CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Ashli Orion may just be the adult industry's biggest secret genius.
The 2011 AVN Unsung Starlet of the Year nominee (a category to which anyone being more perfectly suited is near unimaginable) is also in the present running for the only recently created Best Original Song award, for her hilarious, hypnotic rap/trance ballad "Cock," featured in director Nate Liquor's Best High-End All-Sex Release nominated Downtown Girls from Zero Tolerance Entertainment.
A sort of underground hit among industryites and Orion's fans, "Cock" (which was also used over the closing credits of The New Erotic, indie filmmaker Ramzi Abed's documentary about the alt porn movement) has long remained an insider gem relished for its musical and comedic infectiousness. Now, with its first official recognition in no less prestigious form than a shiny AVN Award nom, it stands to become an out-and-out phenomenon. And one thing that will help it get there, no doubt, is the brand-new music video Orion created for it in celebration of the accolade. (Oh yes ... the girl worked professionally in video production before she got into porn, by the way—just another of her little-known talents.)
"I'm pretty stoked!" Orion told AVN. "Being nominated for an AVN Award made me sooo excited, I called my mom right away! AVN Awards are the Oscars of porn, and I'm just ecstatic, really. I've been watching the AVN Awards on TV since I was a young'un. Don't worry, I'm an L.A. kid, so it won't go to my head! Just makes me happy to think about."
Orion said she shot the new "Cock" video in just a few hours and spent one night editing it. "I can't say that video is my best work, considering it was just random shots I pieced together," she averred. "But yeah, I've been into making movies since I was a kid with a home video camera. I went to CSULB [California State University, Long Beach] for film but dropped out because I had a nice editing and production job at a TV studio. When that stopped paying the bills, I decided to live out my secret fantasy and do porn! I love porn."
"Cock" actually first came to be when Orion was only 16; she explained that she composed it after finding out that her then boyfriend had cheated on her.
"I was really hurt, we broke up, and I decided to make a song to post online that might make his cock hard and [make him] feel upset about what he did," she said. "So I used my keyboard and layered some midis and recorded the song with much different verses. When I was 20, I found the song and remade the verses ... put it together, and voilà."
The musical strength of the song isn't rooted merely in a deftness with digital media, however: "I've played the piano since I was 4, and was in a touring goth band during high school," Orion revealed. "I make music every day—all kinds. I'm just too shy to release them, 'cause they're more from the heart."
She said she gets a "kick" out of people's fondness of the song, and never expected it to catch on so fiercely. "I just wanted to have a silly song playing on my MySpace that was my own," she laughed. "Every set I go to, somebody sings, 'Cock ... cock,' to me. When Nate Liquor asked if he could make a music video/porn to it, I was like, 'Hell yeah, that would be sweet!' He wasn't the first director to ask, but the first one to jump on it and make it happen."
Liquor's decidedly NSFW video interpretation of "Cock" serves as the prelude to Orion's three-way sex scene with Marco Banderas and Sascha in Downtown Girls. Her own, somewhat cleaner rendition (visually speaking, anyway) can be found at www.voteashli.com.
Pictured: Ashli Orion in Teens Like It Big 6 (Brazzers/Jules Jordan)
