Detachable Penis by King Missile (1992)

There is no metaphor here, which is why this song sits at the top of almost any honest ranking. John S. Hall's deadpan monologue over a two-chord guitar loop is the title: the narrator owns a penis that comes off, takes it to a party, drinks too much and wakes up without it. The rest is a lost-and-found story. He checks the couch. He finds it on a blanket at a vendor's stall, next to a broken toaster oven, and has to haggle for his own anatomy: the vendor wants twenty-two dollars and settles for seventeen, a bargain or an insult.

What makes it work is that Hall never winks. The voice is the voice of a man describing a lost umbrella, and every line gets funnier because of how little it is trying. It became a genuine alternative-radio hit, reaching the Billboard Modern Rock top 30 in 1993, in a format otherwise devoted to grunge earnestness, and it says the word out loud rather than hiding behind a saxophone or a "lemon".

Its afterlife is a gap. The people who know it know it word for word; everyone else has never heard of it. The price, seventeen dollars, is the most quoted number on this list, and the song is the one every other entry is measured against: entirely, literally about one, for three and a half minutes.