Part of the reason I get no respect from these writers and journalists is that the South itself gets no respect, and I’m the father of southern hip-hop. I’ll never forget going to the New Music Seminar in New York back in the early 1990s. I was on this hip-hop discussion panel, and Hank Shocklee from the Bomb Squad started dissing 2 Live Crew and my label. He said southern rap was nothing but a fad. I got pissed off. I stood up in front of all of these people in this Marriott Marquis ballroom, about 1,500 people, and I said, “That’s some bullshit. Mark my words: when it’s all said and done, the South will run hip-hop. No disrespect to New York and California, but we’re bigger. We have North Carolina, Memphis, Houston, Charleston, Georgia, Florida, Alabama. Once we fire up, you’re gonna eat your words. Right now, I’m selling a half million records a month, not including New York. I’m doing the same numbers that you’re doing in one town, but I’m doing it throughout the South. Imagine what will happen when more Luther Campbells come on.” There was so much untapped potential in the South, and by the end of the decade it had taken off—and it all flowed from one place: Miami.
When I signed MC Shy D, he was the first rapper in Atlanta to get a record deal. There was no Atlanta scene to speak of back then. There were no southern labels there. L.A. Reid and Babyface’s LaFace Records and Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def Recordings hadn’t come along yet. There was no southern radio, even; all of Atlanta’s urban stations were playing New York music. But what we did in Miami, creating our own sound, that then flowed up to Georgia. Georgia artists got inspired and started saying, Damn, we want our own sound. We want to do something different than Miami, but we don’t just want to imitate New York. Lil Jon pioneered crunk music, an evolution of Miami Bass. T.I., Usher, Ludacris, Goodie Mob, Outkast—they all started to blow up.
I signed the first rapper out of New Orleans, this kid named Bust Down who had a hot song, “Nasty Bitch,” that I loved. Pretty soon after that, Ronald “Slim” Williams and Bryan “Birdman” Williams were setting up shop down there as Cash Money Records, which they did because they were having a hard time getting me to sign them. Birdman tells a funny story of how they were trying to get to me through Bust Down to sign them up. He told me, “We were young guys and you signed up fucking Bust Down. We begged him to hook us up with you, because you were the only brother that was in the game.” For guys in the South, there was only one place to go, Luke Records. And it wasn’t just the South. Even Sir Mix-a-Lot sent me a demo, a guy doing bass music out of Seattle.
I couldn’t sign everybody, so these guys took the initiative and started doing their own thing. Pretty soon Cash Money was blowing up with Lil Wayne, Drake, and DJ Khaled. It had been the same in Houston with the Geto Boys years earlier. I’d brought them down to the Pac Jam for a few gigs, they went back to Houston and started Rap-A-Lot. Then it was Three 6 Mafia in Memphis. Then it spread to Charlotte, North Carolina. Then to Virginia Beach. The next thing you know, Outkast is taking home the Grammy for Album of the Year and Three 6 Mafia snags the Academy Award for Best Song from the soundtrack for Hustle & Flow. The South took over hip-hop, just as I predicted it would.
Every one of these guys who started at that time, I met them at some point down the line. Either they called me in Miami for advice, or I’d play a show in their town, do a radio interview and give them a shout-out on the air. It’s a rite of passage. You show respect when you come into their territory, and they return the favor by linking up with you when they at your home. And whenever we’d meet, they’d tell me the same thing: “Hey man, I read about you in Source, man. I saw that shit in there. I started selling my own little mixtapes. I got hot. Radio station start playing my stuff, and then I start selling my own records.” It was always the same story, and I never got tired of hearing it.
It wasn’t just the inspiration of Luke Records that spurred these guys on. I’d built the infrastructure that they used to get their music out into the world. In 1986, when I was going around hustling copies of “Throw the D” and The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are out of the trunk of my car, there was barely even a hip-hop section in the record stores. There were no southern venues putting on rap concerts, no program directors looking for independent southern rap to play on the radio. By the time the younger guys came along, all that was in place. There was a network of DJs, promoters, distributors, and radio stations ready to promote them. I built that network, by hand. I created all those relationships, going town to town, meeting with promoters, shaking hands, selling them on my product, getting them excited. I paid all those college kids in all those towns to get the records in the hands of club owners and DJs. Then, a decade later, I’d be sitting with CeeLo Green and the Goodie Mob in Atlanta, telling them, “This is the distributor you should talk to in Memphis. Here’s the guy to talk to in California.”
The best part was, by the time the major labels figured out how much money and how much talent there was in southern hip-hop, black artists and label owners had already made it their own. I can’t take credit for the artistic talent and the musical genius of all of those groups, but I can say I poured the foundation they built their success on. If you read the “history” of rap, you won’t find one word about it.
At the end of the day, there’s one simple reason why hip-hop historians and journalists don’t give me the credit I’m due. It’s because of Uncle Luke: the cartoon character I invented onstage, the loud-mouthed hype man, the King of Dirty Rap. Thanks to the 2 Live Crew controversy, Uncle Luke’s crazy nonsense overshadowed everything that Luther Campbell ever accomplished. Uncle Luke makes it rain at the strip club. Luther Campbell gives lectures at law schools on the First Amendment.
I could blame the media for that, and I do, to an extent—they love to sensationalize and twist everything. The truth is that I have to accept at least some of the responsibility myself. I didn’t see any point in trying to change the media’s point of view, so I embraced it, played up the man in the black hat. Uncle Luke was popular. He sold records. If I was out in the club or at a concert, that’s who the people wanted, and I gave it to them. When I was getting tired of running a record label, Uncle Luke gave me a lucrative second career. The King of Dirty Rap became the King of Dirty Videos.
Adult entertainment was the logical next step, the only place for Luke to go. Luke would be the black Hugh Hefner. There wasn’t anybody filling that niche for black audiences. I started seeing these Girls Gone Wild videos advertised on TV, and I thought to myself, “Man, I can do Girls Gone Wild times a thousand.” Little blonde girls flashing their tits on camera? Shit was tame. Ever since the days of 2 Live Crew, my stage shows had been out of control. Bob Johnson and BET had just bought the Action Pay-Per-View network, and they needed programming. I pitched them Luke’s Peep Show. I’d interview rappers and R&B artists, talk to Tupac, Foxy Brown, whoever was in town. We’d do these interviews, and in between there’d be a little peep show, freaky stuff going on. One show I interviewed Jay Z with one hot girl eating out another hot girl on the couch right next to us. Show was a hit. Thousands of guys paying ten dollars a pop to watch. The market for direct-to-DVD sales was blowing up at the same time. On DVD I could be even more explicit. I turned my stage shows into full-on live sex shows, filmed everything that went down and packaged it as Luke’s Freak Show. Sold like crazy.
Between 2 Live Crew and the Freak Show videos, I was defined as Uncle Luke in people’s minds. When I was doing those videos it was all a performance. Luke was out there on camera leading the show, but as Luther, as myself, I was detached from it. I was mostly just watching the whole phenomenon take place, and I was usually confused by it, to be honest. The thing is, people thought my music was explicit. It was mild compared to what I saw other people, regular people, doing out on the road. The freakiness was always out there. They came to me, wanting to be in the videos. People got up onstage and did things I never in my wildest imagination would have thought to ask someone to do. Girls would come and audition and show me their crazy sex tricks to ge
t on the road. One girl came in and put fucking aluminum foil in her pussy, stuck a lightbulb in, and lit the motherfucker up. I was like, “Get the fuck out of here. I gotta take you on tour!”
During the shows I’d have these girls onstage and we’d sing “It’s Your Birthday” and guys would volunteer to come up and join them. Then the girls would strip them naked and lay them down on their stomachs and start fingering their ass. Then the girls would spray styling mousse on their ass and light it on fire while everybody cheered. This was all live onstage, on camera, and guys loved it. Everyone signed the video release. They wanted to be a part of the show. It was almost like I was an anthropologist, dong a study in human nature. “What will these people do tonight?” I’d go onstage and say, “Everybody get fucking naked!” And they would. I’d say, “You, sit on his face. You, give her a golden shower.” And they’d do it.
There was this one girl that toured with us named Jasmine. Jasmine had the biggest fucking vagina in the world. Like, Jesus Christ. I never auditioned girls in the hotel room, always live onstage. Jasmine said she got a fucking trick for me: she was going to have a baby onstage. I got her up there, completely naked, and she started dancing and pulling out these fucking beads from her vagina. Just this long chain of beads. Beads for days, like, get the fuck out of here. Just beads, on and on. At the end of the beads she yelled, “I’m fitna’ have a baby!” Then she pushed . . . and pushed . . . and pushed . . . and this plastic baby doll popped right out her pussy. Like a full-size doll. I played it off like I knew it was going to happen. I was up there going, “This is what the fuck I’m talking about! Luke’s dancers ain’t no motherfucking joke!” In the back of my mind I was thinking, Damn, why’d she do that? That was fucked up.
I’d embraced the Uncle Luke persona because it made money, and it was fun for a while. But then it wasn’t anymore. In 2002, I was hired to host a party in North Charleston, South Carolina. It wasn’t an official Luke concert or a Freak Show. I was just there to MC a dance party, sign autographs, and take pictures with the crowd. The promoter who put the show together was pretty slick. He didn’t want to pay my fee to put on a whole Luke show, so he just paid for my appearance fee and then went and hired a bunch of girls to get onstage and do a bikini contest and strip and get freaky. He staged something that was similar to one of my regular concerts. I showed up for the event, did my MC bit, and then I stepped off to do my autographs and shake hands. This whole strip contest was going down and the girls started getting people out of the audience to come up onstage just like a Luke show, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. The guys started getting naked, the girls were getting naked, and I just sat on the side of the stage, watching the shit.
Next day the cops called. A woman from the concert was alleging that I had raped her during this explicit sex show. I said, “What? I raped somebody? You’re out of your fucking mind.”
Lucky for me, I was videotaping all my public appearances, in case I wanted to use the footage for any future videos. My boy Lucky, he followed me with a camera, shooting me for the whole show. I turned the video over to the cops, and it clearly showed me offstage signing autographs and shaking hands the whole time. It also showed this woman voluntarily getting onstage, joining in the show, and then getting off. Cops apologized and dropped the case and filed a felony charge against the woman for making a false report.
I thought I was free and clear of it, but this part of South Carolina where the club was? It’s white, rural, and conservative. It’s fucking Ku Klux Klan country, come to find out. The district attorney there, he decides to get all Nick Navarro with me: he’s going to make me an example so he can look good crusading for his white, rural, conservative voters. He files an obscenity charge against me for promoting a lewd and lascivious act onstage.
I wasn’t doing anything. Wasn’t even my show. My first reaction was, Fuck this. I’m going to fight this motherfucker, but my lawyer told me, “Luke, you’ll probably lose.”
I said, “How? These motherfuckers don’t have no case. The rape was thrown out. I’m on the video not doing nothing wrong.”
He said, “But there probably ain’t but two blacks on the jury rolls in this whole county. It’s all white, conservative Christian. They’ll hang you for it.”
The DA offered a deal. I took it. Growing up, my father had always taught me: “Don’t ever say you’re sorry for something you didn’t do just to keep other people happy.” But I did it anyway. I just didn’t feel like fighting it. Thousands of dollars in legal fees, going back and forth to South Carolina to defend myself, the whole thing becoming another media spectacle, I didn’t want any part of it. I pled guilty to the obscenity charge. In exchange for the plea, a suspended six-month sentence and an agreement not to make any paid appearances in South Carolina for five years. Fine with me. I didn’t ever want to go back there anyway.
After South Carolina, I lost my enthusiasm for the stage shows. The guy I’d been producing the Peep Show videos with, he’d moved to California to do hardcore adult films. The industry was taking off, making a lot of money. I thought it might be the next move. I saw an avenue that was open. There was nobody doing good black porn. It wasn’t really done the way that Playboy and Vivid did it. Their porn is upscale. Black porn is always done in some fucking roach motel, and the whole shit is cheesy. So I was like, “I’m going to do some high-class, top-of-the-line shit.” That would be the next big step for Uncle Luke.
We did a movie. Luke’s Bachelor Party, we called it. There was a concert going on, but in the back rooms during the show there’d be all this wild sex. I was in it to sort of walk around and introduce the couples and get the party going. Then we went to shoot the film, and while we were shooting it I was walking around watching all the blowjobs and fucking—and I hated it. Hated every second of it. I kept saying to myself, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to be doing this. Get me the fuck out of here.”
The stuff I did with the stage shows was all spontaneous. It was a party, people just getting up onstage and letting their inhibitions go. This was just a business, the girls negotiating what they will and won’t do. It was all a transaction, they’ll do this for this much, that for that much. They’ll work with this guy, but not that guy because his shit’s too big. I thought doing that video would be the same kind of raunchy fun we had at the 2 Live Crew and Luke stage shows, but it was a totally different vibe. Being there, watching it, listening to it, I couldn’t stomach it.
It was a mistake.
The fight for 2 Live Crew’s explicit lyrics was never really about the lyrics. It had been about the principle of fighting for the right to do the same thing white artists did without legal harassment and censorship. It had never been my dream to be the King of Dirty Rap or the black Hugh Hefner or a guy who made porno films. But here I was. I’d lost my way. I’d let myself get wrapped up in the fun and excitement of being a rock star. I’d lost track of who I was, the mission I was on, what my life was really supposed to be about.
When the media played me up as this caricature, I went along and played the part to the max because I got a charge out of provoking people and breaking down parameters of what black men were allowed to be in this country. But I’d won that fight . . . fifteen years ago. Since my company went bankrupt I’d just been stuck in the same place, doing the same shit. I was becoming the cartoon that the media made me out to be. I wasn’t challenging myself. I wasn’t living up to what my father or my mother or Uncle Ricky had wanted for me. I wasn’t doing anything to make the world a better place. I knew I had to change something. I had to find a new path and a new purpose. I went back to the place where I started. I had to go back to Liberty City.
IV
OPTIMIST
After I walked out of that Broward County courtroom back in October of 1990, after all the attacks I had to endure from politicians like Governor Martinez and Sheriff Navarro, from so-called do-gooders like Jack Thompson and Focus on the Family, it was never lost on me that th
eir attacks on me had been a huge distraction from what was really important. The whole trumped-up controversy over dirty rap was so trivial compared to the actual problems that were going on in black Miami at the time. Jack Thompson said his whole crusade against me was to protect the children. In Liberty City, black children were going hungry. In Overtown, black children were getting shot in the streets. Jack Thompson never talked about them. The moral-majority types went on and on about the safety of kids who bought cassettes in suburban record stores, but they never talked about the kids being fed to the meat grinder of the inner city every single day.
The Arthur McDuffie riots destroyed Miami. You’d think maybe the cops would have learned something and changed their way of doing business. Not a chance. In January of ’89, a twenty-three-year-old black man named Clement Lloyd was riding his motorcycle through Overtown. An officer in the area radioed in that Lloyd was “driving erratically.” His only alleged crime: driving erratically. An officer nearby, William Lozano, heard Lloyd’s motorcycle roaring up the street, reportedly fleeing the first cop. Without warning, without calling for the driver to stop, Lozano stepped into the street with his gun drawn and fired a single round, a fatal shot to the head that killed Lloyd instantly and sent his motorcycle careening into a second young man, Allan Blanchard, who was also killed instantly. They were shooting black men off the backs of motorcycles like it was cowboys and Indians. Riots broke out again, raged for two days, leaving one dead, buildings in flames, and millions in damages. Convicted of manslaughter at trial, Lozano won acquittal on appeal and walked away scot-free.
The Book of Luke Page 23