“As Nasty As They Wanna Be is a fuckin’ classic. That’s when women started getting loose in the videos. Everything started to change. It wasn’t all about the paper anymore. It was more like Sex 101. This album showed you how nasty Miami is.” - Pitbull “ME SO HORNY” This single is one of the greatest rap songs ever, because it packaged something so raw and so profane that it should not have made it to TV or radio. “THE FUCK SHOP” When me and my homeboys were teenagers, we used to rent rooms and say we were gonna find some girl in the street and take her to the fuck shop. It never worked, though. We’d just end up sitting in the room getting drunk. Girls used to be like, “I’ll fuck one of y’all, but I ain’t fuckin’ no 20 niggas.” “PUT HER IN THE BUCK” People always talk about “doggystyle,” but down here in the country we like to put them in the buck. I’m a Southerner, and we get wild down here. This is one of my favorite sex songs.
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ESSENTIAL SOUTHERN ALBUMS
2 LIVE CREWNA BE AS NASTY AS THEY WAN
Luke Records - 1989
by Killer Mike
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“MY 7 BIZZOS” This album came out before the sampling laws were passed, and this song used the sample from Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.” Back then, rappers weren’t afraid of using guitars in their beats. Stop hating, let us sample!
ith this album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, 2 Live Crew made the world realize that people like sex. They made sex buyable in rap. There was no sexual awareness in hip-hop before them. They told you to put a rubber on, they talked openly about masturbation and jacking off. They showed people that there was stuff going on outside of what we were seeing in the movies. They told you things your mama was scared to, that teachers couldn’t, and what you yourself were too afraid to read about.
broad vision from the start. You couldn’t look at them as just a Southern group. Two of them came down from California through the military and Luke has a Caribbean background. They took it worldwide.
I think you really see the genius of 2 Live Crew on “Dirty Nursery Rhymes.” They really showed something with this record. They were able to make people not take a serious subject so seriously. This was a way to get people to talk about sex.
With “Fraternity Record,” see, this was before Kanye West came out with the whole College Dropout thing. They were already mocking the college scene and making them party. You can go on college campuses to this day and hear this record. And let me tell you, you’ll never believe what this song makes white girls do.
At the time this record came out, they were fighting to let us as artists say what we wanted to say. No disrespect to the old school G’s that have gotten arrested and have had their own run-ins with the law for fighting for what they believed in, but nobody defended our rights like 2 Live Crew. No one else had their nuts on the line like Luke when it came to this music shit. So when you mention the greatest, please mention Luke. Rap is about what you say and what you do. What Luke did in fighting for freedom of speech is like what Larry Flynt did, but he did it for us musically. I remember the first time I met Brother Marquis. I couldn’t say nothing to him. All I could do was rap “My 7 Bizzos” to him. I recited the whole verse in front of him. And he was probably looking at me thinking, “Why is this guy on my dick? That part of my life is over.” I always remembered the time they showed his face on the news when they shut down one of their shows, and he held up a Playboy magazine. The news camera tried so to switch away real fast but we still saw that white titty. When I met him, I told him that what he did was important. He helped us be able to express ourselves freely. Brother Marquis, he’s one of the greats. When I first heard this album I could not understand why “Reggae Joint” was on there. Looking back, it showed that 2 Live Crew had a 86
“IF YOU BELIEVE IN HAVING SEX” Say hell yeah! Luke was like Doug E. Fresh. Luke could run a crowd for 15 minutes just doing call and response. And they weren’t just rocking small clubs, they were rocking coliseums and arenas like N.W.A, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J did.
OZONE
2 Live Crew was also the first group to understand that people wanted to ride in their cars and bump the music. They knew that niggas was getting speakers hooked up in bootlegs places. So the EQ’ed it and tweaked the music for that specifically.
Number 17, “Mega Mixx III.” Whenever you mention DJs you gotta mention Mr. Mixx. If you a B-boy you can get down on the floor and break to it. If you a Southern playa you can stand back and let a hoe grind on you. At the skating rink, shit, when the DJ was finished or wanted a break he’d just throw this on and let it ride. 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be is not about saving the world. It’s just about having a good time and enjoying life. This was to me one of the last real bootyshake/bass records too. People think bootyshake and bass music are the same thing, but they got it all wrong. Miami bass made girls shake their ass but you still had rapping over it. It was real rapping about everything going on in the ghetto. Bootyshake was call-and-response and dancing. Luke is the person that stamped that call-and-response in your brain, and bootyshake evolved from that. I gotta give a lot of respect to Luther Campbell, Luke Skywalker, or as some of you may call him, Uncle Luke. If it wasn’t for him and Lil J [Prince] at Rap-A-Lot Records, there would be no Southern hip-hop scene. They were the first to make a business out of this. Luke is a true genius.