So just who is the most outrageous of them all? Is it SKID ROW’S SEBASTIAN BACH — banned from Wembley Stadium for life for using the F-word and proud owner of an ‘AIDS KILLS FAGGOTS DEAD’ T-shirt — or is it LUTHER CAMPBELL — the business ‘brain’ behind bozo shag rappers 2 LIVE CREW whose idea of romance is a three-in-a-bed romp? Shy, retiring and totally right-on, honest, STEVEN WELLS met both so that you, the reader, can decide…
THE SKIDS ARE ALL TRITE
“DRUGS MAKE YOUR EYES BLEED! HUK HUK HUK HUK! They’re good for your eyesight though! Coffee GAGAGAGA-GAGAGA!
“Oh cool! Last thing I heard was a guy at the Hippodrome and he called me a pussy and I knocked his two front teeth out and I was sitting next to the girl from Girlschool and she went ‘RIGHT ON, BLOKE!’ Heh heh heh! I was going to send five copies of that Rolling Stone interview to my mom but it said the word DRUG in it so she phoned up crying so I said ‘don’t shatter that for me, mom, come on, f—!'”
Uh, GA! You have just been Sebastian Bached. I mean I’m sat having this intelligent, solid sort of rock ‘n’ roll type interview with bassist Rachel ‘Girl’s Name And A Nose Chain’ Bolan and guitarist Dave ‘The Snake’ Sabo and I’m telling them that in rock ‘n’ roll hotels the cleaning staff complain continually about the long hair that blocks up the bath plugs and they’re saying solid sensible rock ‘n’ roll type things like: “We’re products of a cruel society, you know what I’m saying?” and… “This ain’t the real world. Not at all, man, you get home then you clean cat shit off the carpet, that’s the real world…”
All very grown up and sensible and then KERBLAM! It’s Sebastian ‘F—ing’ Bach time. Like a hyperventilating angel with a liquid cocaine bloodstream, Bachboy bursts into the room and goes BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH! Imagine Harry Enfield’s Little Brother character, a hyperactive and perpetually adolescent cartoon character made flesh, but imagine him with beautiful, bee-stung lips, cheekbones you could slash your wrists with, long golden locks, boggly puppywuppy eyes and a flobbleygobbledogshlobbolob gob. Wind him up and watch him go…
“F—ing A! F—ing B! F—ing C! F—ing D! F—ing E!…”
Now you know the ‘dude’ in Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, the zombie Metal fan…
“Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah! That guy! Yeah! That THAT that that is more like me, that guy. You see I went to the moooovie theatre and I mean SPACE OUT! BURN FIRE!”
MR. BACH IS now smashing the table with his fists and screaming.
“That guy, right? And everybody was watching that part and going — ‘Oh! That’s the lowest a human being can sink!’ And I was like cheering and going — ‘I can relate to that f—er!’ But there’s also this guy in New York called Howard Stern and he had this one guy on there who thought that like he could blow smoke through his eyes? He’d take a drag off a cigarette and go HKKKKKKK! UUNG! He threw up on TV! BLUUUUUURGH!
“Remember the Japanese in Hiroshima were watching this show about freaks of nature about this woman that had tits down to her knees? And they made a plaster cast and I’m going what is up here? Is this the nuclear effect or what? F— yeah, we’re gonna buy one man helicopters, I’m gonna buy a bail of weed too, I’ve always wanted to do that, like a big huge bail I can sit on in my house with string ’round it so I can grab a big handful and light it and go UUUUURK! HuuuuRRRR! URK! SCHNONCK! That’s what I call F— You money! HA HA HA!”
By now me and Rachel and The Snake have been blasted into slack-jawed, impotent silence.
“I feel more at home with British food and British TV and British sense of humour. I mean, when I was putting vinegar on my french fries you guys were going ‘what the f— HEH HEH!’ America is the most spoilt rotten country on the planet, you get 40 F—ing channels, you can get a pizza, a six pack of Coke and f—ing weed delivered to your door in under 30 minutes or it’s free! And then they sit there and bitch and moan and complain about how hard they got it and they should go over to any other country in the f—ing world!
“That’s why you get the televangelists who are the most corrupt evillest people on the planet, Ted Kennedy sitting there grilling a sexual harassment while his f—ing nephew got busted for rape and Ted Kennedy’s running around with his pants around his ankles, drunk! That is America right there! America the beautiful! Y’see I dig hedonism and all that shit so I think it’s fun!“
THERE’S A gap. A tiny wee gap. A minute, minuscule, infinitesimally small conversational window. The Snake sees it and goes for it. He has no chance.
The Snake: “W…”
Mr Bach: “I think that the whole thing about everywhere you go you’ve got to pull your pants down and take a pee on the carpet or take a shit on somebody’s window or punch a hole in a hotel bedroom wall gets old real quick. I still do it. I just don’t talk about it to people like you HUH HUH HUK! Because reading about it can make you pretty nauseous when you read in every interview how you boned some chick or snorted blow out of some chick’s arsehole BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. You read all these bands who say they’re influenced by punk or Motorhead and then they come out with a f—ing sound like the Osmonds with a cowbell BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!”
You hairies are all covering Sex Pistols songs but Metal was always considered the enemy…
“I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a punk-rocker…”
You’re too posh to be a punk rocker.
“Yeah! I know! My dad used to listen to punk in 77 and he bawled me out for listening to Heavy Metal, he used to say ‘that’s shit! How can you listen to that crap!’ And he used to put on The Damned or The Clash and he used to say that Heavy Metal is nothing but capitalist garbage and punk is socialist true anarchy and music that is ‘riginal.
“And I used to say ‘Nah! Van Halen’s great!’ and he took me to a Van Halen show and he f—ing walked out, he goes ‘You’ve got some guy prancing around with his butt hanging out, why don’t you listen to something that means a f—!’
“You should have heard what Johnny Rotten said when we covered ‘Holidays In The Sun’ — he said ‘you’d better give me some serious f—ing bucks for that, man,’ but Steve Jones liked it HAAAAA-YUK! SNONK!”
“Steve Jones is still a punk at heart,” claims The Snake, seizing the opportunity to say something, anything, whilst the beautiful beast is still haaaaa-yuksnonking. “I stayed at his house once, like a cool looking house in Beverly Hills, and I went in and there was garbage just everywhere! Hell! I sit on his couch and there’s like pizza underneath me.
“I told him, I said, ‘dude, it smells really bad in here, you should take the garbage out’.”
After that comparatively sane interlude, Sebbo is back.
“I f—ing hate that — we’re influenced by Howlin’ Wolf and Paganini — why don’t you just lick my f—ing balls! You started with the first Motley Crue record and you f—ing know it!”
YOU WERE a bully at Lakefield College School, Sebastian, and you were there with Prince Andrew. (True! — Fact-checking Ed). Did you stick the jug-eared bastard’s head down the bog and flush?
“HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! I remember one time he was on the ski team, of course! They would go to great lengths to keep the press away from him and they had him registered under an alias and they had him in disguise and they had all the press there at this ski meet and all the kids at school were f—ing jealous of him because he was a prince, right?
“So he comes into the thing and sees all the press and takes off his disguise and immediately goes ‘Hay-low! Thank you! I’m Huh-ere! Nace to see you!’ and I’m going F— OFF! I think he got the shit kicked out of him a couple of times…”
Now hang on, let’s distort time and space back to the pre-Seb verbal holocaust and get a bit serious and slap the Rachel unt der Snake’s wrists for Seb’s naughty gay-bashing T-shirt ‘AIDS KILLS FAGGOTS DEAD’ at Dublin.
“I can’t understand bashing anyone. All of us have been through all sorts of shit whether it be through nose chains or long hair or whatever, so for us to sit there and be hypocrites if we bashed anyone… I could never be content being normal…”
“Everybody’s human, we’re not perfect. You basically have to stand by what you say be it good or bad and ‘fess up. OK, so I made a mistake, y’know, life goes on…”
And that ever so controversial groupie slagging anthem ‘Get The F— Out’ on the album Slave To The Grind.
“It’s about the drum tech. We got a lot of heat for bashing groupies but that’s what happens. This guy, if you met him you’d be able to relate every single lyric to him if you met him for five minutes.
OK, back to real-time (WHOO WHOO WHOO).
Sebastian, your real name is not “Bach” but “Bierk”. Are you aware what “Berk” means in English?
“Uh…no?”
It’s rhyming slang for c—, Sir Berkeley Hunt…
“WELL YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT!!!! HERK! HYUK! HARYURK! HEYURK! ARKOOORURKARGHLE URK!” •
FILTHY LUTHER
MIAMI! PALM trees! Thousands of old people! Sunshine! We are in Hooters restaurant where the waitresses all wear tight pink hotpants that barely conceal their primary sexual characteristics and we are scoffing hot chicken wings as the PA blasts 2 Live Crew’s epic rude rap ‘Me So Horny’.
“I’m like a freak on heat/A dog without warning/I have an appetite for sex/Cos me so horny...“ Except it doesn’t because in Dade County Florida you can truss women up like gynaecological specimens but you cannot play 2 Live Crew in public unless you want a riot stuck up your bottom.
“Step right in, Mr. Campbell’s ready for you…” The secretary jiggles her enormous breasts in the direction of the office. Luther Campbell, top stud of shock-rappers 2 Live Crew, is stretched over a vibrating water desk, his head buried deep in the nether regions of a pneumatic blonde who screams in ecstasy as she grinds her smoking groin into his slobbering mouth. At the other end of the desk Luther’s 15 inches of throbbing love muscle are being fought over by five sperm-hungry bitches, one of whom turns to me and says: “Step right in now, Mr. Campbell’s ready for you…”
My jet-lagged body jerks awake, I stagger into the office. Luther Campbell is dressed in a nice polo shirt, nice slacks and expensive preppy glasses and he isn’t humping, grinding, shagging, porking, poking, pumping, belly bumping, booly dogging, goat jigging, giblet jumbling, nose painting, pile driving or even having a crafty shabba. Instead of the expected inch-deep layer of used condoms and crumpled porno pics there’s a thick pile carpet and instead of white teenage girls kept naked and drugged in a cage in the corner there’s an indoor putting green.
“My handicap’s 15. I’ve been playing one year. They call me The Wonderkid at the f—ing golf club…”
THE ONLY remotely kinky object in the entire room is a black leather riding crop which Luther taps into the palm of his left hand.
Do you ride as well, or is the whip an affectation?
“What?”
Do you have a horse?
“Horse? No.”
But he does have a massively phallic cherry red sports car with a squash racket in the passenger seat and a private jet and a nice house. These are the fruits of his labours as the main inventor and advocate of Rude Rap. 2 Live Crew used to sell records extolling the virtues of getting down and getting dirty to a black audience and nobody gave a damn. Then white kids started listening and suddenly it became a MAJOR PROBLEM!!!! So you can buy Skid Row in Dade County Florida, you can buy Andrew Dice Clay (“You either SUCK DICK or you do NOT SUCK DICK!”) and you can buy any one of 669 varieties of wank mags, but 2 Live Crew? NO WAY!
The LP As Nasty As They Wanna Be’ became the focus of an obscenity trial as ridiculous as any in the long history of white Amerikkka’s attempts to stop little Cynthia Whitebread listening to that hypnotic, disgusting jungle music and maybe going off and (gulp) doing it with a black man. Could the censors ever win?
“Yeah.”
What would you do if the Government confiscated all your money as immoral earnings?
“I would kill everybody who had a part in it. Killing spree. I would murder everybody.”
Yo! What a bad motherf—er Mr Campbell is! Luthe and his five brothers were brought up to be hard working, god-fearing good boys in a shit part of town and he lost his virginity at 13 when he…
“I put that in my book. You’ll have to wait. I ain’t gonna tell you everything...”
Are you romantic?
“I don’t think so…”
Have you ever fallen hopelessly in lo…
“GOOD SEX!”
Yes, but we’re talking about love…
“I ain’t no bourgeois. I ain’t no motherf—ing Don Juan! I ain’t no motherf—er that — ‘Oh Baby! Let’s hold hands and drink champagne, let’s sit by the water’ and all that shit…”
Have you ever been tempted to write a romantic rap?
“I got something like that on my new solo album. It’s more being romantic and then I get caught with another girl and I persuade them both to have sex with me at the same time…”
How very likely. This is a true story?
“Well… yeah…”
Not just in your head? This really happened?
“Yeah, it was a real romantic thing…”
Have you ever been in love?
“I was in love with my first girlfriend, broke my heart. ‘Bout 14 or 15. My brothers, everybody who was older than me saying ‘I told you, you just gotta f— ’em and move onto the next one, you’re not supposed to be falling in love with them.’ And that’s when I really started distrusting women.
“That shit made me — whoooo! I wasn’t letting no woman, no nothing, hurt me, nobody. A strong woman, y’know, that’s what I look for. Some of these girls, all they do is, shit man, soon as you loosen up they start asking you for money. Soon as you loosen up they want a baby and you ain’t even been with them six months! When they see me they say ‘Oh no! He‘s the motherf—er there, he’s the motherf—er!'”
NOW, SO far you might think that Mr Campbell — a man whose had a sticky finger in such compositions as ‘We Want Some Pussy’, ‘Pop That Pussy’, ‘A F— Is A F—’, ‘Ugly As F—’, ‘F— Off’, ‘You Are Very Erect’, ‘Up A Girl’s Ass’ and ‘For Those Who Like To F—’, a man whose latest LP, Sports Weekend is just about the rudest record ever made — might be something of a rutpig. You certainly wouldn’t expect him to be, um, moral…
“If you a whore and you f— around, you lay here, you lay there, you not a woman who has just one man, you just f—around all over the place, then it’s the same for a man…”
Is it?
“Yeah, if he’s sleeping around with every woman in town then he’s considered a whore…”
But that’s exactly what you are doing in, say, ‘Me So Horny’…
“Yeah, in a lot of songs we’re portrayed as whores…”
Are you advocating monogamy?
“You shouldn’t sleep around, you’re a whore!”
Whore is a rather gender specific term…
“Dogs, men who sleep around are called dogs…”
Are you sure? Aren’t they more likely to be called studs?
“Where I come from he’s called a dog. He’s a whore too.”
Can’t touch this. Luther is as moral as he wants to be.
What about homosexuality?
“Gays? Same thing, man, whatever makes them happy. I ain’t got a problem long as nobody tries to talk to me as if I’m gay or something, I don’t give a f—. (Uh-oh! Ryder Flashback! Ryder Flashback!) That’s another thing, I started giving money to the AIDS programme when I first started making money.”
So he don’t shag anything that moves and he don’t dress like a bad ass gangsta.
“I’m totally into my business 90 per cent of the time and ten per cent I’m Luke of 2 Live Crew. So if people take me in that perspective I’m a good role model. I’m a businessman...”
Is it nice being rich?
“No.”
No?
“I work hard man! And the more money you get the more shit you get, the more shit happens! I get harassed by these political motherf—ers, y’know, ‘he’s getting more money than me and I’ve been doing this shit a hundred years’. These people don’t like to deal with a black person having money. Black people don’t supposed to have shit. Real f—ed up, man.”
And that’s the throbbing crotch of the whole business. Luther and 2 Live Crew have stumbled across a formula that sells. On record they are spunk-spurting rampaging black studs/sluts out to screw the ass of every bitch/whore/freak in town. Women in their raps are dumb pieces of cocksucking meat. Luther’s defenders will tell you that it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand, that it’s comedy, parody, man. His detractors will tell you that it’s misogynist pornography, pure and simple. But is pornography made by blacks somehow more offensive than that created by whites?
“If I can’t beat you then I’m going to beat you to a pulp/…The party’s over so get the f— out/…Well I puke/I stink bitch get me a drink/…I ain’t buying you breakfast/So keep your mouth busy and wrap your lips around my attitude…”
THAT’S NOT a 2 Live Crew lyric, it’s taken from ‘Get The F— Out’ by Caucasian Metallers Skid Row. The simple fact is this: 2 Live Crew are not being prosecuted and persecuted because they are sexist but because they are black.
“I sold a million records just in the black community, white kids started getting hold and that’s when the f—ers started f—ing with us. That’s what they do, man, they don’t want it to happen man, but it’s gonna happen. One day we gonna have a white president who was a Public Enemy fan, a 2 Live Crew fan. It’s gonna happen. It’s like the hippy zippy days, rebellion type music. Man says don’t listen to this shit, they going to f— y’all…”
The fact is that if certain censorious types hadn’t chosen 2 Live Crew as a target, they wouldn’t have sold so many records.
“I’m back to the regular flow of sales. I didn’t ask for anybody to f— with me, they came and f—ed with me themselves…”
Are you the Dr Ruth of rap?
“Nah, what I tell people they already know…”
As a black in the music business, do you ever get patronised?
“No, they try that, y’know. All the white people in this business don’t know jack shit about what I’m doing. They don’t know about the street music, they don’t know what’s selling, y’know?”
Are you afraid of ever getting out of touch? Your daughters are going to grow up in relatively affluent surroundings…
“My daughters will never be out of touch ‘cos I’ll tell people the true facts. If you’re not getting it then I’ll take you where it’s at. I could easy take you round the corner where people are sticking needles in their arms and shit. I would expose my children to that, y’know? I would take them to the jailhouse and walk them through that motherf—er, let them see that and show them the different roles in life and say — hey man, which one d’ya want to be?”
Do you have a message for the kids in Britain?
“Yeah, when I sell a million copies in England I’m going to that place where the Queen lives… Buckingham Palace, yeah, and pull my pants down and tell her to kiss my f—ing ass…”
Yo! What a rude mother- f—er!
© Steven Wells, New Musical Express, 30 November 1991