Not to be a smartass, but wasn’t Campbell supposed to be launching an adult video company back when? www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=14820. Whatever happened to that?
from www.vanityfair.com – Twenty years before Solicitor General Elena Kagan was uncomfortably forced to weigh in on the landmark case of Team Jacob vs. Team Edward, she defended 2 Live Crew’s incendiary 1989 album, Nasty as They Wanna Be, against obscenity charges.
Arguing that the disc had “undoubted artistic value,” Kagan, then an attorney, successfully helped overturn a ban on the album. Nasty as They Wanna Be “does not physically excite anyone who hears it, much less arouse a shameful and morbid sexual response,” she wrote in a brief filed on behalf of the band, according to the New York Daily News.
(Skip Gates is another prominent intellectual who argued against the obscenity charges. The group’s “exuberant use of hyperbole [phantasmagoric sexual organs, for example] undermines—for anyone fluent in black cultural codes—a too literal-minded hearing of the lyrics,” he wrote in a 1990 article in The New York Times.)
Anyway, now 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell has voiced his support of Kagan in his column for the Miami New Times.
He summarizes her defense of the 1989 album thusly: “In other words, my homegirl Kagan was saying people could not be aroused by the lyrics ‘cause my dick’s on bone’ or ‘me so horny, me fuck you long time.’ She realized these words did not meet the standard of appealing to prurient interests.”
(This case was truly the vampires vs. werewolves of its time.)
He continued: “She is not going to let any person or group tell her what is right or wrong. Kagan will judge each case based on the law of the land. She has demonstrated she can protect the Constitution by doing the fine work she did to protect 2 Live Crew’s freedom of speech.”
The Senate, for whatever that’s worth, appears to agree with Campbell: by most accounts, Kagan will almost certainly be confirmed to the Supreme Court before the August recess.
Meanwhile, Tipper Gore, who led the battle against profanity in pop music, is having a really bad year. Professional scolds, take note!