Kielbasa by Tenacious D (2001)

Tenacious D open their 2001 debut with Kielbasa, a slow, earnest rock number in which Jack Black and Kyle Gass sing about a sausage as if it were a wedding vow. The verses are seduction by delicatessen; the chorus is the "kielbasa" and where it is going, which is not a barbecue. It is the first thing anyone hears on the record, which tells you exactly how the band wanted to be introduced.

The album went Platinum in the United States on the back of Tribute and Wonderboy, so Kielbasa reached a million homes as a side effect, like a free gift nobody ordered, and it has been a live favourite since. It is the band's whole method in one song: the joke is not that the song is dirty, it is that the dirt is performed with the conviction of Meat Loaf.

Its afterlife is as the sausage of record. Bo Carter had a "wiener" in 1935 and Lil Johnson a "hot dog man" in 1936; Kielbasa is the twenty-first-century entry in a lineage that is nearly a century old and has still never been inspected by a food-safety authority. With Cock Pushups, a skit on the same album, it gives Tenacious D two songs on this list.