Live Crew

Thanks in large part to the national obscenity controversy surrounding the Miami rap group 2 Live Crew, the group's "As Nasty as They Wanna Be" album has sold more than 2 million copies--earning the Crew's leader, Luther Campbell, approximately $6 million. And making him a national celebrity. Nearly 1,000 of the "Nasty" albums were sold at E.C. Records, a tiny store in nearby Ft. Lauderdale--earning its owner, Charles Freeman, about $3,000.

Controversial rap group 2 Live Crew's pay-per-view concert scheduled to be broadcast live Nov. 8 from the Palace in Hollywood has been canceled, a spokesman for the group said late Tuesday. David Chackler, chief operating officer for the group's Luke Records, blamed the cancellation on 2 Live Crew's failure to show up for Monday's scheduled press conference held at the Palace by Choice Entertainment, the firm which was producing the cable broadcast.

No newspaper in the country would print the unexpurgated lyrics to "As Nasty as They Wanna Be" any more than it would have printed the transcripts of the Watergate tapes without the expletives deleted. Why not? Because children 18 and younger enjoy ready access to the daily paper. Accordingly, we adults choose to restrict what they find there. To those of us who support this choice, it is not anti-democratic, totalitarian or fascist. It's part of life in an open society. We take it in stride.

MOVIES Production has been completed on the yet-unscheduled NBC movie, "BestIntentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry," a drama about the 1985shooting death of black honor student Edmund Perry by Harlem police. Based on the book of the same name by Robert Sam Anson, "Best Intentions" starsAnna Maria Horsford, Taurean Blacque and Georg Stanford Brown.

Without a serious disagreement among them, six jurors took only about two hours Saturday to eat lunch and then find three members of the rap group 2 Live Crew not guilty of violating obscenity laws in a nightclub concert performance.

Shakespeare, Eddie Murphy, Ella Fitzgerald, James Joyce and James Brown were just a few of the names mentioned in court here Friday as defense attorneys tried to establish for the jury the artistic company kept by the rap group 2 Live Crew. Most of the name-dropping was done by Henry L. Gates, a professor of literature at Duke University, who called 2 Live Crew's music "astonishing and refreshing."

A defense attorney invited a vice squad detective to step down from the witness stand Thursday and demonstrate for the jury the type of suggestive dancing he said he saw during a concert by the rap group 2 Live Crew. Broward County Sheriff's detective Eugene McCloud, who on Wednesday seemed embarrassed even to repeat the sexually explicit lyrics sung by the controversial group in a Hollywood, Fla., nightclub, refused.

Jurors in the 2 Live Crew obscenity trial listened intently today as the defense's first witness--a Duke University professor--told them that vulgar rhymes and angry expressions have long been used in black art and music. They were told that blacks have used such vulgar expressions to express anger at black stereotypes and oppression for centuries. "They embrace the stereotype over and over again that you can have no reaction but to bust out laughing," said Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Nude dance shows and adult bookstores are scattered throughout the county where the rap group 2 Live Crew gave its controversial performance, a police detective testified today at the band's obscenity trial. Defense attorney Bruce Rogow cross-examined Broward County Sheriff's Vice Detective Eugene McCloud, the prosecution's first witness, in an attempt to show that the sexually explicit concert did not violate contemporary community standards.