Lick My Love Pump by Spinal Tap (1984)

Nigel Tufnel sits at a piano in This Is Spinal Tap and plays something genuinely lovely, a slow, melancholy piece, part Mozart, part Bach, as he explains to the documentary crew. It is in D minor, which he notes is the saddest of all keys; people weep instantly when they hear it. The interviewer, moved, asks what it is called. The answer is the title of this entry, and the weeping takes on a different character.

That makes it the strangest thing on the list and, in a way, the purest. Every other song here has words; this one has a title and a punchline and nothing else, and it is still unmistakably about what it is about. Christopher Guest, who played Tufnel, wrote and performed the piece himself, and it is a real composition: the joke would not land if the music were not sincere, which is also the secret of every great dirty song.

Its afterlife is institutional. This Is Spinal Tap was added to the National Film Registry in 2002, the title is the most quoted line from the most quoted rock film ever made, and about 170 people a month still search for it by name. There is nothing to say after it, so this entry will stop here.