“I called Lorne Michaels”: the song that battled against being banned to rewrite the First Amendment
Shock sells, whether it’s in film, music, or – admittedly – journalism. Over the decades, there have been countless deliberately shocking songs that have become colossal hits as a result. Only a small handful, however, can truly claim to have changed the legal landscape of the USA like the Miami rap outfit 2 Live Crew.
Even if you have never knowingly heard the hip-hop stylings of the Floridian quartet, if you were tuned in to the popular culture of the late 1980s, you probably remember the vast controversy that the group drummed up with their output.
From their very beginning, the band’s recordings largely revolved around sexual content and deliberately provocative lyricism, much of which remains as shocking today as it was back in the far more conservative age of the late 1980s. So much so that their third LP, the appropriately titled As Nasty as They Wanna Be, sparked an obscenity trial.
You don’t need to be an expert in psychology to determine why Judge Jose Gonzalez of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida deemed the album to be officially “obscene”. After all, the album cover featured the four members of the group underneath the spread legs of four bikini-clad women, and the tracklisting featured such songs as ‘Me So Horny’, ‘Dick Almighty’, and ‘The Fuck Shop’ – none of which you would expect to hear on the hi-fi of a federal district judge.
Inevitably, once it had been ruled that any record store in the judge’s district could be prosecuted for selling the album, and the band members themselves had been arrested for performing some of its songs at a strip club (a venue where, apparently, obscenity has no place), the album went Platinum. Even David Bowie once admitted to having bought a copy in the wake of the media circus, saying, “Freedom of thought, freedom of speech – it’s one of the most important things we have.”
Civil rights litigator Bruce Rogow came to the aid of 2 Live Crew, battling against that obscenity ruling, and eventually got Judge Gonzalez’s order overturned, two years after the album’s initial release. In the meantime, though, 2 Live Crew made the executive decision to re-record a ‘clean’ version of the album, with certain songs cut and others slightly adapted – ‘The Fuck Shop’ becoming the slightly more palatable ‘The Funk Shop’, for instance.
That clean version of the album, however, only attracted more legal jeopardy, resulting from the newly-included track ‘Pretty Woman’, a parody of the Roy Orbison classic. The estate of the recently-deceased Orbison sued the group for copyright infringement, and 2 Live Crew drafted in Nashville attorney Alan Turk to argue that their version constituted a parody, and therefore fell under the fair use doctrine.
Turk initially won the case, but on appeal, it was determined that ‘Pretty Woman’ didn’t constitute a parody due to its commercial nature, setting a dangerous precedent in American culture that put all forms of comedy in danger. “I called Lorne Michaels after the [6th Circuit] issued its opinion,” Turk reflected, per an article by Victor Li in ABA Journal. “I told him to get his lawyers ready.”
“There wouldn’t be Family Guy, South Park – certainly no impersonations of Donald Trump on SNL,” the attorney explained. Luckily, then, when the case got all the way to the Supreme Court, the aforementioned Rogow returned and obtained a unanimous ruling that ‘Pretty Woman’ was, in fact, a parody and therefore fell under fair use.
In quite a substantial way, then, that parody track – in itself created in order to curb a different legal loophole – became something of a landmark in the protection of the First Amendment, and allowed the long-standing realm of parody and pastiche to continue to flourish in American culture. Not bad for an album titled As Nasty as They Wanna Be.
