YO! DIDDLEY!
HERE ARE some song titles: ‘A F— Is A F—’, ‘Ugly As F—’, ‘Who’s F—ing Who?’, and ‘F— Off’. I mean, that’s some kind of genius, calling a song ‘F— Off’. Hey Mr DJ, what’s this song called? “F— Off “. Pardon? “F— Off”. F—ing brilliant or f—ing what?
Let’s all be good liberals and agree on four things:
1) Racism is a bad thing; 2) Sexism is a bad thing; 3) All art must/should be judged in the first instance as art; 4) Censorship sucks.
With 2 Live Crew — the funking equivalent of Ivor Biggun, The Macc Ladds and Derek And Clive — the knob’n’fanny obsessed lyrics are paramount; 2 Live Crew are rude and disgusting, that’s what they do, so you can unspool the ‘clean’ version and flush. They make music for sexually immature young men; one track — ‘Fraternity Joint’ — is specifically aimed at students. In certain situations, say you really wanted to piss off Mummy or Daddy or sabotage Mary Whitehouse’s 90th birthday rave, this would be a damn useful record.
Sadly there is no distance or irony. Live Crew just slap their rigid dicks in your face on track one and keep slapping away, relentlessly, until you’re beaten into submission. In short, 2 Live Crew are bad (as in crap) in bed. There is one oasis of weird amongst all the ugh ugh thuggery, ‘Girl’s Ass’, a spoken word sex-for-morons joke scene (bloke’s mate takes over shagging this bird, she says, “do you get bigger after you’ve been to the bathroom?” He says, “no, I’ve just stuck it in the wrong hole” ha ha) over gently lilting supermarket muzak, kind of The Cocteau Twins Meets Swedish Lesbians In Sid The Sexist Wet Dream(XXX).
Crap joke, yes? But is it any more offensive than Radio 1 DJ Simon Mayo’s “What’s the different between a bimbo and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into the drum machine once?” I think not. And Radio 1 won’t play this record, of course. Got to maintain standards dontcha know?
2 Live Crew are sexist shock-horror merchants. The entire album is little more than a litany of ho’s, freaks, bitches and cum-hungry ugly dogs with hot pussies. This gives the censorship lobby a huge sticky knob to beat the band with and thus we have the unnerving spectacle of racist, right-wing bigots and prudes attacking black music with charges that 2 Live Crew oppress women.
So do we defend the Crew from racists, or attack them for being sexist? Have the right-wing groin-clutchers got a point? Well maybe when they hang Bush as a war criminal, then we’ll let them criticise our music. 2 Live Crew are sexist, puerile, homophobic and dumb. But on any scale of real obscenity they don’t score diddley squat.
Students, Zit readers. Happy Mondays: (10)
Feminists, collectors of classic records, your mother: (0)
© Steven Wells, New Musical Express, 26 October 1991