Uncle Luke can find the irony in knowing that his controversial and raunchy music helped to pave a way for artists to speak freely and provocatively. The 2 Live Crew frontman and group members were vilified more than three decades ago for explicitly rapping about women rump shaking and adults being unabashed in their consensual bedroom conquests.
The group successfully had an obscenity ruling overturned in 1992 when the album As Nasty As They Wanna Be spurred a flood of conservative backlash for its lyrics and cover art. The victory set a freedom of speech precedent for artists following the path he helped pave.
Luke also famously won a fair use case before the Supreme Court when the X-rated lyrics of “Pretty Woman” came under fire. In a Dec. 26 interview for the “All the Smoke” podcast, the Miami record executive touched on how the landscape of Hip Hop has become widely accepting of female rappers who have charted with their own explicit records.
“I love it, but it’s crazy. … My biggest critics were women back then when I was going through all the s**t,” he told hosts retired NBA star Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. Moreover, Luke said, “Right now I’m like, my how the tables turn. … I love Sexyy Red. I love what all of them are doing, you know what I’m saying, because they being themselves, and they represent a certain group of people.”
Sexyy Red, Ice Spice and Megan Thee Stallion are among the female contemporaries that he playfully called out on social media for capitalizing off of what he did decades prior. “I’m still waiting on these girls to send me a f**king check,” he joked in a video shared online last summer. “Anybody that’s running around shaking their a**es, talking about p**sy and d**k on the record, y’all need to send me a check,” he added.
But in all seriousness, the Freaknik king told Barnes and Jackson, “I love the fact that they [are] able to do they s**t because then, you know … if I don’t go back and get the federal case, which was when Nasty [As They Wanna Be] was deemed obscene [and] overturned. ... If I don’t get that overturned, they can use that case against all these girls. Everybody. Because it’d be case law. … They wouldn’t be able to say what the hell they saying.”
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