Borgore has earned constant ire for such lyrics since he first emerged as a producer of bone-rattling, rap-heavy dubstep — a hybrid he calls “gorestep” — seven years ago. First, the criticisms were contained to the dubstep underground, where he got his start releasing mixes and EPs while living in his native Israel. (One, a 2010 set of EPs called Borgore Ruined Dubstep, was an early rebuttal to critics.) But the complaints began to snowball in earnest in the summer of 2012, when he released the most well-known collaboration of his career: “Decisions,” a singsong, lackadaisical track that found him bragging about his virility and chanting “bitches love cake” with none other than Miley Cyrus on backing vocals.

“I didn’t think she was gonna go for it,” Borgore explains to me before the show in the narrow, dimly lit concrete room that serves as his private lounge. “I talk about getting drunk and porn stars, fucking five chicks — and that’s what she wanted. I was super happy about it.” The widely circulated video features Borgore and Cyrus flinging cake at each other, him with heavy-lidded hauteur and her with the wide-eyed zeal that would characterize her controversial “ratchet” reinvention.

With that track, Borgore was established as a swaggering new presence in the fast-ascendant American EDM scene. He amassed thousands more followers on Twitter (238,000 to date, many of whom retweet his incendiary rhetoric and flood his feed with revealing pictures and the hashtag #bootyforborgore), and performed at high-profile dance festivals including Ultra Music Festival and Electric Daisy Carnival — occasionally from within an LED van that reads “Cream Machine” and “Stops for Whores.” He released a collaboration with Waka Flocka Flame (“Wild Out”), and Steve Aoki enlisted him for his 2013 Aokify America stadium tour.

Borgore’s “gorestep” is his personal derivation of “brostep,” a generally more assaultive splinter scene of dubstep that’s arisen in the past few years and emphasizes distortion and bass drops while siphoning some of the heaviness of rock music. But Borgore is an outsider, says DJ and journalist Philip Sherburne. “His lyrical focus gives him more room to be more explicitly sexist or misogynist,” says Sherburne, who has written about electronic music for Pitchfork, SPIN, and Resident Advisor. He adds, “Though I can’t think of anybody that is quite as extreme or as explicit as Borgore.”

“Borgore is certainly a misogynist," adds Kathryn Frazier, who owns Biz3 Publicity (which represents Daft Punk, Skrillex, and Bassnectar) and co-runs Skrillex's OWSLA label. "He's like the Eazy-E of EDM — the dim reality is that he'd probably take that as a compliment. I think most EDM is not inherently sexist, but someone like Borgore stands out like an overreacting teenager dying for attention. Anyone remotely evolved rolls their eyes at his desperate antics.”

Not all of Borgore’s DJ peers have appreciated his prominence; in 2012, dubstep producer Bassnectar called out Borgore in a long string of tweets, which began, “What is *UP* with jackass DJs thinking its cool to degrade women??? And what is UP with the girls who so weakly respond to those jackass DJs…im all about Peace Love Unity & Respect, so calling people out isn’t something I want to do, but I just can’t believe this guy @borgore” [sic]. In 2013, the DJ-producer BT tweeted to his fans, “I'd like to fight @Borgore in a cage match for charity. If I win, you'll do 300 hours community service at an abused women's center.” Borgore responded to both swiftly, calling Bassnectar a “hypocrite” for promoting drugs and declining BT’s offer with condescension. Bassnectar resolved the exchange with some placating words but BT has since fired further shots about Borgore’s lyrics and alleged crack smoking. Borgore denies he has ever done drugs. (BT declined to be interviewed for this story and Bassnectar was unavailable.)

Several other prominent DJs told BuzzFeed that they are repelled by Borgore’s lyrical content. “What a wanker. He’s an embarrassment,” says Nicole Moudaber, a London- and Ibiza-based house and techno DJ who will headline a stage of the Electric Zoo festival in New York in August. “It has been done years ago with urban music and it’s so dated, that whole way of attracting attention by putting other people down. I’ve got zero respect for people like this in general, not just Borgore.”