Twenty five years ago, 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell had no clue he was about to become the poster boy for freedom of speech and the face of a much-publicized legal challenge over the definition of obscenity.
In today’s music world, he’d scan as positively tame. But in 1990, a cadre of moral puritans was livid over his sexually explicit lyrics and salacious onstage antics.
“I made it possible for everybody to be horny,” jokes Campbell, now 54, and still performing the same signature tune—“Me So Horny”—that rankled public consciousness, sent him into an unexpected legal struggle that tapped his life savings, and changed his life.
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Campbell spent much of 1990 in Florida courtrooms battling both local and federal laws for his First Amendment right to play and sell songs like “Horny,” “We want Some Pussy,” and a slew of other sex-slathered tunes.
The songs made lifestyle control freaks from Tipper Gore to the governor of Florida, Bob Martinez, lose their minds.
On the 25th anniversary of his bold stand, Campbell remains a proud crusader who mainstreamed the freedom of music artists to say and play what they want by making uptight authorities think twice before challenging them.
“Things we were doing that people were all appalled by, you know girls with big asses on the album cover. Now everyone is making money off these girls with all the hair extensions and big asses,” Campbell says.
Adds Bruce Rogow, the First Amendment lawyer who represented Campbell throughout his legal battle with free speech foes, “We kind of put an end to the kind of thinking that the government could get in the way of art.”
To be sure, there have been challenges to musicians over their oeuvre since Campbell’s legal scraps—Marilyn Manson, Insane Clown Posse come to mind immediately—but none have felt the wrath of the feds over their lyrics that Campbell and his comrades did.
Campbell, a rap impresario from Liberty City, had a head full of libidinous party time anthems in 1985 when he met the California-based 2 Live Crew, who had a Florida hit called “Revelation.”
It was tame, not hard enough to be gangster, and not soft enough to tilt the ballad machine. Besides, Campbell eschewed the gangster stuff as he grew up in it, ditto the drugs. His bag was sex.
“So I put my own money into the group and then joined them,” Campbell says now. He wanted dance party music with adult-themed lyrics, like the material he heard Redd Foxx and Aunt Esther do. “I saw them on Sanford and Son and realized they were also hard core adult-themed comedians. So [2 Live Crew] was going to be funny and fun.”
Once Campbell was part of 2 Live, the party was on. The first LP, The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are, came out on 1986 featured the single “Throw the D (dick).” The U.S. overall was worried about speech in the moral majority era, as obscenity prosecutions conducted by the Department of Justice leapt from 37 in 1988 to 120 in 1989.
Parental freakouts were coming fast and there’s nothing like a raging housewife on Donohue to put your music in the front row, which is what 2 Live Crew wrought. The deepest heart of today’s right to hear anything you want—and the right of an artist to play and record/release it—started with a crusading Florida sheriff in early 1990.
The law in Broward County, home of then-spring break capital Fort Lauderdale, was overseen by Sheriff Nick Navarro, who claimed his office was getting complaints about music that was popping up in stores by 2 Live Crew.
By then, the band’s second LP, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, an indie slab of vinyl featured the asses of four down-for-it ladies across the cover, was selling like crazy.
After getting a court order that the material might run afoul of obscenity laws, Navarro sent his agents out to advise record store owners that selling Nasty could result in obscenity charges.
“It was a watershed moment,” says Rogow, Campbell’s lawyer. “That run for 2 Live Crew was extraordinary. It was an oddity in that no one else in the country came after them. Luckily for 2 Live Crew, the sheriff in Florida decided to take them on.”
In response to the sheriff’s warnings, Campbell filed a lawsuit against the county asserting his First Amendment rights. It placed the case in front of a federal judge.
In June 1990, U.S. District Judge Jose Gonzalez ruled against 2 Live Crew, the first time in U.S. history that a musical recording was declared obscene by a federal judge. The ruling put Campbell on the map as one dirty artist, in league with Mae West, Lenny Bruce, and Deep Throat.
“I read [the judge’s decision] and thought it was great,” Rogow says.
Campbell, though, was devastated. He tore it up into little pieces and called it “toilet paper.”
But Rogow knew something was about to break even before the decision came. “No matter what happens in this case, you win,” Rogow told Campbell. “If the government says you can’t have something, everyone is going to want it.”
If the judge had not found the material obscene, it would have ended there. But with the decision to quash art, “he prolonged it,” Rogow says.
Campbell wasn’t thinking about the future, though.
“I was thinking about Bruce’s argument, that we had proved our case so well, and when I understood my case, I felt it was an idiotic ruling,” Campbell says.
Three days after the judge’s ruling, Campbell and two other Crew members were arrested after a nightclub performance and charged with obscenity for their act. The cops were there, armed with Gonzalez’s ruling. And if something is deemed legally obscene, you can’t play it in public.
“I told the guys to be prepared to go to jail for this,” Campbell says. “I knew the police were there.”
A six person jury, five whites (four women, one man), and one black woman, acquitted 2 Live Crew several months later.
Meanwhile, Gonzalez was overturned by a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in declining to hear the case, solidified the appellate ruling.
2 Live Crew had fought the law and won.
Meantime, the As Nasty as They Wanna Be went double platinum. Not only was it dirty, it was good dirty.
Campbell notes that he went to the wall to defend the right of musical artists’ to be protected under the First Amendment, all the while fending off zealots from the other side who accused him and 2 Live of making music that degraded women.
“We had the Al Sharptons and the Jesse Jacksons coming at us saying this is wrong, against women and so on, and I said ‘you guys are not looking at the big picture.’ I wasn’t fighting for music or my livelihood, it was about the right to create something.”
Campbell’s battle has given him a profile among the First Amendment crowd, but has earned him little praise from the music industry. He’s got a memoir coming out this fall, titled The Book of Luke: My Fight For Truth, Justice, and Liberty City and 2 Live continues to do dates. But he finds that getting attention for his free speech stand from the music establishment elusive.
“No one has asked me to talk at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame about it, and we’ve never been recognized for it,” Campbell says. “We’re the Rodney Dangerfields of the executive and music business.”
