Dick Almighty by 2 Live Crew (1989)

Dick Almighty is Miami bass at its most direct: a 2 Live Crew chant over an 808, in which the title is repeated as a creed and the verses supply the size, the power and the miracles. It sits on As Nasty as They Wanna Be beside Me So Horny, and of the two it is the one with no plot, no sample to hide behind and no subject but the one in the title, worshipped loudly.

The album went two times Platinum, and in June 1990 a federal judge in Florida ruled it legally obscene, the first such ruling against a recording in the United States, with this track among those named. A record-store owner was arrested for selling it and the band for performing it. The Eleventh Circuit overturned the ruling in 1992 and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, which left Luther Campbell with a Platinum record and a place in constitutional law, a rare double for a song with this title.

Its afterlife is the sticker. Every Parental Advisory label, every clean edition and every argument about what a record is allowed to say runs through the case this song helped provoke. It is the most litigated penis in American music, and it walked out of court a free man.