far back as the 1910s, African American communities were using the phrase “rock and roll” as a euphemism for sex).
Following the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, the U.S. began to loosen up, and by the ‘70s, it was only the old fogies wagging their fingers and clucking their tongues when the words “sex” and “sexy” began to appear in the titles of hit songs on the Billboard charts.
And that’s what this list is about – the most popular songs in Hot 100 history to have the words “sex” or “sexy” in the title. Some of these Hot 100 hits are, well, hot; others are hokey; a couple have aged poorly.
Without beating around the bush any further, here are the 15 biggest songs with “sex” or “sexy” in the title in Hot 100 history.
This ranking is based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart. Songs are ranked based on an inverse point system, with weeks at No. 1 earning the greatest value and weeks at No. 100 earning the least. To ensure equitable representation of the biggest hits from each era, certain time frames were weighted to account for the difference between turnover rates from those years.
