By Milka Magnesia

In ancient myths that span the globe, sirens were female creatures who summoned all sailors within earshot with songs so irresistible that the seamen could not help but veer off course to see the source of such impossibly beautiful music.

The joke was on them, then, when the sirens inevitably lured them to crashing deaths among the jagged rocks that the sinister songbirds called home.

Thousands of years later, rock chicks would pretty much fulfill the same role.

From Eisenhower-era sock hops to the inescapable hip-hop of today, rock chicks have looked good, sounded great, and seldom delivered when it came to celebrity skin. There have been a few flesh-baring exceptions.

And for those about to rock and show their racks, we salute you.

Christina Aguilera (Picture: )
She started out the skankier of the two reigning pop tarts to emerge from the Disney Channel's , but we all know how things ultimately turned out between Christina Aguilera and rival raunch songstress Britney Spears. While Brit spelunked into white-trash insanity, Christina arose from her Dirrty early ways to come off as kind of classy. Her shirt comes off in her MTV special Diary, and the odd black-and-blonde tendril that covers Christina's obviously implanted lacto orb slips away, revealing a pair of pierced pink nipples.

Toni Basil (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3)
"Oh, Mickey/You're so fine/you're so fine/you blow my mind/Hey Mickey!/Hey Mickey!" No one who had a radio in the 1980s went on to escape without that song taking up presumably valuable space in his head. The cheerleading trollop responsible for the 1982 smash "Hey Mickey" was Toni Basil, a Hollywood veteran best known as a dance choreographer but best exposed as an actress with topless turns in two of the most rabidly followed cult movies of all time: Easy Rider (1969) and Greaser's Palace (1972). And Toni's so fine she'll blow more than just your mind. Hey, Toni!

Laura Branigan (Picture: 1)
She started out as a backup singer for heavy-duty singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, but Laura Branigan is forever in rotation on the iPod of our collective consciousness due to he 1982 cover of the Italian pop standard "Gloria." The upstate New York native scored a lesser but still substantial hit in 1982 with "Self-Control," the video for which was weirdly erotic and directed by Hollywood heavy hitter William Friedkin (The Exorcist), who seemed to be channeling then-contemporary porn-film visionaries Rinse Dream and Gregory Dark. Laura changed her focus from singing to acting shortly thereafter and she showed what she was sporting up front during a shirt-free love scene in Backstage (1988).

Bjrk (Picture: - )
Iceland's most sought-after human export is an adorable freakette whose music can be jarring, soothing, and astonishing at the same time--just like Bjrk's milky mammaries will make you feel when you see them in her videos for the songs Cocoon and Pagan Poetry.

Vitamin C (Picture: )
Long, lithe, delectably bitsy-boobied Colleen Fitzpatrick belted alterna tunes as the frontwoman for the band Eve's Plum in the early 1990s. The group's highest level of notability came when Beavis and Butthead goofed on a couple of their MTV videos. Colleen fared better when she underwent a post-Britney makeover--which included changing her name to Vitamin C--and scored a major springtime 2000 pop hit with the farewell-to-high-school anthem "Graduation." Later that same year the Big C tossed off her cap and gown as a disciple of the titular bloodsucker in Dracula 2000 (2000), and we sure do like her apples.

Pamela Des Barres
Groupie extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres banged the cr?-de-la-rock in the late 1960s and early '70s, ultimately chronicling her carnal tour of big-ticket arena artists' bedrooms in a 1988 autobiography, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. During a foray into acting, Pamela made with the glands, busting out her big boppers in the blaxploitation hit Slaughter's Big Rip-Off (1973).

Deborah Harry (Picture: 1 - 2)
New York new-wave ensemble Blondie still stands as one of the best-loved, most deeply respected groups of the 1970s and '80s. They also ranked very high among the most commercially successful. Lead vixen Deborah Harry was a former Playboy bunny who quickly became one of the most famous women in the world. Her legacy in rock lives on, as do her ultra-kinky sex scenes opposite James Woods in director David Cronenberg's sci-fi freaker-outer Videodrome (1983).

Janet Jackson (Picture: 1 - 2)
It was the top-pop heard--and seen and talked about and traded online and frantically rewound and watched repeatedly--'round the world: Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction" during the halftime show of Super Bowl 2004. The shocking milestone in network-television nudity was a first of many kinds but not, you may be surprised to know, the original opportunity to see Ms. Jackson's jug in the raw. She slipped some right tasty nip onscreen during her 2002 TV concert Janet - Live in Hawaii.

Grace Jones (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3)
Tall, taut, and arousingly angular, Grace Jones was an avant-garde dance-music diva in the '80s. Grace may not have landed many tracks on the radio, but she became a major international celebrity with her long, strong legs planted in many films. Besides taking on Arnold in Conan the Destroyer (1989) and being a Bond girl in A View to a Kill (1985), Grace bared her naked goods onscreen in Let's Make a Dirty Movie (1975), Deadly Vengeance (1981), Vamp (1986), and Boomerang (1992).

Jewel Kilcher (Picture: 1)
Jugalicious folkie Jewel Kilcher landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1997 as the representative lovely of the all-female traveling granola-rock festival The Lillith Faire. The awesomely buxom blonde Alaskan routinely scored big on radio and via videos on VH1, to the point that someone published a truly mesmerizing collection of her poetry titled A Knight without Armor. Trying her mams at acting, Jewel goes without armor during a breastfeeding scene in the Civil War drama Ride with the Devil (1999). We don't quite get to see her milk spigot, but the massive dairy balloon that she stuffs into the kid's mouth makes it plain that Junior had the best agent in show business.

k.d. lang (Picture: 1)
Mellow chanteuse k.d. lang is a lesbian who has touched pop-music audiences, jazz fans, and even Tony Bennett, with whom she recorded an album of duets. She's out and proud and it's a kick to imagine ladies lapping her furry loin, which you can do when she shows it off in the Alaska-set indie flick Salmonberries (1991).

Courtney Love (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3)
The former Hole hole who was married to Nirvana mastermind Kurt Cobain when he blasted a hole through his head, Courtney Love has become one of gawking America's most compellingly grotesque disasters. Maybe she still sings, maybe not. Maybe she still acts, maybe not. You can most definitely ogle her naked body, however, in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Beat (2000), and Taff (2003).

Madonna (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - - 5 - )
For fans of songbirds gone sexually berserk, there was a time before Madonna Louise Ciccone Penn Ritchie and there have been all those years since. An earthy Italian broad from Detroit, Madonna originally broke through as a disco diva and then continued reinventing her image with every subsequent release. At present, she's an English matron of some sort living across the pond and penning kiddie literature. We prefer her naked, early image in A Certain Sacrifice (1985), the black-and-white provocateur in Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), her bare-assed attempt at grittiness in Dangerous Game (1993), and her shot at erotic-thriller stardom with Body of Evidence (1993). Even in her largely reviled collaboration with director-husband Guy Ritchie, Swept Away (2002), Maddie made sure to show her mammaries. We're still holding out hope to see her Material Curls.

Zia McCabe (Picture: )
Kewpie-doll cute redhead Zia McCabe plays keyboards for the alterna-pop squad The Dandy Warhols and hardly presents herself as a salacious sex kitten. That's what makes it all the more thrilling when she occasionally doffs her top in concert and performs with her nude knobs bouncing about, as evidenced in the classic 2004 rock-doc DiG! (2004).

Alanis Morissette (Picture: - )
Canuck TV kid star Alanis Morissette surprised the entire planet when she went from relative obscurity to reigning as the best-selling female solo rock artist of all time upon the massive smash of her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill. In the decade since, Alanis has continued to develop as an artist while regularly connecting with the public. Her closest moment to nudity, for years, came in the video for her 1998 song "Thank U," wherein she travels about in public seemingly naked (the most important parts are pixilated). Then, quite stunningly, Alanis released the comedic documentary We're with the Band (2004), in which she steps onto a stairway backstage, drops her drawers, and fills several plastic cups with golden hits of another (the best) kind.

Michelle Phillips (Picture: 1 - 2)
The Mamas and the Papas brought southern California harmonies to unique highs during the Flower Power days of the 1960s, powered in no small part by the willowy blonde delights provided by Michelle Phillips. She was married to the group's leader, Papa John Phillips, during their heyday and then moved on to the movies when their sunny sounds turned sour. Deliciously mini-milkered Michelle bared her entire wondrously waify physique in director Ken Russell's kooky biopic Valentino (1977).

Diana Ross (Picture: )
From leading '60s super group The Supremes to making history as a solo star, Diana Ross has figured as one of the most incandescent show-business icons of the past half century. Her talents extended, with great acclaim, into acting. You'll get some real wood checking out Diana's supremely suckable Hershey's Kiss in Mahogany (1975).

Wendy O. Williams (Picture: 1 - 2)
Shock-rock destroyer goddess Wendy O. Williams--W.O.W. for short--stormed the music scene with her tsunami-force sonic squadron The Plasmatics during the original onslaught of punk rock. Before taking to music, Wendy performed in New York's legendarily sleazy live-sex peep shows during the '70s and appears in several hard-to-find hardcore porn films, including Candy Goes to Hollywood (1979). The best place to get an eyeful of this ear splitter's eye poppers, though, is in the 1986 exploitation parody Reform School Girls.




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