Ellington

To attend a 2 Live Crew concert is to experience a mixture of hedonism and mass hysteria. Between the kick of 808 drum patterns and thongs moving to the rhythmic swing of the music, who would guess this group had once fought one of the most significant wars regarding free speech in the United States?

Formed in 1984 at Marshall Air Force Base in California, 2 Live Crew consisted of Chris Wongwon ("China Man"), DJ David Hobbs ("Mr. Mixx") and Amazing V. They released their debut single entitled "Revelation," and shortly thereafter moved to Miami and replaced Amazing V, who left the group, with New York rapper Mark Ross (Brother Marquis). "After we left the military, it was really nothing out there for us," Wongwon said before 2 Live Crew's July 18 show at Club Crazy 8 in Byram. "The West Coast had its own set of groups with their own style. We had wanted to go where we were happening, and we were happening in the South."

The group signed with former road manager and promoter Luther Campbell's Luke Skyywalker Records. Campbell later changed the label's name to Luke Records after Star Wars creator George Lucas filed a $300 million lawsuit against him. (They settled for $300,000). Campbell would later join the group, helping them raise the energy level for their already raunchy lyrics. "Before we had the girls out there, he used go out there and hype the crowd up. So later, on the 'Move Something' album, we brought him into the group," Wongwon says.

In June 1989, the group released the seminal "As Nasty As They Wanna Be." A maelstrom of criticism surrounded the group's sexually explicit lyrics, which many also considered misogynist and violent. "The album contained 87 references to oral sex and included the controversial single "Me So Horny," which incorporated a sample from the Stanley Kubrick-directed movie "Full Metal Jacket."

"What we were doing was expressing ourselves musically. That was our thing; it was like locker room talk and party rhymes. But other people took it offensively because it wasn't meant for them. It was meant for our folk. The people we were dealing with. The streets," Wongwon says.

The album's release happened to coincide with the efforts by the Parents Music Resource Center, Florida attorney and evangelist Jack Thompson, and the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association to pressure retail outlets into not selling explicit albums. They argued that sexually offensive music should be stickered and its sale to minors strictly monitored.

In 1990, a judge in Broward County, Fla., ruled the album obscene, which is a very high legal standard under the U.S. Constitution. The group now held the dubious honor of recording the first record in America's history to be deemed illegally obscene. Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin would later follow suit, and retail outlets around the country began banning the album. Two years later, a Georgia appeals court would overturn the obscenity ruling. The U.S. Supreme would back up that ruling.

But like the McCarthy blacklisting three decades earlier, the later vindication did not make up for some of the harm done by the censorship efforts, Wongman says. Shortly after the original ruling, a record-store owner was arrested for selling a copy of the album to an adult. A jury later convicted him of obscenity, and he was fined $1,000. The retailer closed his store after falling behind on his rent because of constant police attention. "That was that man's livelihood. When they went in there and arrested him, basically what they did was shut his store down because they were watching over it," Wongwon says. The Crew itself was then arrested in Florida for obscenity after they performed music from "As Nasty As They Wanna Be" at an adults-only show. They were later acquitted. Despite the controversy, or partly because of the attention surrounding it, the album went on to sell 3 million copies.

The group's legal troubles would continue. Publisher Acuff-Rose Music sued the group for its parody of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" on the grounds that the remake version tarnished the image of the original. A Nashville court first ruled against Acuff-Rose in 1991, but a successful appeal sent the case to the Supreme Court. The court eventually ruled in favor of the group, legally underscoring that parody is not the same as plagiarism.

Regardless of its string of important First Amendment victories, the group would finally splinter due to differences with Campbell, who filed for bankruptcy in 1995 over the amount of money the group members were owed by Atlantic Records, Wongwon says now. Campbell also had financial problems of his own; in the early 1990s, he was ordered to pay $1.6 million in royalties to rapper MC Shy D who had sued him for breach of contract and misrepresentation over the albums "Gotta Be Tough" and "Comin' Correct in '88."

Much like porn king Larry Flynt, 2 Live Crew, with the throngs of thongs surrounding them, can seem like unlikely heroes for free speech. But the next time 2 Live Crew performs in a venue near you, try for a moment not to think about the obscene lyrics and half-dressed dancers. Think instead of how these guys helped make it possible for you, the adult consumer, to buy records that you like, regardless of their lyrical content.