Coolio Not So Cool With TMZ's Pornhub Claim

LOS ANGELES—From the beginning, the interesting thing about the arrangement between Pornhub and rapper Coolio—whatever its parameters were—was less the fact that Coolio decided to record a music video, Play with the Pussy, for release on the mega-popular porn tube site than that it was the site itself that was the active suitor in the budding relationship. The immediate implication was that Pornhub was actively interested in diversifying its repertoire of content beyond the sexually explicit. According to Coolio's interview with Rolling Stone, posted today, the rapper said the song came about by a chance encounter. "I met some executive from Pornhub while he was out [in Las Vegas] for the AVNs," he told Jason Newman. "We hung out; he was cool. He asked me to do a song for Pornhub and that was it." Responding to the TMZ claim that he had actually signed with Pornhub to make a complete album, which Pornhub would then distribute through the porn site, Coolio said, "I'm never doing a new album. I'll probably do nothing but singles. I'm as good as anybody out there lyrically and conceptually and can go toe to toe with the best of them throughout history. But I don't know how much longer I'll be doing it. It's not really fun anymore." But he also said, in response to a question about recording new tracks for Pornhub, "I don't know where that came from. If they pay me enough money, fuck yeah, I'll do an album exclusively for Pornhub. At this point in my career, bro, I don't have nothing to prove to nobody." Which sounds very much to us as if the rapper is open for anything—if the money is there. "I just have to prove some shit to my banker," he told Newman. "I have to prove to that motherfucker I can put more zeroes in my account." Pornhub's latest assessment of the situation seems to comport with Coolio's. This afternoon, spokesperson Matt Blake told Billboard, "The way TMZ spun it, they made it seem like we have the exclusive forever [on his music], which isn't true—him and I have spoken about this, at the end of the day it's all about money. It would depend how much exposure it generates. If it works, we'll go forward. We love Coolio, he was a great sport. If he wants to do again, we'll be more than happy to set it up." About the music video, which was reportedly shot in Sherman Oaks, California earlier this year, Blake told Billboard that the production value was top-notch. "TMZ made us look really low budget," he said, "but wait 'till you see it. The crew was all mainstream Hollywood people. We put together a crazy crew, and the video come out amazing." The commitment to value is, as Billboard noted, "part of a broader strategy for PornHub, which is looking to branch out from its smut-based roots in the hopes of penetrating mainstream culture." Blake all but confirmed those ambitions by adding, "We're changing the way that people see PornHub, that we're more than just porn. Obviously, we do porn... but combining music with sexy naked ladies can't be a bad thing!" Music and porn have a long and close history, of course. More than a few bands have hired adult performers to appear in videos, just as more than a few mainstream movies and television shows hire people from the industry. But Pornhub appears to want to turn that trope on its head by becoming the producer of a multiplicity of content, just as Netflix decided that it, too, wanted to become more than just a distributor of other people's content, and started producing its own. Netflix is not porn, of course, and Pornhub most decidedly is, but what they do share is the ability to attract millions of eyeballs on a daily basis, something that these days seems to inevitably inspire visions of producer fame and riches no matter from which side of the tracks one originated. As Billboard observed, "To the outside observer, PornHub may not be the most natural selection for an artist to distribute their work. But consider that PornHub draws 40 million visitors a day and is ranked the 47th most-visited site in the U.S. according to Alexa, and to an artist it starts to look pretty enticing."