The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  Our goal with Nasty was to take the concept of a 2 Live Crew album to the absolute limit, to make it as insane and explicit and raunchy as we could while still keeping it funny. It was all there in the title. It was a provocation, a dare to the morality police: This is who we are. You want us, come and get us. It worked. Move Somethin’ sold nearly a million copies. Nasty would double that. When we released it in the summer of 1989, it shipped with five hundred thousand preorders, certified gold before it even left the warehouse. The radio-safe version, As Clean as They Wanna Be, came out at the same time, and that sold less but it still did well.

  We took everything that made our first albums a success and took it even further. It was some wild shit. The songs were raunchier: “Dick Almighty,” “The Fuck Shop,” “Put Her in the Buck.” People loved it. And not just because it was dirty. It was me and Mixx and the other guys firing on all cylinders and coming up with great shit.

  I’ll never forget the night I was sitting up late watching TV. I love war movies, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket was on HBO and that scene with Matthew Modine and the Vietnamese prostitute came on and she’s going, “Oh, me so horny. Me so horny. Me love you long time.” I couldn’t stop laughing. I was like, bam, that’s a song right there. That’s the hook. The next morning I went to the guys, gave them the idea, and they ran with it. Ice and Marquis wrote up the lyrics, and my man Mixx was all over it. He always had a crate of R&B, soul, rock, and funk records that he had ready to cut and sample. He pulled out “Firecracker” by Mass Production and had the basic track done the next day. The whole album was like that.

  Everything we did got harder. The music got harder. The album covers got more graphic. The shows went off the deep end. In the beginning it was just us onstage, me being the hype man and Mixx on the turntables with Marquis and Fresh Kid Ice out front. We added dancers, male and female. I knew the girls liked the music and they would come to the shows; the guys were there for the girls, and the girls were there for the guys.

  The music was getting more sexually driven and shocking, and the shows began to reflect that. We got rid of the guy dancers and started bringing on the girls with the big asses, girls like Cindy and Mona and Annette. We kept putting women on our album covers, and I didn’t want no skinny-ass models. Down in Miami, it’s all about a full-figured woman. Girls with curves. Somebody who can shake that ass. They were real women who could dance and they was fine as hell. People loved them.

  During the shows, sometimes the girls in the audience would jump onstage and pull off their shirts and dance around topless, just because they wanted to. It was crazy. I started thinking about Tootsie’s, the strip club my bodyguards Damien and Rocco used to take me to back in the Pac Jam days. I said, “Fuck it. I’m just going to bring strippers onstage.” We started replacing the dancers with strippers. They were coming out with G-strings and wet T-shirts and pasties. It was like a strip club onstage. I brought on other elements to the show, like a big-ass fucking Jacuzzi coming down out the ceiling with some naked girls in it. Shit was wild. Whatever I thought of, I did. These were rock shows. I was living the life of a rock and roller, because that’s what I wanted. I always considered myself a rock and roller. I listened to that more than R&B. That’s why you hear the Kinks and Manfred Mann and Van Halen and Bruce Springsteen on our records. I wanted to bring to rap the visual element and lifestyle that you saw at rock shows and rock videos but in a way that had a black sensibility and showed black taste.

  It was the same with our videos. If you look at the rap videos from those days, there were no girls in the videos. There was no sex in the videos. It would just be a couple of rappers on a soundstage with a boombox and some breakdancers and a little fake graffiti to make it look ghetto. Total bullshit, and that was the only thing happening. The video vixens and the real black women, nobody else had done that yet. This was years before Sir Mix-a-Lot and “Baby Got Back.” There were no rap videos set in the club or out on the beach with girls in bikinis. We changed all that.

  Like everything else I did, I usually had to do it on my own and use common sense to figure it out. The videos were no different. There was no such thing as the film commission down in Miami to do these videos, no unions and crews and shit like that. I got these college guys from the University of Miami film school. They came down to my house in Miami Lakes to shoot the videos for us. They got credit as interns for their class. Around the same time, a black strip club called Rolex opened up in Miami. From there I was getting more exotic dancers for the videos. I would shoot the pretty girls’ faces and then I’d shoot the ass of a curvy woman. So when you saw it, you’d be like, “Man, they got these fine girls with curves!”

  I would tell the girls, “Make love to the camera like you making a guy spend more money.” They would get into the camera and they would be fucking dancing in a seductive way. In these videos we’re all in the pool, dancers shaking their asses, it’s all some wild and crazy party. Once our videos started airing, Miami strip clubs started blowing up because everyone was coming down wanting to see these girls in the 2 Live Crew videos. More and better-looking girls started coming down to work and make that money.

  The first video we shot was “Move Somethin’.” We took it even further for “Me So Horny.” Initially they wouldn’t even let us on MTV or BET. But there was this channel called Video Jukebox. With Video Jukebox, you could call up, pay a fee through your telephone, and they would show the video. Our songs would come on and you had these videos of half-naked women and people in the pool partying. When that shit hit the TV it fucking blew up. Instant hit. We stayed on all day. All around the country, people were calling in to pay to see it. Now we had a visual vehicle. We weren’t being played on the radio, but motherfuckers were locked into Video Jukebox, and they were buying our videos religiously. Eventually, MTV2 had to buy Video Jukebox because it was taking so many of their viewers, which we all thought was great.

  Nasty was selling tens of thousands of copies a week, plus I had all the sales of our earlier albums and the other acts I was signing. As I told Will Smith and all those guys back in the day: I was getting all the money. They say that the total net worth of your assets is ten times the amount of cash in the bank. The most I ever had in the bank was ten million, over half of that from Nasty alone, so I’d have to guess the most I was ever worth was $100 million—and I was only twenty-eight years old.

  I can’t really say for sure how much there was. To be honest, I wasn’t counting the money. I was too busy making it. And I never cared about the money. I really didn’t. None of that was promised to me. I was supposed to be in a prison cell or in a coffin alongside my man Handsome Harry. Everything I got on top of that was gravy, as far as I was concerned. For me, what I was doing with Luke Records, it was more about the fight, the struggle, proving I could do something that society had told me I couldn’t do. Aside from buying my parents a new house, I spent some of the money on myself, bought a house on a golf course in Miami Lakes and a waterfront condo downtown. I bought a yacht, some cars. But almost all the money I made up to that point I reinvested in my businesses. I put it toward creating jobs in Liberty City. That’s what was important to me.

  As the 1990s took off, I was on fire. Everything I touched turned to gold. Most of the major hip-hop acts of that time were busy complaining about getting fucked by their labels. I was the manager and face of one of the hottest rap groups in the country. I had twelve acts signed to my own label, the largest independent black-owned record label in America. I had seventeen employees working under me at my plush office on Biscayne Boulevard. I had an old guy named Joe Coalsky, a legend in the music business, doing the distribution and the collecting. I had another guy, Slack Johnson, who had worked at major record companies, doing marketing and promotion.

  Just two years after selling records out the back of my old beat-up Honda, I’d moved to this plush office suite on Biscayne Boulevard. Now I’d even outgrown that. The offices weren’t big enough.
My warehouse wasn’t big enough, either. I moved into a bigger space, one massive, all-in-one complex right in the heart of Liberty City. It was probably the single biggest commercial investment in Liberty City since the riots. We took over this building, cleaned it out, and made it into a warehouse, a studio, an office with conference rooms, and a teen disco that could hold a thousand kids every Friday and Saturday night. All under one roof. We even had a retail shop where people could come in and buy records and merchandise right from the source. The records were moving so fast I hired a couple dozen more guys from the neighborhood to handle the inventory.

  My empire was growing one piece at a time. I started diversifying. The club scene was blowing up in Miami, and I’m the kind of guy who’d rather own the club than spend money in someone else’s. If I’m throwing the party, I also want to be the one selling the booze. I decided it was time to break into adult nightclubs. That’s when I bought Strawberries in Hialeah. The club was already popping when I bought it. My brother Brannard, the executive chef, I brought him in to run it. I was making all this adult music, and now I had a place to test that, too. After Strawberries took off I opened another club, Miami’s, in Pensacola.

  All of my businesses were operating in the black: the clubs, the record label. I was making shitloads of money. I was producing more albums, signing new artists, expanding my operations. Everything I did with my money was to make more money. Like when I bought a company jet. With 2 Live Crew, we were on the road constantly, but I always needed to be back in Miami during the week to run the businesses. It was a waste of time to fly commercial; I needed to fly when I needed to fly. I wanted to do two shows in one night and then get back home for the next morning. When I saw how much it cost to rent a private jet, I was like, Why pay that money to someone else? I bought a plane, and instead of having the promoter pay the travel expenses to the private jet company, I had them pay me to provide my own transportation. You hear about rap stars buying private jets and you think it’s some crazy rock-star bullshit. Not the way I did it. My jet paid for itself and then some. Fifteen years later, Jay Z was rapping, “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” Guess who he learned that from?

  The wealthier I got, and the higher I climbed, the more racism and hypocrisy I saw. I’d take a bunch of guys out on my yacht for Miami’s Columbus Day regatta, and we’d go from boat to boat, partying. The shit I saw rich white people doing was way raunchier than anything we ever put in a 2 Live Crew song. I saw white executives, politicians, lawyers, all having this huge drug-fueled orgy out on the water. They were all respectable, upstanding citizens, and I was the bad guy. The only real difference was they were hiding their sins while I rapped about it and put it on TV. Oh, and I was black.

  Once Nasty came out, the controversy surrounding it showed the racism and hypocrisy of America for what it really was. With that album we were spoiling for a fight, and we got it, thanks to one batshit homophobic Bible-thumping clown named Jack Thompson. Every crusade starts with a true believer. Most of the people who came after us ended up being self-serving hypocrites who wanted to score political points; they didn’t actually care about obscenity. But Jack Thompson really and truly believed that 2 Live Crew was the single greatest threat facing the future of America’s youth. Jack Thompson is—and I can’t emphasize this enough—crazier than a shithouse rat. He actually was made to meet with a psychiatrist to prove his sanity because everything he did and said was insane. He used to attach pictures of Batman to his letters and faxes to identify himself. That’s how convinced he was of his own importance as a crusader for decency and morality.

  Thompson’s first real headlines came when he went after the popular Miami radio DJ Neil Rogers. Rogers was gay and out of the closet, and Thompson didn’t believe homosexuals should be allowed to poison the airwaves with their filth. Thompson was obsessed. He harassed Rogers so much that he ended up getting barred from ever saying Rogers’s name in public. Thompson then decided to run against Janet Reno, Bill Clinton’s future attorney general, when she ran for state’s attorney for Miami-Dade County. The black community loved Janet Reno, black women especially, because she had a reputation for putting deadbeat dads in jail for not paying their child support. You’d go to the Martin Luther King parade and Janet Reno would be the only white person there—period. So I thought, Man, we gotta do a fucking Janet Reno song. I called my cousin Anquette and we recorded a track called “Janet Reno” supporting her candidacy. “Janet Reno come to town, riding on a pony, dah, dah, dah. . . .”

  It was just something we did as a fun little joke, but the song blew up all over local radio, big fucking song. Everybody was talking about it on TV. Thompson got pissed. He started calling the radio stations, saying they had to take the song off during the election because you have to have equal time for each candidate. I did a radio interview about the whole thing. It was a Christian radio show, and Jack Thompson was on the segment. Thompson just lost it, going off and telling everyone that Janet Reno was a dyke, 2 Live Crew was evil, and all this wild shit. That was my first encounter with somebody telling me to my face that my music was devil music. I was like, “What the fuck you talking about? Y’all crazy.”

  I thought this guy was just a crackpot. I didn’t give him one moment’s thought after that. He ended up losing the election by a lot, but he felt like I made him lose it, and then he went on this mad crusade. He tried to get Janet Reno to prosecute me, but Janet Reno wouldn’t fucking touch me. Then Thompson led an antigay protest in front of her house, and I launched a protest in front of his house. I took everyone from Liberty City and sent them all to his neighborhood, sent all these black people out to lily-white Coral Gables. I rented buses, vans, and shit and loaded all the people with protest signs and went and stood out in front of his house. I fucked with him hard.

  Thompson started a fax and letter-writing campaign. He wrote to every politician, judge, media outlet, and law-enforcement official in Florida, sending them lyrics from Nasty and telling them that my music was obscene and a dangerous threat to innocent children across the state. Thompson was just an ex–golf pro with a law degree. I always knew he was a joke, but some people thought he was credible just because he was a lawyer; they thought he was writing as someone representing the law and the Constitution, not as a nut job chasing his own personal obsession. Plus it was a juicy story for the media. So he kept picking up more and more steam and people started interviewing him. He was getting his fifteen minutes of fame.

  Almost every sane Florida politician that got harassed by Thompson ignored him. Every one except the big one: Bob Martinez, the governor. He fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Martinez, being Hispanic, was always looking for issues to play to his conservative white Republican base, and he thought this would be a big win: he’d silence the foul-mouthed nigras debasing the image of the fine state of Florida. After getting Thompson’s letter, Martinez turned around and sent out a letter of his own to the state attorney, Peter Antonacci, calling us “vulgar” and “disgusting,” and even suggesting that Luke Records could be prosecuted under Florida’s RICO act—that’s the anti-racketeering statute they use to go after organized crime and the mob. Antonacci thought it was bullshit and basically kicked it down to county-level law enforcement to pursue if they wanted. Pretty much all of them took the letters and tossed them in the garbage. In Dade County, Janet Reno went on record saying she had real crimes to worry about.

  Only one guy took the bait. Sheriff Nick Navarro of Broward County, the asshole from Cops who was busy making himself a reality-TV celebrity by hounding drunk rednecks at the beach and throwing young black dudes down on the hoods of cars. Navarro never met a camera he didn’t like, and when he saw a chance to go after this obscene rap group in his own backyard with the blessing of the governor, it was the role he was born to play. He sent one of his deputies out to buy the album. They typed up the dirty lyrics and an affidavit and took it to a judge, Mel Grossman, to get a determination of probable cause saying
that the material was likely to be found obscene, had no artistic merit, and could therefore be banned. Grossman, who apparently didn’t care for our sense of humor, gave them the order for probable cause.

  At that point, there hadn’t been any hearing or jury trial to establish that the album was obscene by the standards of the law. But that didn’t stop Navarro. He and his deputies went around Broward letting record stores know that anyone who sold the album could be arrested, even before the album had been legally deemed obscene during an adversary hearing. In other words, they were engaging in prior restraint. They were violating my First Amendment right to free speech.

  Up until that point I hadn’t been taking any of this seriously. I thought it was all a bunch of posturing for the cameras. But now my albums were disappearing from stores. My constitutional rights were being taken away. This was what my father and my uncle Ricky had prepared me for when they taught me the history of what black folks in this country had been through. I’d seen this fucking movie before, and I was ready to fight.

  At the time I had an entertainment lawyer, Allen Jacobi, but he felt like I would need more legal help than he could offer and recommended me to Bruce Rogow, a former professor of his at Nova University in Fort Lauderdale. He was like, “Let’s hire the best. This guy Bruce Rogow.”

  Rogow had no idea who 2 Live Crew was, didn’t even know much about rap, but he was the perfect guy for the job. His track record made him look like the Perry Mason of lawyers. He didn’t fucking lose. Not only was he a First Amendment expert, he’d been a lawyer with the civil rights movement in Mississippi back in ’64 and ’65. He had spent a lot of time in Africa, and his house was full of African artwork. He was this older white dude in a double-breasted suit and a bow tie, and he seemed to know more about black and African people than I did.