Brother Marquis and Fresh Kid Ice make a game effort to make the expurgated version work (actually, the rewriting isn’t noticeably awkward), but it winds up being a party without a bottle opener.Īn emboldened and meaner-sounding Crew reached its dubious apex on the overwhelming As Nasty as They Wanna Be double-album and its expurgated single-album extract, As Clean as They Wanna Be. The Crew’s amateurish first album sets the basic parameters: simple boomin’ tracks (the Miami sound generally uses ultra-deep synth bass as the rhythmic foundation) with scratches, obvious samples and energetic dance-party rhymes, several of which crudely discuss the group’s hobby (e.g., “We Want Some P–sy!!”).īesides his improving production skills, Campbell’s serious marketing savvy emerged on Move Somthin’, the first 2 Live Crew record to be released in both clean and dirty versions. Coupled with Southern fear of a black planet, that was all it took to bring the 2 Live Crew into the crosshairs of a hysterical judiciary, resulting in the group’s third album being outlawed in some counties of Southeastern Florida in June 1990. What Miami’s 2 Live Crew does is hardly new (check old party records by Blowfly or Redd Foxx for historical precedents), but rap’s enormous word-of-mouth audience turned what should have remained a fringe novelty for Hustler readers into a massively popular (and, unfortunately, influential) pop phenomenon.
As the catalyst for a terrifying governmental attempt to censor ostensibly obscene musical expression - making it a crime in some districts to tell a dirty story with a beat - Luther Campbell, leader of the 2 Live Crew and owner of Luke (formerly Luke Skyywalker) Records, has followed Larry Flynt into the free-speech history books as another crude sleazemonger of trivial artistic merit whose prosecution nonetheless threatens basic constitutional freedoms.
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