Weekly updates:

Music
Posted by

Weekly updates


RU - A Brief History of Porn Rap

Dirty Rapps [sic] have been an integral part of hip-hop since its humble beginnings. Big Bank Hank boasted about his “super sperm” on ‘Rapper’s Delight’, (albeit courtesy of the rhyme book he borrowed from Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers), while Too $hort was selling tapes filled with songs such as ‘Blow Job Betty’ and ‘The Bitch Sucks Dick’ in the early ’80s. The 2 Live Crew made a career out of explicit jams like ‘We Want Some Pussy’, while NWA took it to the next level of explicitness with ‘Just Don’t Bite It’ until Kool G Rap further raised the bar (pause) with ‘Talk Like Sex’. The first real forays into the Porn Rap arena were really groups such as HWA (Hoes Wit Attitude) and soloists such as Choice.

One-time Nas accomplice Akinyele figured out that there was a bigger market in songs such as ‘Put It In Your Mouth’ rather than the stuff he did with Large Professor on his first album, and quickly branched into releasing a couple of soft-porn, Porky’s style films on VHS and recording songs about women getting fisted by their girlfriends. Professional rap weirdo Kool Keith dropped the Sex Style album, and Cage joined forces with the High & Mighty for the Smut Peddlers Porn Again LP in 2001. Even actual porn stars got in on the act, with legendary screen queen Heather Hunter picking up the mic for 2005’s Double H: The Unexpected and Jake Steed recording freestyles for the opening titles of his Freaks, Whoes & Flows series of XXX videos (later compiled on this CD), before doing a skit on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic 2001 album, while the Deep Porn CD combined hip-hop and dance producers with some of their favourite performers and Pinky started dropping mixtapes in 2010 for some reason. The less said about that Brian Pumper guy, the better.

2014 has seen several major developments in the Porn Rap game. Cole James Cash, an independent producer who I featured in my ‘Unsigned Skype’ section last year, is about to release a project titled BBW: A Pornographic Opera, a collection of songs dedicated to his favourite XXX Big Beautiful Women. “It got me a chance to meet some of my favourite porn stars and annoy them with requests to appear on my album cover and do drops,” explains Cole James. “One thing about doing a porn project is it’ll make you tired of the women you do the songs about. Having to study up on some of these girls, then give the rappers context to rap about was sometimes tiresome. A lot of times no one knew what some of the girls looked like. In a lot of ways making a fat girl porn album was like making a gangster rap album. Some of the guys had never fucked a big girl, but then again, a lot of these rappers never shot nobody neither.”

Meanwhile, PornHub (the 47th most visited website in America with 40 million views per day) have decided to expand into the music game, beginning by teaming up with everyone’s favourite former crackhead-turned-pop star Coolio. “We’re changing the way that people see PornHub, that we’re more than just porn,” PornHub’s head of PR Matt Blake told Billboard. “Obviously, we do porn… but combining music with sexy naked ladies can’t be a bad thing!” Incorrectly reported elsewhere as a record deal, what’s actually happening is that PornHub is supplying the performers (Alexa Aimes, Phoenix Marie, Jessica Bangkok, Missy Martinez and Skin Diamond) and the platform to air the video (which is also on YouTube), while Coolio shouts out the site in the song’s title, ‘Take It To The Hub’.

I can’t really see the logic here, since if you’re going to PornHub, you clearly want to see some proper pr0n, rather than porn stars dancing in the video for the one-time member of WC and the MADD Circle. Nicki Minaj has the rap video titillation market sewn up at this point, with her ‘Anaconda’ video having been watched 158 million times in the three weeks since it premiered, proving that it’s a lot more exciting seeing women who we haven’t seen naked before appearing almost in the buff. On the other hand, the BBW: A Pornographic Opera offers a view into a world that many of us may not have experienced. Based on that alone, BBW Rap is a far more interesting concept than watching the guy who made ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ hosing down a bunch of adult film actresses. Best we don’t encourage that, else Ron Jeremy makes a return to rapping!

Keep up with Robbie’s weekly ‘No Country for Old (Rap) Men’ here.