At the same time, because of what 2 Live Crew was doing, more Miami rappers were stepping up, creating different kinds of bass music. It never bothered me that other rappers were copying our sound. I looked at it as more like we were starting a movement, a whole new genre of music. The bigger Miami got, the better for me. Plus I never got the point of all those bullshit rap feuds anyway. LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee going at it, dissing each other. I didn’t beef with other Miami artists. I signed the motherfuckers and I kept making money.
I was still promoting most of my own concerts, too, putting 2 Live Crew and MC Shy D on with whoever I had down from New York. In one night I was getting paid to perform, had a piece of the door, and was moving records and merchandise for half of the acts on the bill. I was making serious money, but people thought it was a joke. They didn’t know. All the New York guys, they were out there selling gold and platinum records, they were the ones getting the videos on MTV, who had everyone telling them they were gonna be famous rock stars. To them, they were the big shit and I was just this clown, this small-time guy in Miami. There was a couple of times I remember I was on tour with Kool Moe Dee, and Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff. They’d laugh at me and say, “What label you on? Luke Records? The fuck is that?”
I’d sit there and I would hold court with them. I’d tell these guys, “Luke Records is my label. I get all the money.”
“What?”
“Look, your money gets split up ten different ways, all these people taking a cut, holding their expenses against your royalties. I’m getting back two dollars a record and you’re probably getting back two cents, and that’s if you get anything back at all. So who’s the joker on that?”
They also saw me selling my own merchandise. Most labels would get a third-party vendor like Winterland to make and sell the shirts, and then the artist would get a fee. Luke Gear was mine. I owned it. I designed it, manufactured it, distributed it, and I was getting all the money from it. We would roll up to a venue, and there’d be a table out front selling all the T-shirts and shit, theirs and mine. Only after the show they’d see me in the back counting out stacks. They’d say, “What you doing?”
“I’m counting my money, motherfuckers. I made about thirty grand in merchandise tonight.”
They’d be like, “What the fuck?!”
I’d be like, “Yeah, man. You see, Winterland pays you a flat fee, about twenty-five hundred dollars, to sell your shit at these concerts. But that shirt they’re selling for fifteen dollars really costs about two. Me, if I put up ten thousand dollars for merchandise, it retails for about one hundred thousand, and I’m selling the shit out of it.”
I would do commercials on local TV for Luke Gear. I was getting mail orders even when we weren’t on the road. College kids loved it. We had University of Miami football players wearing our scarves on the sidelines at games. Derrick Thomas of the Kansas City Chiefs, he was wearing the shit. I started sending out free promotional gear to professional athletes, doing cross-marketing with sports ten years before anyone else in hip-hop. This was all before Rocawear, before Wu Wear, before Sean John or any of that shit.
Owning my own label, owning my own masters, my own merchandise, I was doing all that years before anyone else in the business. I paid retail for every ad I ran. I paid retail for every piece of equipment I owned. The only break I got came from the U-Haul place. When the Ghetto Style DJs were starting out we’d built up enough equipment that we needed a second van. When we rented the truck for the weekend, the guy from the U-Haul place would let us keep it during the week to store the gear; he only called it in if he needed it for another customer. That was great. Nobody did shit for Luther Campbell except the U-Haul guy. I fought for everything else.
What I did down in Miami basically changed the whole face of hip-hop. At that time, everybody was just happy to be on Atlantic Records or CBS or Warner Bros. They didn’t aspire to have their own record label like I did. Most of these guys, coming fresh out of the projects, they didn’t know something like that was even possible. But after I’d hold court with them and show them what I was doing, how much money I was making, they’d get pissed. These dudes would go back to their labels and say, “Hey, we want to do our own stuff. We want our own merchandise. We want better royalties. We want ownership. We want to be like Luke!”
These artists now wanted to be entrepreneurs. They’d heard the horror stories of what had happened to all the old-school guys getting exploited. Artists became a little more educated about the business. This led to Bad Boy Records and Cash Money Records. The music business had to change. Tupac, Biggie, Jay Z, that whole next generation, the corporate labels had to go back and change their contracts and give them more, give them better royalties, give them ownership. Lots of rappers are doing it now, but I did it first. In the 1980s, I had the only artist-owned, black-owned hip-hop label in the country. After Berry Gordy sold Motown to MCA in 1988, I had the biggest independent black-owned label in America, period.
MOVE SOMETHIN’
Luke Records took off as a business because I was relentless and smart, always making up for what I didn’t know by learning on the job and using common sense. On the musical side of things, the reason 2 Live Crew got hot was because of two things we did. We used funny, everyday ghetto language to talk about an interesting subject that everybody enjoys and hears about all the time, and we had a bass beat that you could dance to. It’s that simple.
Because 2 Live Crew became so notorious for its lyrics, Mixx never gets the credit he deserves. He never gets mentioned with Jam Master Jay and Eric B. as one of the great influential DJs, but he should be. How many songs can you point to that launched a whole genre of music? Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and rock and roll. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and grunge. Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’” and LA gangsta rap. “Throw the D” belongs on that list. It launched the whole Miami Bass sound, which inspired crunk music in Atlanta and bounce music in New Orleans. You’re talking about millions and millions of records sold, and all that started with David Hobbs.
Mixx was like a mad scientist. Didn’t party, didn’t do drugs. Lived in the studio, poring over old records for samples, looping beats together for new songs. I was the executive, and he was the producer. I would come up with ideas, like, “Hey, let’s do a parody of ‘Do Wah Diddy.’” I would tell Mixx and he would disappear and run with it and call me a few days later to hear what he’d cooked up. Every time I went in there to listen to a song with Mixx, I’d get excited. It was like going home when your mom tells you she baked a cake.
The other half of our success—using everyday language to talk about a subject that everyone enjoys and participates in—well, that got a little more complicated. Given our reputation, people are usually surprised to learn that Uncle Luke and 2 Live Crew started out in a teen club. We performed fun, innocent party music for them. The teen clubs we played were even endorsed as wholesome, safe entertainment by a conservative watchdog group called Informed Families of Dade. Even when we did “Throw the D,” that song was more suggestive than explicit. It was PG-13, not XXX. We even got asked to be talent-show judges at some of the local high schools.
When we started recording albums, I told the rest of the group that we had to do something different. New York already had its style. The major record labels, they already had big stars and the big budgets to promote them. If we were just another bunch of guys wearing gold ropes and yelling, “Throw your hands in the air,” nobody was going to know who we were. Fresh Kid Ice and Brother Marquis, they obviously couldn’t flow like Big Daddy Kane, so we needed to jazz them up. We needed to stand out. We needed a signature style to go with this new bass sound Mr. Mixx was cooking up in his laboratory.
“Let’s be different. Let’s be funny. Let’s be explicit.” They were all down for it. Back then everyone was sampling James Brown and old-school R&B artists. My idea was that we would sample music, but on top of it we would use movie quotes from Dolemite and st
and-up bits from Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. We’d sample bits from Cheech and Chong, from Eddie Murphy. We started adding in things that New York rappers would never do.
On The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are, a lot of the songs aren’t explicit at all. But the dirty ones were the ones that everybody liked, songs like “We Want Some Pussy” and “Get It, Girl.” When we put out our second album, Move Somethin’, in 1988, we did more of it. We made it raunchier, dirtier. That was the first album we put out with a girl on the cover. It was the four of us in the hot tub with the woman standing over us in the bathing suit, her legs and ass facing the camera. We did things like that to get noticed. I didn’t have a marketing budget, but you put that record on the shelf, guys are going to pick it up, buy it, and take it home and put the album up on their wall.
By the time we came out with Move Somethin’, we’d created our own image and our own style: we were party music. We had fun and made people laugh, singing “Me So Horny” or “Pop That Pussy.” At first, people bought the records and danced and laughed along at our shows. The numbers speak for themselves. What We Are hit No. 24 on the Billboard R&B chart and No. 128 on the Billboard 200 chart. Move Somethin’ went to No. 20 on R&B and No. 68 on the Billboard 200. Both were RIAA-certified gold records, and that was all word of mouth and college radio and us driving around in our van marketing ourselves. No major label or commercial radio promotion at all. People liked the music. People loved the music, with one exception: rappers from New York.
At that time, there wasn’t no such thing as southern hip-hop, and as we traveled throughout the country we started getting friction from the New York artists. They thought we weren’t real hip-hop, the same way they felt about LA. Those New York guys liked me fine when I was a promoter in Miami, booking their shows and selling the fuck out of their records. Once 2 Live Crew came out and started competing with them, it was like all hell broke loose. They hated us. It was like every single one of those New York guys hated us with a passion. They’d be on BET talking bad about us. We were totally discriminated against. They’d never let us share the stage with them. It was like they were the white people and we were the niggers.
We would go and perform and we would have to literally fight with these dudes. What was happening was that as hip-hop started to blow up outside New York, all these big New York acts were getting booked on these tours throughout the South: Atlanta, Birmingham, a bunch of these college towns. On a lot of tours, the opening act is chosen by the local promoter, and these local guys all knew how popular we were. “Hey, these 2 Live Crew motherfuckers are the hottest guys down here. I’ll add them to the bill and sell some fucking tickets.”
The promoters would put us on the show. They were using our name to sell tickets, but then, when it came time to do the concert, the road manager of the headliner, he controlled the house. He controlled how many lights you got, how much sound you got, how much stage time you got, everything. We were booked for a show with Run-D.M.C. in Biloxi, Mississippi, and I had to fight with their manager. Before the show, this guy was bitching to the promoter, “We don’t like these motherfuckers. They’re not hip-hop. They’re not from New York. Fuck them. We’re not going on after them.” The promoter tried to compromise. He had a contract with us, so he had to let us do something. He came to me and said, “Look, y’all guys can go on, but you only have three minutes.”
“Three minutes? We got to do ‘We Want Some Pussy,’ ‘Throw the D,’ and all these other songs! How we gonna do that in three fucking minutes?”
“Well, man, I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”
“Fuck that. They only want one song? I’ll give em one song,” I responded.
“Peter Piper” was Run-D.M.C.’s big single at the time, so I went to Mixx and said, “Hey Mixx, we’re gonna go right up there and we’re gonna do ‘Peter Piper.’”
We got up onstage and I said, “Look here, ladies and gentlemen of Biloxi, Mississippi. Run-D.M.C. says we ain’t got but three minutes to perform. We can’t sing ‘We Want Some Pussy.’ We can’t sing ‘Throw the D.’ We can’t do all the shit that you came to hear in three fucking minutes. What we’re gonna do is have Mr. Mixx cut ‘Peter Piper.’”
The crowd started yelling, “‘Peter Piper,’ ‘Peter Piper,’ ‘Peter Piper’!” Mixx got on the turntables cutting the song. All those guys, Run-D.M.C. and their manager and their security, they all rushed the stage, ready to fight. “Hey motherfucker, what the fuck y’all doing? Come on! Let’s go! We can do this right here on the fucking stage!”
We went at it. The fans went crazy, cheering the fight. Security came. Cops came and separated us.
“Fuck this! We out!” And we left.
It was the same bullshit whenever we shared a bill with any of those guys. I kept my pistol on me, because I knew what was coming. Memphis, Tennessee: we did a show with Eric B. and Rakim. Drove all the way to Memphis from Miami, had all our equipment on the front of the fucking stage, and same thing. Their people said, “Y’all got one song. Three minutes.”
I went out and I took the mic and for three solid minutes I yelled, “Fuck Eric B. and Rakim! All these motherfuckers, they don’t like us. We from the South and these motherfuckers got a problem with that. They think they’re better than the South. They won’t let us perform.” Shit hit the fan. Started a fucking riot. People were throwing shit, yelling, “Give us our money back!”
Then it was Savannah, Georgia, and Public Enemy. Here we go again. I was getting ready to go up onstage and the road manager, this white guy, he came to me in the kitchen in the back of this club and started talking shit to me, started telling me what we could and couldn’t do. “Yo, y’all motherfuckers can’t put y’all shit onstage. Y’all can’t do this, y’all can’t do that.”
I told him, “Look, motherfucker. You can’t tell me what to do.” He started getting up in my face and I started getting up in his and I don’t remember who took the first swing but I ended up beating his white ass all up and down that damn kitchen. Cops came and it was a whole thing. We ended up not being able to do that show.
If you ain’t from New York, you ain’t shit. That was the attitude. Every time. It wasn’t just us. The Philadelphia guys, Schoolly D and all them. They would be alienated, too, kicked out. Same with N.W.A and the guys on the West Coast. We weren’t getting on the Fresh Festival concerts. We weren’t getting on the big corporate tours. We could get on college radio, but New York had control of the commercial radio. We couldn’t get played, even the clean versions of our songs. That’s why we had to work the chitlin circuit as long as we did, because they had control of local commerical radio. We ended up hooking up with N.W.A and Ice Cube and doing shows with them, because we were all outcasts. We started sharing stories about how the New York artists were disenfranchising us and not letting us on the major tours. We’d sit there and share these stories and get fucking pissed off.
The wild part about it was that these New York guys were on this trip that their shit was better, but I was my own executive, so I knew what my sales figures were. In all my history and all my career, my number-one-selling market was New York. The fans in New York loved 2 Live Crew. They loved bass music. I sold more records in New York than I sold anywhere else. Which shows you that all that macho East Coast–West Coast posturing, all that Tupac and Biggie shit, it was all bullshit, pointless.
People liked all the music, every kind of rap: dance rap, kiddie rap, gangsta rap, conscious music, bass music, New Jack Swing. The variety is what kept hip-hop alive and made it grow the way it did. If the sound had never changed from what it was in the South Bronx, hip-hop would have died in 1983. It would have been a fad. But here we were, beefing with each other over what was “real” hip-hop. We were tearing each other apart when we should have been united. There was something bigger out there for all of us. White kids were starting to buy our albums. They were popping up at our shows. Hip-hop was taking its first steps across the color line, which indicated that shit
was about to blow up.
After we put out The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are, I got some letters from a PTA group in Birmingham, Alabama, saying that children were getting hold of our songs and that they were inappropriate and what could I do about it? I was totally sympathetic to their concerns. Once we started doing more adult material at the Pac Jam II, I drew a clear line between kids’ shows and adult shows. We’d do an early show, serve nothing but soft drinks, and all the kids could come in and have a good time. Later we’d clear the club and let all the grown-ups line up for the late show. We IDed everyone to make sure everyone was over eighteen, and then do an explicit show for the adults.
With the albums, I turned to my old friend common sense and decided to do something similar. I did what the movies did. They had a ratings system, PG and R and so on. That worked and everyone agreed to it. Music didn’t have anything like that, but I figured it should. I put parental-advisory stickers on my records. I called retailers and told them, “Hey, if you see a sticker on our album, do not sell it to kids under eighteen.” A lot of stores kept it behind the counter, the same way they’d do with Playboy and Penthouse, so that people had to ask for it and show ID. That parental-advisory sticker was my idea, not the recording industry’s.
Where I first ran into trouble was that some leftover, unstickered copies of the explicit version of The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are were still out in stores. In April of 1987, in Callaway, Forida, some little town out in the Panhandle, a store clerk sold a copy to a fourteen-year-old girl. The clerk got arrested for the “sale of harmful material to a person under the age of 18,” a third-degree felony. A lot of stores around the area started pulling the album.
The Book of Luke Page 10