UNCLE LUKE WORDS: JULIA BEVERLY PHOTO: COLIN WILLIAMS
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ow hard is it for an artist such as yourself to stay relevant in the game for a long period of time, with trends coming and going so quickly? How hard is it to stay relevant? It’s not hard at all. Not to me, because I’m a businessman first. If I was just an artist I would probably have been lost in the shuffle a long time ago. But I’m in the business of sex, and when people are in the business of sex they stay around for a long time. And I’m consistent with sex, I don’t fuck around. I’m not a gangsta one day and a weed smoker or something the next day. I’m sex all the time! Have you thought of going into the “sex business” full-time? Like full-out porn? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing now. This will probably be my last album as an artist. I have a couple artists on my label, yeah, but I’m going straight sex, porno, adult entertainment. That’s the only way to go. It’s a $57 billion dollar industry. Ads in the porn magazines ain’t like your magazine where you’ve got to spend $10,000 an ad (laughing). In the porn business you can just spend $2,000 with the AVN and you’re good. You don’t have to buy ads, you don’t have to buy videos, you don’t have to spend half a million dollars in promotions and marketing.
Would you describe your new album My Life & Freaky Times as softcore porn, or more mainstream? How explicit is it? It’s Luke. Everything I brought to the table with 2 Live Crew. You have kids, right? What’s your opinion on how much sex kids should be exposed to? Yeah, I’ve got three kids. Kids should stay in kid’s place. I don’t think kids should be exposed to nothing that they ain’t ready for. I coach football, and I’ll have all the kids over at my house. They’ll be in the back room and they talk like grown people. I’m not sayin’ that I condone that, though. They don’t talk crazy around me cause I’ll straighten them out. You’ve gotta know how much they’re ready for. I got a 15-year old daughter and her mother said she was talking to boys. So I got on the phone and told her, “Yo, you talking to boys? You know what them muthafuckers want, right? That’s all they want, to try to get a little piece of the tail.” I talk to them real. At the same time, if they’re talking like that, 9 times out of 10 they’re listening to music like that. To a large to degree they are getting exposed to it through music, but you’ve gotta know how deep to go with them. That’s how I am with my kids. Sometimes they ain’t ready, like my son. He ain’t ready, he’s into that Playstation right now. But as soon as he started talking about them girls, that’s when I’m going to start talking to him hart. He’s gonna be hearing that shit. “Nigga, you better wear a rubber!” Do you think it’s important for the schools to address sex education as well as the parents? Yeah, I think they need to. I think kids nowadays are not like the kids when I was a kid. Nowadays, the kids are exposed to so much more. You’ve got internet, music, fast girls, everything is fast right now. The world is going real fast. You’ve got cell phones now; shit is not slow like it used to be. Back in the day if you had four brothers or something in the house and one phone, you could never get on the goddamn phone. You’d have to wait in line or beat somebody down like you was in a jail cell just to use the phone. So it ain’t like it used to be, and there’s so much shit that they can see and hear these days. They need to be talking about sex at school because these kids are having sex at 13. I don’t know what’s up with their hormones, I guess it’s whatever the hell they’re putting in the chickens. These girls got double D’s at twelve years old. My daughter’s like fuckin’ 5’9” at twelve years old. I hear that the government has been pushing more for abstinence education in schools telling them that the best option is not to do it at all. That’s the wrong thing to do because it’s not realistic. When you talk to kids about what not to do, they’re gonna go do it. It’s just like anything else. You’ve got to use reverse psychology. Back in the day when kids
were told not to listen to my music, they found a way to go get it. They’re gonna sneak around the corner and listen to it. It’s the same thing with sex. If you’re telling them not to have sex, then the cool kids are gonna try to rebel against the adults. Those are the ones that are eventually gonna do shit they don’t even know nothing about cause ain’t nobody talking about it. I think people should have more conversations about sex and the responsibilities that come with it, cause other than that you’re gonna have a whole bunch of people having kids. But when you talk about the fact that kids are exposed to so much more sex these days, don’t you think you had something to do with that? Wasn’t that the purpose of your whole career? No, not necessarily. I think I did open it up for the urban community, yeah. I opened up Pandora’s Box. Right here on South Beach, before, you would’ve seen black girls coming in from the ocean and they wouldn’t have a bikini on. They’d have a towel all wrapped around them. Traditionally, black people are really conservative. They’re more conservative than conservative whites are, in my opinion. Most black households are like Oprah. With this whole tradition of sexuality most black people are nervous about that. So to a dgree, I opened that up so people expose themselves a little more and show their body a little more in a tasteful, classy way, and sometimes in a derogatory way. But I could’ve never put that in a video, cause they would’ve never played it. So on the music standpoint, I opened it up so people can say what they wanna say on a record. But as far as sex, that’s always been here and it’s always gonna be here. I ride by schools right now when I’m going to work, and in my opinion they need to put uniforms on all of ‘em. Some of the girls are walking to school like they’re going to a nightclub. That ain’t my fault, cause there’s a time and a place for everything. You say it’s not your fault, but at the same time, if you opened the doors for women to dress a certain way in videos why are you surprised that kids would want to dress like the women they see on TV? Don’t you think it all ties together? Not necessarily, cause I haven’t had a video in a long time. Here’s what I was taught in my household: kids stay in a kid’s place. If kids are having kids, you’ll run into a situation where the kid’s mama and daddy ain’t gonna conduct themselves in a womanly way or a fatherly way, because they’re just a damn kid too. When I was a kid, when I was up under their roof, I had to be my ass in the fuckin’ house at a certain time. I couldn’t be all in the streets doing whatever I wanted. If my niece came over with some scandalous lookin’ outfit on, she’d have to take that shit off. It’s the responsibility of the parents to regulate their kids. I mean, Playboy’s been around for a hundred years. So music videos, man, that shit don’t do nothing. Back in the days those black exploitation films were worse than the films now. Shit, they had girls on there snorting coke and all that shit. People were exposed to worse things back then than they are right now with a lil’ music video. Do you think prostitution should be legal? It is legal. Shit! You’ve got states right now in the union where sex is legal. Vegas. Everybody wants to go to Vegas, everybody’s got a convention in Vegas. If you ain’t got no money, you can’t get no sex. Most girls want a man with some money. At the end of the day they don’t want no broke-ass man. Why fake it? Shit, come on out of the closet. Do a poll in your magazine: “How many women want a brokeass man?” How many women want a man that can do something for them; that can take them shopping and buy them nice things? That costs money right? How many women want to take care of a man? If any women reading this magazine got a lot of money and wanna wife me, then wife me goddamn it. I’ll quit my job. You can take care of Luke for the rest of his life! On that note – you mentioned that you’re a businessman first, not just an artist. A lot of people may not be familiar with the story of what happened to Luke Records and why you ended up filing bankruptcy. It seems so common nowadays for people to file OZONE
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