Issue Icons
LUTHER CAMPBELL
By Moe TkacikPhotos By Aaron Cobbett
If sex was the equivalent of genocidal fascism- and apparently in the late ‘80s it sort of was-the saga of Luther “Luke Skyywalker” Campbell would be like a real-life version of The Producers: man produces preposterously offensive musical performance and ends up with a smash hit when the audience can’t tell the difference between national tragedy and comedy. The difference, of course, is that the audience of Springtime For Hitler mistook it for comedy, whereas 2 Live Crew’s audience was, for the most part, convinced that joke lyrics like “A big stinkin’ pussy can’t do it all/So we try real hard to bust the walls” would be the downfall of the nation. In 1988, an Alabama record store owner was the first of many clerks-most in Campbell’s home state of Florida, where the governor made the extermination of 2 Live Crew a sort of crusade-to be arrested by undercover police officers, under a state law banning the sale of “obscene” materials, for the mere act of selling a tape of 2 Live Crew’s Move Somethin’. The follow-up to that album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, eventually went double-Platinum, aided by the curiosity of millions of middle-school white kids hoping their local record store clerks would risk going to jail for them. Since then, Campbell, whose Luke Records label made millions from the record, has diversified into porn and sports marketing, declared and emerged from bankruptcy amid a nasty dispute with his tax attorney, discovered acts like Trick Daddy and Pitbull, been accused of paying college football players to rig games, and told all about it on a highly amusing album/audiobook box set, My Life and Freaky Times.
[SWINDLE/S]: So do you have a personal favorite freaky time?
[LUTHER CAMPBELL/LC]: My personal all-time greatest freaky time . . . I don’t know. There are quite a few of them; that’s why I did the audiobook.
[S]: I was listening to this album the other day and thinking that some of the sex sounds kind of rough. Have you changed in terms of your lovemaking style? Mellowed out? Do you still put her in the buck?
[LC]: Yeah I do. Do you wanna get put in the buck? You ever get put in the buck?
[S]: Well that’s what I was thinking, like, I have to get on the kitchen sink? Because I don’t think I’ve done it on the kitchen sink.
[LC]: You never did the kitchen sink? I’ve had sex in a refrigerator before.
[S]: Like a meat freezer?
[LC]: Yeah, an industrial refrigerator in one of my clubs.
[S]: That’s cold.
[LC]: Look, you have to be creative, because just regular sex is not fun, like, get in the bed and foreplay and all that. It seems to me like a waste of time.
[S]: Yeah, I hate foreplay. But some of the stuff in that album is a little too creative. I mean, like that lyric about licking my ass ‘til your tongue turns doo-doo brown. Did that really happen? Is that based on a true story?
[LC]: (laughs) You’d have to ask Fresh Kid Ice … he made that one up.
[S]: I mean, listening to this stuff the other day it was just sort of mind-blowing to me that people got arrested by undercover cops for selling that disc. Like, police departments put actual undercover cops on the case for that, of all the things you could have your undercover police doing.
[LC]: Well, yeah, that was really over-the-top. Things have changed now, but back then, I don’t think a lot of police departments thought about how things like that would be broadcast across the world as being really stupid.
[S]: Since this issue is about icons and legacy, what would you say that you brought to the industry?
[LC]: I brought the business portion of it, the idea of the artist/businessman. A lot of people talk about me going to the Supreme Court and fighting those cases, and a lot of people think you wouldn’t be able to do stand-up records or do parody if I had lost that case. But I look at it more so from a business standpoint. When I was doing my records, everyone was really excited about being on a record label. I was one of the first people to start my own record label as well as being an artist, and the first to make it more like a crew type thing, as in me as an artist putting my other boys on. Nobody was doing that at the time; there was no Bad Boy or No Limit. When I started, there was Sugar Hill, there was Def Jam, and Def Jam was on Columbia, and that was it. You never had an artist owning a record company putting his other artists on independently. At the end of the day, that’s what I would want my legacy to be, more like an artist/businessman to start this whole era.
[S]: It wasn’t like you had a strategy team that was like, “Okay, we’re going to use a word-of-mouth marketing approach.” You just did it.
[LC]: All that came from me being a DJ. I looked at how I promoted a party. I want to promote a record the same way I promoted a party, which was to get out on the streets and put up fliers, go on the radio and talk about the record, go into the clubs and promote it in the clubs. I just flipped it into doing music.
[S]: I was reading a story in the L.A. Times from 1990, when you were at the center of the culture wars, and you said something that should have been obvious, like, “I market a product: sexually explicit hip-hop comedy.” Was it amusing to you that no one seemed to get that it was a joke? [LC]: Yeah, it was amusing. (points to a bottle of water) When you go and you say, “I’m gonna make water,” and then everybody starts saying, “Look at you! You’re making wine, you’re getting everybody fucked up and they’re getting all drunk, drunk, on the wine,” and you’re like, “This is fuckin’ water! There ain’t no alcohol in this motherfuckin’-” “Oh, but that water! It’s, it’s . . . devil water!” You know what I’m sayin’? And then, so you start thinking, Oh, shit, New York Times. Oh shit, Washington Post. Oh shit, I’m on Phil Donohue, talking about the water. At some point, yeah, “Goddamn right, it’s wine! Okay?” You ride that fuckin’ horse! Because you can’t beat ‘em, that big media machine. I’m in Time magazine with the water. “Yeah, it’s devil water! Y’all motherfuckers want to buy some of that?” I mean, we had Leroy and Skillet, Redd Foxx, Eddie Murphy, all well-known comedians sampled on the record, in their own words, in the music. And people are saying, “That’s not funny; that’s not comedy,” but these are comedians making jokes, sampled on the record! And I’m saying, “Okay, well, to you it might not be comedy, but to all the people who purchased that album before you, they thought it was comedy.” It was crazy.
[S]: My Life and Freaky Times boasts of a few times you were saved by pussy. Can you tell me about one time?
[LC]: I was in Indiana, and there was a girl in the hotel room. And Mike Tyson and I were supposed to go out, and she said, “You’re gonna leave all this to go out with Mike?” And she was standing there, bucknaked. And I’m like, “No man, I’m not leavin’ it.” And that was the night he was accused of rape. And if I’d been out with him that night, I’m pretty sure they would have put it on me.