What is pornocore? The rap subgenre named by Kool Keith
Kool Keith, by the latter half of the ’90s, was already known to shock with his absurd, often obscene brand of hip-hop. But he truly outdid himself in ’97, with the release of his album Sex Style and its pioneering of a subgenre he personally dubbed “pornocore.”
Beginning his career as the founder of the Bronx-based group Ultramagnetic MCs, but it was through his solo work that he really became known as one of rap’s oddest figures. His first solo album, Dr Octagonecologyst, was released in 1996 under his Dr Octagon alias, who was a murderous alien gynecologist with the ability to travel through time.
The Dr Octagon work was as sexually explicit as it was strange and violent, but it was only with ’97’s Sex Style that he truly arrived at his “pornocore” style. The time-travelling alien stuff was gone from this record. This was all about sex, but with an over-the-top, porn-influenced slant.
The act of sex is perpetually referenced throughout the album, with Keith embodying a range of smutty characters in the songs. He was more than happy to present himself as a pimp or deviant.
Keith, it turns out, had literally been hanging out with porn stars in the build-up to creating Sex Style, which likely explains why the project took the shape that it did. A New Yorker by birth, Keith had moved to California before he started working on Sex Style — and the change of scenario found its way into his ideas.
“I was living the life, because it was all sun and stars,” Keith recalled during a 2021 interview with David Ma, reflecting on his move to California. “I was hangin’ with porno stars all the time on Sunset Boulevard. I was just freaked out! It was such a fun LA summer.”
To Keith, Sex Style was an honest expression of what his lifestyle was really like during his early LA days. He felt free to do whatever he wanted, and he was therefore “on a mission to capture my mind state at the time.” That meant delving into a lurid world of sex and porn.
“Sex Style was actually my life then,” Keith claimed. “I wore pink Speedos and ate Corn Pops in my kitchen. It was crazy.”
There is a strain of hip-hop music known as dirty rap, which deals in sexually loaded lyrical content and even sound effects. Lots of artists have indulged in this subgenre, but none of them are quite as colourful and bombastic as Keith’s experiments. With that in mind, there’s an argument to say that he is the only one to ever truly produce “pornocore.” There’s lots of dirty rap out there, but maybe Kool Keith is the only true pornocore artist.