The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  “Do you think I can win?”

  “Yeah, I think you can win. And even if you lose, you win.”

  “What kinda jive white-man talk is that?” I asked.

  “If the courts don’t find the album obscene, you’re off the hook. If the courts do find it obscene, you’ll sell a ton of records and make a lot of money.” After he told me that I was like, Okay, I like this dude. He would defend anyone’s right to free speech. Even mine. During the trial, we went to lunch one day and he even picked up the check. It was the only time in my life I’d ever seen an attorney pick up a check. After that, I liked him even more.

  Rogow felt that the best defense was a good offense. He immediately wanted to make a preemptive strike against Navarro by accusing him of prior restraint. Nineteen days had already passed since Navarro had started harassing record-store owners. Yet all they had was the order declaring there was probable cause for obscenity; there was still no official ruling on the subject. None of what Navarro was doing was legal. It was pure intimidation. We had to force the issue and make them prove the album was obscene. On March 16, 1990, we sued the sheriff of Broward County.

  The case that Rogow put together rested on the Supreme Court’s Miller v. California test on obscenity. There’s three parts to the test. First, does the material, taken as a whole, appeal solely to the prurient interest? In other words: does it turn you on? Second, does it violate the standards of decency in the local community? Third, and most importantly, you have to prove that “the material in question, when taken as a whole, has no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Usually, if something has any value, artistic or otherwise, it cannot be banned. The question was: is As Nasty as They Wanna Be art? The federal district judge in the case was Jose Gonzalez, a Hispanic liberal who had been appointed by Jimmy Carter. Rogow thought he would be a strong First Amendment defender. Also, in the Alexander City trial, the jury had judged our last album not obscene—and that was in Alabama. This was a slam dunk. There was no fucking way we could lose.

  The hearing started on May 14. The first thing we had to prove was that Navarro had engaged in prior restraint. That was easy. It was clear that he’d overstepped his authority by intimidating store owners without bothering to get a ruling on the album. Next we came to the Miller v. California test. Here Rogow was brilliant. To prove that the album didn’t solely appeal to the prurient interest, he called a clinical psychologist. She testified to what we knew was true: the album didn’t make you want to have sex, like pornography does. It made you laugh. People are far more turned on by visual stimulation than audio. She said she’d never had one patient who ever complained about getting a hard-on by listening to rap.

  Then, to prove that the album didn’t violate existing community standards of decency, all Rogow had to do was go shopping. Across the street from the sheriff’s office in Broward County—literally right across the motherfucking street—was one of the largest adult bookstores in south Florida. Rogow went in there and bought a whole bunch of shit. I’m talking nasty, freaky shit, videos and magazines, S&M, bondage, people having sex with animals. It was wild.

  Rogow brought all this back into the courtroom and he put it all on display in great detail. One of the exhibits he submitted to the court was this lesbian movie with two women masturbating together. There was no jury in this trial, only the judge. Rogow played this for Gonzalez, who was all alone up there. He had to sit there and watch as Rogow played him this tape. Rogow played the whole scene, beginning to end, nothing but two chicks fingering themselves. It went on for like ten minutes. Gonzalez was so fucking uncomfortable up there. It was fucking brilliant.

  Proving the album had artistic merit was the other leg of the case. Rogow knocked that out of the park, too. He brought in Greg Baker, a music critic for the Miami New Times, who knew all about us and the history of Miami Bass. He brought in John Leland, a music critic from New York who was one of the most knowledgeable critics on the subject of hip-hop at the time. Baker and Leland laid it all out for Gonzalez: the history of call-and-response in black music, how Latin and Caribbean sounds evolved into Miami Bass, the whole history of scratching and sampling that started with Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash in the Bronx, how this was a groundbreaking, innovative form of music.

  It was now time for the defense to present their case. Only they didn’t have one. The lawyers for Sheriff Navarro didn’t call one expert witness for their side. They thought all they had to do was show the judge transcriptions of our lyrics and the rest would be self-evident: it’s a bunch of black guys rapping about pussy in front of white people. Guilty. Case closed. It’s also important to point out that this whole trial revolved around violating community standards for decency, and how many citizen complaints had Navarro received? Not one. Literally not a single citizen of Broward County, black or white, had actually called or written his office to complain about our music. In fact, it was just the opposite: people were buying thousands of copies a month. All this had been stirred up by one religious zealot and some publicity-seeking politicians. The whole thing was unbelievable.

  We were sure we had it in the bag. At the end of Rogow’s closing arguments, I was all smiles. Besides, no album in the history of recorded music had ever been found obscene. But there has to be a first time for everything. When we gathered back in court to hear Gonzalez’s ruling, he started out by slamming Navarro for engaging in prior restraint. Navarro, he said, was guilty on that count. But then Gonzalez dropped a bomb. He declared that Nasty was, in fact, obscene. We couldn’t believe it. I don’t think Navarro and his lawyers believed it, either. It turned out that Gonzalez, though politically liberal, was actually very culturally conservative. He only listened to classical music and opera, and no matter what the experts told him, he thought our music was a bunch of noisy filth.

  I was shocked, angry, dumbfounded. I walked out of the courthouse into the wall of cameras and microphones. Bruce was cool as a cucumber. He hadn’t expected the verdict, either, but he was confident we’d win on appeal. He’d told me at the beginning that even if I lost I’d win. I tried to keep that mind. When they asked me what I thought about the decision, I said it was worth less than toilet paper. And it was. I wouldn’t have wiped my ass with it.

  I thought I’d leave them with one last sound bite before I rolled out. Jack Thompson, the man whose delusions of grandeur had started all this shit, was a few feet away, preening for some reporters. I turned to Jack and I yelled, “Hey Jack, you need to get some pussy!”

  OBSCENE

  Gonzalez handed down his ruling on June 6. The blowback was quick. Everything started to spiral out of control. Nasty started disappearing from record-store shelves all over south Florida. One Broward County record-store owner named Charles Freeman refused to comply. Freeman, who’s black, made a public announcement that he would keep selling the album until the Supreme Court said he couldn’t. The day after the ruling came down, an undercover cop went to Freeman’s store, EC Records, and bought a cassette of Nasty for $8.49. Then he turned around, told Freeman he was under arrest, and put the handcuffs on him. Five other deputies swarmed the store, like Freeman was some kind of violent criminal or something. They made Freeman sit there in cuffs for forty-five minutes. The television news crew was running late and Navarro was waiting until the cameras showed up to film him walking in and making the arrest in person.

  Store owners were scared to conduct legal business. All across the state, prosecutors were convening grand juries to try and have our album banned. It escalated quickly. Nasty was found obscene in seven different Florida counties: Sarasota, DeSoto, Manatee, Putnam, Volusia, Flagler, and St. Johns. Cops in Vero Beach started acting like Navarro, warning store owners that they’d be charged with a felony for selling the album. The bannings spread; a judge in Indiana ruled the album obscene. We were banned in San Antonio, and prosecutors in Dallas fined two record stores for selling the album.

  For every sheriff or district attor
ney who went after us, there were plenty of officials who said, as Janet Reno did, that this wasn’t worth their time. One sheriff in Georgia said he really enjoyed our show. But the crackdown was severe enough that it started to have a chilling effect on the industry. People were starting to watch what they said, who they did business with. Geffen Records had no problem putting out explicit records by Andrew Dice Clay and Guns N’ Roses, but they backed out of a deal to distribute the Geto Boys, who were just starting to establish the rap scene in Houston.

  Meanwhile, I was under attack on a completely different front. Back when I’d been an intern at the radio station, Star Wars was the big movie, and guys had started calling me Luke, which naturally led to Skywalker. I’d changed the spelling to Skyywalker, and used that as my DJ name and then in the name of my label. As my profile increased, I’d figured this might be a problem. When I started my label, my lawyers asked me if I’d gotten permission to use the name. I hadn’t. So I got a release. I actually had a release signed by George Lucas. It said as long as we didn’t use the name for movies or anything related to the actual character, we were okay.

  Apparently, the lawyer I had back then didn’t know shit. I was later told the letter release was no good because it was never executed. So now Focus on the Family and all these Christian groups started calling Lucasfilm in California. They put pressure on George Lucas, and he came back after me. I ended up having to write George Lucas a check for $500,000 and recalled tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise with Luke Skyywalker on it that had already been printed. Whatever. It was just money. I paid it and moved on. I didn’t need the name. My real name was famous enough on its own at that point.

  The Skyywalker thing was a dumb, expensive mistake. I was twenty-eight years old, a black kid from Liberty City who didn’t go to college and barely graduated from high school. I was making all this up as I went, figuring things out on the fly. I didn’t have powerful mentors showing me the way. All I had was my own God-given common sense and the character and the backbone my parents had raised in me.

  Once the Gonzalez decision blew everything wide open, I really had to step outside myself and look at the whole situation and think. I knew that, deep down, no matter what anyone said, it was really about race. What the politicians and the media were doing was so obvious. Some days the newspapers ran our story next to the coverage of the Central Park jogger case, where five black kids from Harlem were on trial for assaulting and raping a white woman in the park. Guilt by association. Look at the dirty jungle music driving young black men out to rape white women. The five guys in the Central Park jogger case were innocent, too, by the way.

  Censorship and free speech were this thing that had the whole country in a frenzy. It was affecting everyone, from heavy-metal bands to painters and photographers trying to get their work in museums. But we were getting it worse. Andrew Dice Clay was putting out his dirty albums at the same time. He was talking more wild shit than I ever did, and they invited him to host Saturday Night Live. When Skid Row’s lead singer, Sebastian Bach, used profanity onstage in Philadelphia, he was arrested, but they let him off with a fine. Madonna was probably the biggest name facing problems. She was drawing a lot of controversy with her provocative Like a Prayer tour. In Toronto, cops told her to tone down the show. She told them if they tried to make her she’d cancel the whole thing and they could deal with the thirty thousand angry fans. The cops backed down.

  All of those people were white, and at worst they were just being hassled and inconvenienced. We were the only group in the country that was having its First Amendment rights curtailed in a court of law. We were even getting it worse than the other hip-hop acts, and when I understood the reasons for that, that’s when I really realized exactly what was going on.

  White America was getting itself all worked up about every hip-hop act that came along, not just 2 Live Crew. N.W.A, Slick Rick, Too $hort, all those guys got flack. But there were three specific artists around that time whose work became legal flash points in terms of talks of boycotts and censorship and pulling records out of stores. One was Ice-T’s song “Cop Killer,” which had every police union in the country calling for the song to be banned. The second was Professor Griff of Public Enemy, who made some ignorant anti-Semitic comments about Israel in an interview, kicking up a shitstorm in the media about blacks and the Nation of Islam and Israel. And the third one was some black guys in Miami talking about sex.

  Which of these three did America consider the most dangerous? It was the black guys talking about sex. In America, that was the single biggest taboo you could be breaking, the fear of miscegenation, the terror that kept four hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow in place. And not only did we break that taboo, we smashed it, stomped on it, and danced on it. People were more upset about us than they were about talk of killing policemen and Jews. Think about that.

  That was the reason the 2 Live Crew controversy blew up so big, but the reason it kept going so long was because I had the balls, and the means, to fight back. And that’s what really pissed these white conservatives off: my freedom, my power to tell them no. Ice-T was on Time Warner. When the police unions threatened boycotts over “Cop Killer,” the label pressured him to back off, and he did. He took the song off his album. Public Enemy was on Def Jam/Columbia. When the Anti-Defamation League folks went after Public Enemy, Columbia pressured them to throw Griff under the bus, and they did. They kicked him out of the group. But nobody could pressure me. I was black-owned, independent, and making tons of money. I was my own man—a free black man. Nobody owned me. That, I realized, was the thing that really drove them so crazy.

  And because I had the only black-owned label, I was the only one who could fight this fight. If I didn’t stand up, corporate America would keep trying to censor all of us. That’s how I saw it. Unfortunately, nobody else in hip-hop saw it that way. Not at the time. The major-label artists, instead of backing me, they distanced themselves. Groups like Salt-N-Pepa and Kid ’N Play, they wanted to stay acceptable to middle America and sell records. They went on BET and publicly slammed us. Other groups just didn’t say anything. No major rappers came out in our defense. Not one. Even guys like Russell Simmons, who as an executive I thought would understand the dangers of censorship, I never heard him say a word. No comment. No commitment.

  Mainstream artists wanted to play that respectability-politics card. They wanted to throw 2 Live Crew under the bus and show white people that hip-hop could be well behaved. But you only deserve free speech in this country if you’re well behaved. In fact, the people who need free speech the most are the ones breaking taboos and challenging the status quo. Respectability politics weren’t going to save hip-hop from censorship at the hands of corporate America. We had to save ourselves. We had to fight.

  Me, there was never a time I wasn’t thinking about fighting. I was born to have this fight. As far as this country was concerned, I was already supposed to be dead or in jail. So I had nothing to lose. The millions I had in the bank—I didn’t care about that. They could take it all. My father never apologized for being who he was, and neither would I. This was my music and I was going to fight for my right to make it. Not because I particularly cared about being a dirty rapper, that wasn’t really what the fight was about. The question was whether or not the laws of the land applied to a black man the same as a white man. That’s what was driving me. If Andrew Dice Clay and Hugh Hefner have the right to do it, then I have the right to do it. I believed that a black man deserved to have his day in court and see justice served.

  After Gonzalez handed down his verdict, Rogow and I hadn’t even left the courtroom when we were already plotting the next steps: Rogow would appeal Gonzalez’s ruling to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, where we knew we’d find people with some sense to judge this case, but that would take months to play out. I couldn’t have my career on hold for that long, so I decided I’d challenge the law directly by doing the show at this run-down little pla
ce in Broward called Club Futura.

  On June 9, 1990, Mr. Mixx, Fresh Kid Ice, Brother Marquis, and I rolled up to the club in our white limousine. There were at least thirty police cruisers parked outside. We went in and got ready backstage. I put on my 2 BLACK, 2 STRONG, 2 LIVE CREW shirt. I normally didn’t wear that to perform, but that’s how I was going out that night. As soon as I got onstage I was looking in the crowd. I could see all these out-of-place people: undercover cops. They were easy to spot because they were old as hell and dressed like they’d just run through KMart grabbing shit off the racks with the lights out. They kept making eye contact with each other, nodding at each other, talking into their earpieces.

  Rogow had told me that if I sang about elected officials, our performance could be defended as a political rally. So we got the crowd going with chants: “Fuck! Martinez! Fuck! Fuck! Martinez! Fuck Navarro! Fuck! Fuck! Navarro!” Fans were wearing T-shirts that read LET LUKE PLAY. A lot of them had shirts that said: I USED TO LIVE IN AMERICA, NOW I LIVE IN BROWARD COUNTY. It turned out it was a political rally after all.

  The cops in the front row all had those mini-cassette recorders sticking out of their front shirt pockets, and you could see the red lights flicking on and off in the dark. I didn’t want to make things difficult for them, so I leaned down and sang my dirty lyrics right into their little microphones. They must have had over a dozen officers in the club that night. Two would have been plenty. I was there to get arrested. I was there to take a stand for the First Amendment—to take a stand for hip-hop, for my community, for everyone who’s ever been bullied into silence by a man wearing a badge.