There is, believe it or not, something of a history between music and pornography. Back in 1991, Happy Mondays “guest edited” an edition of Penthouse magazine and in 1999 Prodigy had music used in the cryptically titled The Uranus Experiment that Liam Howlett described as being “the first zero-gravity porn film”.
Such, ahem, couplings are not just relics of the boorish 1990s as R&B singer Ian Isiah has just worked with Pornhub which is [checks Wikipedia “entry” quickly] “a Canadian pornographic video sharing and pornography site on the Internet” which has been “providing professional and amateur pornography since 2007”. If you are unfamiliar with this website and its “output”, we politely suggest not Googling it on company time. Or on a company computer.
Anyway… ‘Persistent’ is the first single from Isiah’s Shugga Sextape (Vol. 1) album and got its first exposure on the aforementioned firewall-unfriendly site. The video sees Instagrammer @ibeen. davis (we also advise caution when looking at her account) go into a neon-lit room (that is almost certainly not a karaoke booth) where she watches Isiah on the screen.
There is nothing “adult” per se about the video, apart from the female lead stripping to her underwear and pulling some eye-watering shapes. But the main problem, of course, is that all the surrounding and recommended videos are not for those who are delicate of constitution. Plus the category tags alongside the video (“Babe, Big Ass, Brunette, HD Porn, Music, Reality, Role Play, Romantic”) suggest the type of Pornhub enthusiast they are hoping will somehow “stumble” across this video.
We are all for artists trying to appeal to new audiences, but this video campaign means that: a) viewers under a certain age should most assuredly not be watching this and; b) many people will have moral and ethical objections to the platform that Isiah has gone with here. There may be an argument that in the video she is looking at him (and thereby subverting the male gaze), but we are doubtful, given the nature of the videos surrounding this one, many will be happily palmed off with this excuse.
