Sex is an integral part of the human experience. Self-love is a very common sexual experience (perhaps the most common, even.) So it really should not be a surprise that references to masturbation come up time and time again in music of all genres. What is sometimes surprising is the way it is presented, from the hilarious to the truly bizarre.

“Mr. Richard Smoker” is featured on Ween’s fifth album, 12 Golden Country Greats, which rather amusingly only contains 10 songs. “Mr. Richard Smoker” is not specifically only about masturbation, but rather profiles a man who enjoys many of the finer things in life, from cocaine and hot tubs to, yes, playing with himself.

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Mister Richard Smoker
You’re a chicken choker
Tonight you’re gonna
Let it all hang out

Pantyhose and Aqua-Net
Smokin’ menthol cigarettes
Tonight we’ll tango in the street
You eat dark meat

Oh, The Heartbreakers, bringing us such rock-fueled angst. “All By Myself” is the defiant wail of the withdrawn, the anthem of a lonely man on the edge of society. The song displays moments of lust, of rebellion, of aggression, and of loneliness – and how do all these things play out? That’s right, by making a bit of a mess.

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I don’t need society
To open up my life for me
I don’t need no audience
To shoot you in my cunning sense

I don’t think you understand
What’s that dripping in your hand
All the things you thought you do
You finally met your Waterloo

“Homemade” is off of Sebadoh’s 1993 album, Bubble and Scrape. Sebadoh helped pioneer the lo-fi indie rock sound that would become associated with other bands of their era as well, such as Pavement and Guided by Voices. The lyrics we see here are fairly characteristic of Sebadoh – introspective, perhaps a bit frustrated, a bit socially uncomfortable. Eric Gaffney gets special points here for referring to his penis as his “holy bone”, and for the act of masturbation as “juicing free”, which is just more confusing than anything else.

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Sittin’ around with my homemade bone
I’m naked and loose when no one’s home
And I may let my fingers roam
Juicing free on my holy bone
Here I am, on my knees
Praying to the beast that stole the sex from me

Mindless Self Indulgence is known for playing fast and loose with people’s expectations, but let’s stop and think about these lines for a moment. The situation being described is one in which someone else is trapped in a room with the lead singer, who responds to the situation by exposing himself and relentlessly masturbating. There is no escape. It’s a little bit terrifying, isn’t it?

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I don’t want to be the one who’s stuck with me
when I whip my meat out,
trapped in a room when I start to beat it.

“Orgasm Addict” is a bold and brazen look at sexuality for sexuality’s sake, the kind of raw animal compulsion that tends to find teenagers in those awkward developmental years. I’m not sure if addiction is really the right term here, but certainly they’re at least describing a compulsion. Thing song is one of many that will go down in history as masturbation songs that reference mothers (a list that probably should never have existed.)

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well you tried it just for once found it all right for kicks.
but now you found out that it’s a habit that sticks.
and you’re an orgasm addict.
you’re an orgasm addict.
sneaking in the back door with dirty magazines.
now your mother wants to know what all those stains on your jeans.

Legendary punk rockers The Misfits make our venerable list for the last line of the quoted lyrics, obviously. Frankly, we’re not really sure any commentary will do it justice. Slurp it from your palm. Okay. Right-o.

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Or be poor, and devoid,
and masturbate me! Masturbate me!
Then slurp it from your palm!

Interestingly enough, “My Ding-a-ling” was Chuck Berry’s only #1 hit single in the United States. The song describes how the singer was given two small jingle bells by his grandmother, which he keeps on a string and calls his “ding-a-ling”. A variety of situations are given in which he “plays with his ding-a-ling”, including during school and while crossing a creek infested with snapping turtles (which, presumably, might bite off his ding-a-ling.)

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When I was little boy In Grammar school
Always went by the very best rule
But every time the bell would ring
You’d catch me playing with my ding-a-ling

Once while climbing the garden wall,
Slipped and fell had a very bad fall
I fell so hard I heard birds sing,
But I held on to my ding-a-ling

Once while swimming cross turtle creek
Man them snappers right at my feet
Sure was hard swimming cross that thing
with both hands holding my ding-a-ling

Thomas Dolby, perhaps best loved for the ever-catchy “She Blinded Me With Science”, brought us this bizarre little tune that is essentially about getting off while speeding in someone else’s car. Or, at least, on the surface. Perhaps the car is a symbol for the woman’s vagina as well, or perhaps the whole thing is about materialism in relationships. It doesn’t really matter, because the line that always grabs everyone’s attention is the jarring and sudden reference to thinking of your mother at the moment of orgasm, something that really kills the whole happy-go-lucky tone of the song.

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fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour…
my hand slipped inside the belt of my trousers
as we hit eighty, ninety miles an hour…
and as we passed the magic100 my love exploded
all over her bright pink leather interior…
And at that moment, I thought of my mother.

Australian band Skyhooks were most active in the 70′s, and this song has all the glam and dancing shirtlessness of the era. This one’s notable not just for its blatant self-pleasure references, but also because it describes pleasuring one’s self in a cinema, rather than somewhere private. What’s more bizarre is the line “could be sticky on the seat”, which implies that perhaps someone else has done the same thing in the same seat before? And bringing a raincoat is also strange – do they expect to be showered on? There’s just so much confusing and wrong here.

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Slip into a cinema and give yourself a treat,
Better take a raincoat could be sticky on the seat,
Open up you Twisties and open up your fly,
Pictures start to flicker as your hand moves down your thigh.

Mr. Bungle’s “Girls of Porn”, from their self-titled album, is very likely the most unabashedly vulgar track on this list. It’s also one of the catchiest, which is a slightly unnerving trade-off that Mr. Bungle revels in. “Girls of Porn” is fun to many people, downright offensive to others, and just a tiny bit too much for some – in other words, it’s closer to being porn itself than any other song we’ve found.

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Ain’t got no woman next to me
I just got this magazine
And what’s on the TV screen
But that’s okay with me

My hand gets tired and my d**k gets sore
But the girls of porn want more
So I flip throught the pages one more time
And I just let the jism fly

From the mundane and lonely to the weird and perverted, it’s all here. Hopefully you’ve got enough of an introduction to the world of onanism in music to fill out the first 10 tracks in your very own Self Love Mix CD.

Written by Christopher Moyer – Copyrighted © www.weirdworm.com