Why 'Okayyy' Feels Like a Y2K Porn Set — and Why That's the Point

Latto and Doja Cat

Rapper Latto released the official music video for her song “Okayyy,” featuring Doja Cat, on July 21 of this year. “Okayyy” is the fifth track on her sophomore album, “Big Mama,” which dropped in May.

And the music video is lowkey giving Y2K porno set gangbang — no matter if you love it or hate it. The lack of plot, the oiled-up bodies, the McMansion setting and the use of digital cameras recall the amateur-style home videos of the early 2000s. But the video is a shout-out to, and a reclamation of hip-hop’s video vixen era.

Strip clubs, especially in Atlanta (Latto’s hometown) and Houston, have long served as testing grounds for up-and-coming rap music, particularly in the South. That means rap’s visual aesthetic and sound are shaped by what works on stage at clubs like Magic City, open since the mid-1980s.

That influence became especially visible after Nelly’s music video for “Tip Drill.” That video featured amateur-style filming and scantily clad, sometimes topless women dancing provocatively in and around a mansion, styled like a strip club performance — the same aesthetic Latto and Doja Cat are channeling here. Even the face tape and durags worn by the men in “Okayyy” are a direct nod to Nelly.

But there’s no nudity or intercourse in Latto’s video, and no men pulling off women’s clothing or groping them on camera the way “Tip Drill” did — the same video Spelman students famously protested.

The nearly four-minute video opens on Latto lying in bed, then cuts to seven oiled-up, shirtless, muscular Black men lying shoulder to shoulder in a circle in that same bed — perhaps a nod to Latto’s lucky number. She grows more animated as the beat plays, grinding into and pulling the sheets, while the video cuts back and forth to the men dancing. She’s positioned as the main star, and the seven men are her co-stars, styled like fellow actors in a gangbang porno.

Later, Latto films herself with a digital camera in a mirror inside a stereotypical McMansion bathroom — the same kind of behind-the-scenes clip an adult film star might post today, or that amateur creators shot in the early 2000s. The camera angles cut between her filming herself, her being filmed, and a surveillance-style angle, as if the viewer is watching through a porn studio’s monitor. We even see Latto applying body oil here, as if she were getting ready for set. The seven men do push-ups on the marble behind her, as if getting hyped for their own shoot.

Doja Cat first appears alongside Latto, in front of a baby-blue backdrop, an aesthetic pulled straight from an early-2000s porno DVD cover. She later gets her own solo scene, dancing and lip-syncing before the video takes an interesting turn: Doja Cat, scantily dressed, walks through a prison visitation room toward a Black male inmate, shot from the surveillance-camera angles on both sides of the glass. She uses the visitation phone to talk to him, then is filmed in a bedroom filming herself in a mirror, echoing Latto’s earlier scene.

The video cuts between the visitation room, the bedroom, and the baby-blue backdrop as Doja Cat dances more seductively for the inmate, at one point making direct eye contact with him from his point of view and later showing herself off through the glass. The man pounds on the window trying to reach her — a conjugal-visit trope straight out of adult film.

Latto and Doja Cat reunite for an outdoor scene, standing in front of the seven men, who are now barefoot and washing a black SUV with white rags — a play on the bikini-car-wash trope, except here the men do the washing while the women dance and pose in front of them. At one point, Latto slaps her own ass in front of the men at work. The video then cuts rapidly among all the earlier scenes before ending with Latto filming herself in the mirror.

Is it nearly four minutes of pure sexuality? Yes. Does the video have a plot? No. But it fits into the lineage of hip-hop Latto comes from, channeling that 2000s aesthetic. The oiled-up bodies, the bikinis, the McMansions and the cheap digital cameras all echo the video vixens of that era.

So why does video vixen give Y2K porn star? They were really never separate industries. Many of the women cast as video vixens in that era were dancers from strip clubs. In fact, many of the women featured in the “Tip Drill” music video came right out of Magic City — the same club that shaped the sound and image of Southern rap in the first place. This overlap shows on camera: Video vixens and amateur adult productions used the same consumer camcorders, producing the same handheld, tripod-shot look and washed-out color temperature seen in “Okayyy.” The intimate camera angles recall urban men’s magazines like “King” and “Smooth,” which built their brand on photographing those same women. Both industries relied on the same low-budget playbook: small crews, same metro areas, same kinds of locations — bedrooms, bathrooms, driveways.

In “Okayyy,” Latto and Doja Cat flip that aesthetic. They’re surrounded by half-dressed men who function as props, with the camera lingering on the men’s bodies instead of individualizing them, the way so many male rappers do to women. It’s the men washing the SUV, not a bikini-clad woman. Latto and Doja Cat are the stars of their own video — not human props being used for someone else’s fantasy. They’re presenting their sexuality on their own terms — not as trophies of a male rapper’s success and wealth, the way video vixens so often were, even while channeling that same Y2K aesthetic.