Eighteen Tunes to Screw To, While You’re Stuck Inside
This story was originally published on Broke Ass Stuart’s Goddamn Website five years ago. Here, it’s been updated and also includes a Spotify link.
Cue up the entire playlist with a single click: Eighteen Tunes to Screw To
And stay tuned for a follow-up list the next week or two.
I used to have a Spotify playlist called Music To Screw To, a curated aural orgy of thumping bass and wah-wah guitar glory. All the obvious songs were there —”Whole Lotta Love,” where Robert Plant sounds like he’s having an psychedelic orgasm on tape. “Come Together,” with its slinky, throbbing bassline. The sexily contemporary “Lebanese Blonde” and the R&B classic “In Between the Sheets,” among others.
Naturally, I turned on this playlist one night when I was giving a platonic massage to a new friend I was hoping to seduce. When the friend inevitably went over to my laptop before I could say stop, they saw the playlist name, and I was caught wet handed. Embarrassing? Kinda.
I’ve since renamed the playlist Ahhh.
Playlists like these are important. Without them, your entire music libraries would be on shuffle like a parade of drunken bumble bees and coked-up hornets. A song like “Islands In the Stream” might come on when undergarments are being seductively removed. Then, as a finger grazes a hole with feather-like sensitivity, on comes the blaring of “Yakety Yak.” You can panic and try and make up a story, like assuring your friend that it’s a remnant from when you wrote a research paper on The Coasters’ valuable influence on the 1957 music scene, but it will be too late.
Yes yes, you want your sexy music to invoke an atmosphere that’s smooth, secure, occasionally pulsating and sometimes rocking — without feeling that uneasy sensation you might experience when an anvil comes crashing through a window or a pigeon flies into an aircraft engine.
This should go without saying, but we live in a matrix that is increasingly reliant on small, portable gizmos. Do not—I repeat, do not—listen to any of these songs with an iPhone or any other device incapable of delivering huge reserves of bass. If you do, you may as well cue up “The Sound of Music” and then drizzle cold mayonnaise all over your genitals.
Ok, are you ready? First, listen to the playlist alone and get a feel for which songs you’d like to play during foreplay, intercourse, and aftermath, since they’re listed here in no particular order. Then, invite someone over, crank the bass up, hit play, and let the vibrations start to rumble.
Eighteen Songs to Screw To:
On The Road Again by Canned Heat
Passing By by Zero 7
What’s better than a song that sounds like a cross between Pink Floyd and Air? I like to listen to this with fat headphones because the sultry vocal harmony is panned beautifully between two ears. Wearing fat headphones might be awkward in bed with a partner, though, so just play it on a stereo really loud. The bass is gigantic.
Mambo Sun by T-Rex
The less popular but more sex-appropriate pioneers of glam rock alongside David Bowie. Lava lamp-shag carpet-big hair-sexy scream-fuzz guitar-ooh-aah-party, compressed into 3:41 of ear massage.
A Go Go by John Scofield
John Scofield looks like an accountant. On better days, maybe he looks like a disheveled math professor. The sounds he creates are a different story, however. I once saw him live and nearly shit my pants when he plugged a wah wah pedal into a backwards pedal and made the most satanic noises I’d ever heard come from a musical instrument. This track is slow, dark and perfectly moody—and filled with his signature nerve-twisting guitar weirdness.
FunkShun by Albert King
Albert King’s voice is a stunner—soaring, barking, hooting and crooning all at once. In any case, he doesn’t sing on this song because it’s an instrumental. Smokey piano, simmering horns, snaky bass and biting guitar all make this tune groove like it’s escaping the steamy window of a Memphis juke joint.
Stretched Home by The Album Leaf
An ambient instrumental with a soaring chorus that may remind you of the music from The Legend of Zelda. That might not sound sexy, but it can work as a soundtrack to intercourse that’s particularly triumphant. Like the battle of Waterloo.
The Robots by Kraftwerk
These guys were making electronic music decades ahead of their time, and this song is their quintessential ode. It is deep and minimal, and sounds no less relevant today than it did in the 1970s.
Come On and Love Me by Lenny Kravitz
Lenny Kravitz and Creed had at least one thing in common—they both reached high levels of popularity with shitty music that eclipsed their earlier work that was actually good. On the correct side of that arc, this song comes from Lenny’s album “Are You Gonna Go My Way” where he channels the spirit of Jimi Hendrix quite effectively. It’s filthy and sensual, drenched in reverb and garage-echo drumming.
Blues Man by Stephen Stills
You know that song “Our House” by Crosby Stills Nash and Young, about a very very very fine house with two cats in the yard? Graham Nash wrote that. Stephen Stills was the grit in that band, the source of much delicious tension and famous for doing things like soaking his guitar strings in barbecue sauce to make them sound more fucked up. On Blues Man, it’s just Stephen solo with an acoustic guitar. His vocals are like a bar fight compressed into a set of whispers, and the incessant twang of his finger picking sounds like his guitar is six inches from your ear. This song smokes.
Tribute To Muddy by Johnny Winter
Johnny Winter was blind, and an albino, and the brother of Edgar Winter of “Free Ride” fame. This is the one song that inspired this entire list — bass that pounds like thrusting hips, guitar bits that sound like a pubescent boner, and Johnny growling and wailing like someone possessed. “Tribute to Muddy” is a bit heavy in its delivery, less a soundtrack for a candle-lit caress, more of something to blare if you are (1) a cowboy fucking a cheerleader in a barn, (2) a cheerleader fucking a cowboy in a barn, (3) two cowboys taking turns fucking each other in a barn, or (3) two cheerleaders scissoring in a barn. Don’t forget the sub woofer.
Radian by Air
I cannot think of enough expletives to describe this song, and even calling it a “song” seems like an injustice. Turn the bass up very high. At about 3:10, just when you and your sex partner(s) feel like your heads are going to explode like watermelons filled with dynamite, in comes an ethereal harp that takes the track to a more floaty realm. A knockout.
If Only Tonight We Could Sleep by The Cure
Most of the songs on this list are characterized by walloping bass and pulsating drums. Leave it to the Cure to shatter that blueprint, instead creating an eastern soundscape of glittery spider webs, swaying peacock feathers and plunging forays towards a sort of sitar-laden womb. The final vocal line: “Don’t let it end.”
I’m In the Mood by John Lee Hooker
This song, like the one by Johnny Winter, employs a blues rhythm called the shuffle, and it’s really amazing how much it evokes the feel and imagery of pounding hips. This came out in 1951, has sold over a million copies, and got Keith Richards to say “holy shit, I need to do this. Mick! Come check this out!” Not only is this track absurdly sexy, but it gives you a small glimpse of what old-school blues music sounds like, and every sex-having music aficionado should be in the know.
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