I went with my gut on every choice. If I was gonna be judged, I didn’t want to have any regrets. Some of the selections went our way, some didn’t. There was another guy in the jury pool, a biker, like a Hell’s Angels type of guy. Dude was ugly, had a wife-beater on, tattoos up both arms. Bruce wanted to keep him. He said, “This guy doesn’t like authority. He’s a biker, and bikers are not sympathetic to the police. I think he’d be good.” But I didn’t like him. He looked like the kind of redneck asshole who’d go around fucking with black folks, wearing Confederate-flag T-shirts and shit. I said, “Nah. He’s a nigger hater. I want him out.” Bruce used one of our peremptory challenges and struck the biker down. Then, when the dude came down from the jury box, he walked by my table and reached out and high-fived me and said, “Go get em, brother!”
My mistake.
We only had a few blacks in the jury pool to choose from, and unfortunately several of them disqualified themselves up front by saying flat out that they didn’t think we were guilty. It was nice to hear, but it kept them from being considered. With a jury of six, we ended up with only one black person, this old grandmother. But we had at least a couple of white people I felt would be sympathetic to my position. Given the pool of jurors we had to work from, it was probably the best we were going to do.
The prosecutors were doing their best to manage with the racial aspects of the trial, too. The lead prosecutor was this white lady, Leslie Robson. She was the worst possible person to try a case like this. She had this shrill, monotonous voice, and even when she smiled she looked like she was smelling something unpleasant. They brought on this black guy, Pedro Dijols, to serve as her co-counsel, to try and make it look like this wasn’t a racist prosecution. But Dijols wasn’t an African-American. He may have looked black to the jury, but that motherfucker was Puerto Rican. He tried to act like he wasn’t just there to look black for the jury, but prior to our trial the only thing he’d ever prosecuted was DUI cases. Robson didn’t let him talk much. If you ask me, the dude was just there to be window dressing.
I actually ran into Dijols in the bathroom during the trial, and he said to me, “Man, I like your music. We was just jamming to your shit in the office the other day. I don’t know what the fuck they got us doing this here trial for. This is just my job, you know? I gotta do it.” He wanted to have it both ways, play the respectable token for his white bosses out in the courtroom and then turn around and try and act like he was down with me in private. It made me think even less of him, but it made me realize the prosecution didn’t have much of a case if half of them were dancing to our music in the office.
This trial was the reverse of the Gonzalez hearing. This time we were the defendants and it was up to the prosecution to make its case first. They couldn’t use the lyrics from the album as proof of obscenity; the thing on trial was our performance of those lyrics, which meant their only evidence was the recording of the show at Club Futura made by Navarro’s deputies, who didn’t know shit about recording music in a club. They’d all used those little minicassette recorders, and they’d been standing five feet away from the huge, blaring speakers. The tapes were nothing but garbled, distorted noise. No one could understand what was on them. Listening intently the best you got was blown-out distortion with the occasional shit or bitch or ass coming through.
The prosecution played clips from tapes for hours, just blaring loud, unintelligible noise at the jury. Since the tapes were so bad, their whole case came down to Navarro’s deputies testifying about what they heard and explaining what was on the tape. What you had was a bunch of stiff, wooden cops on the stand stumbling through lyrics like “Put your lips on my dick and suck my asshole, too.” They were worse than porn stars reciting dialogue. It was fucking hilarious. They thought reciting the lyrics was going to indict me, but they ended up making themselves look ridiculous. The whole thing was a farce.
On his cross-examination, Bruce was brilliant. He made the cops go back and repeat the lyrics over and over again, being very specific. By doing that, he drained all the shock value out of the words. While the deputies were cursing up a storm of dick and ass and pussy, Bruce never uttered a single word of profanity. He would always say “anal sex” or “intercourse” or “Are you referring to the lyrics about the man’s penis entering the woman’s vagina?” He sounded like a doctor discussing normal, basic human bodily functions. Bruce managed to make sex so boring that at one point a juror fell asleep. The psychological effect it had was brilliant. We came off as normal, sane people while the cops sounded like a bunch of dirty perverts obsessed with dick and ass and pussy.
This went on for days. One of the sheriff’s deputies who testified was this petite young lady with this tiny little voice like Mickey Mouse, and she was up there reciting lyrics like “Lick my asshole up and down / Lick it till your tongue turns doo-doo brown.” Everybody in the courtroom was cracking up, including the jury. They were putting their heads down and turning beet red trying not to bust out laughing. They were doing their best to play this impartial, respectful role, but it was impossible with these witnesses up there making clowns out of themselves. Eventually the foreman of the jury passed the judge a note, and she announced to the courtroom, “The jurors have made an unusual request. They want to know if they are allowed to laugh.”
The second she read that note, I was like, “Oh, shit, we won this motherfucker.” The intent of the music was always to make people laugh. When given a fair hearing, and in the right context, the jury liked the music and were entertained instead of offended. The judge told the jury they could respond to the testimony however they liked. For the rest of the week, it was like a comedy show up in that courtroom.
Then it was time for our defense. All we had to do was prove to the jury that our music was comedy, that it was art, same as we had in the first trial. Bruce called as our star witness Dr. Henry Louis Gates. Today Gates is famous as the Harvard professor who got arrested by some white cop for trying to open the door to his own house and ended up having beers with Obama on the White House lawn. Back then he was a professor of English literature at Duke University. Rhodes Scholar, degree from Oxford University, brilliant guy. Bruce had called him because of an op-ed he’d written for the New York Times called “Decoding 2 Live Crew.” Gates’s testimony was the highlight of the trial.
Gates’s expert opinion was basically what I’d been saying all along, that our music was a joke, a comedy routine set to music, only he was able to speak on it from a historical perspective that gave everyone, including me, a deeper understanding of what we’d been doing. On direct examination from Bruce, Gates compared the profanity in our music to Chaucer and Shakespeare, which had always used raunchy language and wordplay about sex to get laughs from the people, but most importantly he put our music in the broader context of the black experience, how when a group is marginalized and stigmatized with certain stereotypes—like young black men as oversexed brutes—one way to deal with that stereotype is to embrace it, to exaggerate it to the point where it obviously becomes absurd. “You can have no reaction but to burst out laughing,” he said, pointing out that on the tapes of our concert, the whole audience was laughing and singing along. There was never any threat of sexual violence or anything like that at our shows, because the whole thing was so ridiculous. “What you hear,” Gates said of the tapes, “is great humor, great joy.”
On cross-examination, the prosecution tried to badger Gates, mocking him for comparing us to Shakespeare, calling it ridiculous to put us in the same black creative tradition as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, but the professor was cool under fire. He’d already demolished their case, and by that point they were just fumbling along and trying to get this over with. They knew they’d lost. By the time we rested our case, the Vegas odds were 9 to 1 in our favor.
The verdict was set to come back on a Saturday. We made our way to the courthouse. Outside it was swarmed with TV cameras and news crews from all over the world. I was the focal point o
f it all, giving interviews and making comments, being filmed walking to and from my car.
The media barrage was everything Nick Navarro had wanted, only Nick himself wasn’t there. In fact, he’d disappeared about halfway through the trial. He knew this wasn’t going his way, and he didn’t want to be there when it blew up in his face. The media event of the year, and the man who never met a camera he didn’t like was nowhere to be found. Three other people weren’t there that day: Mr. Mixx, Fresh Kid Ice, and Brother Marquis, which tells you a lot about where the band was headed at that point.
The jury only needed one vote to come to a decision. They’d have been in there for less than ten minutes but they ordered a pizza and took time to eat lunch. We were called in to the courtroom and the foreman stood to read the verdict: not guilty, acquitted on all counts. I turned and hugged Bruce. I was thrilled. It was a total rush. I was judged by a jury of my peers. They came back and said, “This is art. This is free speech. This is a free country. This shouldn’t be censored.” It let me know the fight wasn’t for nothing and that not all people were fucked up, just some, like Jack Thompson. I was happy not just that I’d won this fight, but that I’d made my bigger point: that a black man in America could have his day in court and see justice done.
The minute that verdict came back, it was like the fever broke, not just for us but across the nation and across the industry. The whole censorship frenzy that had consumed the twenty-four-hour news cycle went away. Our very next show in Gainesville, a handful of Christian groups tried to stop us, but this time the police and the local authorities shut them down. Cops didn’t harass us or intimidate us at all. What were they going to do? Arrest us and try us again in Gainesville? The legal precedent had been set. We just did our show, the fans had a great time, and everybody went home happy.
In the next months and years, the record-store owners who’d stood up for us all had their convictions overturned, including Charles Freeman. In May of 1992, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Gonzalez’s ruling that Nasty was obscene, saying he’d imposed his own judgment rather than a fair application of community standards. Rappers, heavy-metal bands, sexually explicit painters and sculptors, they were now free to do their work. They might get protests from self-righteous nut jobs, but that’s just more free speech from the other side and that’s fine. The threat of official interference from the state was gone. I fought that fight for myself, for hip-hop, for black musicians, and for every creative mind in the country. Not a single musician or artist has faced an obscenity trial in America since that day. Not one.
Not only did we win, everyone who was against us lost. Jack Thompson wouldn’t give up. He petitioned the judge to nullify the verdict on the grounds that one of the jurors hadn’t told the truth in jury selection about how much college education he had, as if that mattered to the case. He harassed the judge so much that she filed a formal grievance against him with the Florida bar for obstructing justice and wrongly trying to influence an officer of the court. Thompson still kept going, after me, after the video-game industry, after anyone he thought was corrupting the morals of America’s youth. He harassed so many people and had so many grievances filed against him that the state of Florida finally disbarred him a few years ago.
Everybody that hitched their wagon to Thompson’s lunatic crusade got burned, too. In their next elections, both Bob Martinez and Nick Navarro went down in flames. They’d tried to make me their Willie Horton, and it blew up in their faces. Martinez became a one-term governor after losing in a landslide a few months later to his Democratic opponent, Lawton Chiles. Navarro lost right after that, too. His fifteen minutes were up. The cameras moved on and he ended up running a private security company—just another retired rent-a-cop working Christmas parties and the senior prom. Even Dan Quayle only got one term as vice president before the voters kicked him and Bush Sr. out of the White House.
That fall, MTV invited 2 Live Crew to perform “Banned in the U.S.A.” at the 1990 Music Video Awards. Finally. I felt like it was the first real, honest recognition from the music industry of the importance of what I was doing. I always kept up my game face in public, being tough and a fighter and all that, but it was hard. I’d been through so much shit that year, the death threats and the public turning against me and the eyes of the world on me from New York to Japan. I let all of that go onstage that night. It was the deepest moment I’ve ever had performing. Public Enemy and other artists started coming onstage hugging us, so it was like the weight of the world had been lifted. It was nothing we’d rehearsed. It was totally spontaneous. They just felt it in the room. They just felt it and came out onstage. It was some deep shit. People couldn’t tell because I was wearing my sunglasses, but I was up there fucking crying and singing my heart out and letting the world know how incredible it felt that I’d won the fight.
That was the best performance of my lifetime.
ROCK STAR
Back when we were starting out, 2 Live Crew never got any respect from our fellow rappers or from the major labels. We were too raunchy, too controversial. Coming off the Broward trial, after taking that hit and becoming First Amendment champions, I started to hope that we’d finally get our due, the kind of respect I got from Bruce Springsteen when he let me use his song. I was thrilled when I received an invitation to attend the Grammys. They said they were going to be giving out a special Freedom Fighter award in light of everything that was going on that year with musicians’ free speech under attack. They intimated to me that it was something special, and that it would be a secret until the show aired, but that I’d want to be there for it. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, damn, here it is at last, the industry acceptance that I’ve never received.
I flew up to New York for the show at Radio City Music Hall. I walked through all the interviews along the red carpet, flashbulbs everywhere. I went in there that night ready to be recognized for taking a stand and holding my ground. I took my seat and settled in for the show. Finally they got to the special award. Somebody gave this big speech about music being an art form worth defending and how the First Amendment had been under attack and so they were going to honor an artist who had been fighting for free speech and free expression all over the country. “Please join us in bringing onstage . . . Madonna!”
I was like, Madonna?! Get the fuck outta here.
I ain’t been back to the Grammys since.
In hindsight, it was foolish of me to think that the mainstream music industry was ready to start recognizing independent black artists and labels. In the end, I didn’t care. I was too busy to give a shit. I wasn’t looking for their validation and I didn’t need it. Thanks to Nasty and the trial, I’d become an international rock star all on my own. Our record sales had been taking off in Japan, so the first thing I did once I got out of that courtroom was book my first solo tour over there to promote Banned in the U.S.A.
Japan was wild. We played Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, and Tokyo. I’d never even left the country before, and the whole experience was pure culture shock. Even though the audience didn’t understand the words, they still understood the music. It was crazy to see how music is such a universal language. It was amazing to see how far hip-hop had traveled around the globe. This was barely ten years out from the Sugarhill Gang and “Rapper’s Delight,” but hip-hop style and music and fashion were everywhere.
MC Hammer was touring Japan at the same time, playing fucking arenas. We were both a long way from when he slept on my couch and did a show at the Pac Jam II. We met up with him for his show at the Tokyo Dome. Hammer had his whole entourage up onstage, must have been at least a hundred people. He brought me onstage to close out the show with him on “2 Legit 2 Quit.” I remember being up onstage, doing our thing and looking out at the Japanese kids. They’d never seen somebody move like Hammer did, shaking his body at 130 beats per minute. They went crazy for it.
And those Japanese girls were freaks. Straight-up wild, nasty freaks. Every night they
were jumping onstage and grabbing my crotch. Every night. The last night of the tour, I said to myself, “I’m tired of these girls grabbing my dick onstage. I’m gonna pull some Rick James shit tonight.” One time Rick James was eating out Teena Marie onstage. I wasn’t going to do that, but I decided I was going to be the first rock star to get a blowjob onstage. I was like, fuck it, by the time the police find out I’ll be on a plane back home. A bunch of girls climbed onstage and I told them, “Y’all motherfuckers line up. Give me some head. Run a train, right in front of the band.” They took my shit out and they all took turns giving me head during the last song.
When I got back from Japan in December of 1990, I didn’t even pause to catch my breath before launching my next big venture, the one thing every rock star needs: my own marquee nightclub. I still had my first club, Strawberries Too, out in Hialeah, but that was just a local spot in a suburban strip mall. We had the Hurricanes players, some NFL guys coming out there. Mike Tyson came in a few times. But it wasn’t a five-star celebrity joint. That’s what I wanted to create.
The Book of Luke Page 17