- Here's the best part.
The front door of the Freak Bus was a stripper's booty,
so when the door opened, it was like a stripper booty opened,
and then it's strippers walking out of a stripper.
[laughter]
And I'm 20 years old,
and I'm standing there and I'm just like, "Yo!"
Welcome to "This is Not Happening."
I'm your host, Roy Wood Jr.
Now, tonight's episode-- it's not for the faint of heart.
In fact, you might even want to cover your ears.
[jazz band plays note] Because tonight...
♪ ♪
♪ It's about to get filthy ♪
♪ Dirty, maybe just a little purdy ♪
♪ It's about to be freaky ♪
♪ Nasty ♪
♪ Gonna make you want to touch yourself ♪
♪ I'm talking 'bout smut ♪
♪ Talking 'bout sluts ♪
♪ Talking 'bout putting stuff in your butts ♪
♪ It's gonna get icky ♪
♪ Tricky ♪
♪ It's about to get a little sticky ♪
♪ If you think you can play ball ♪
♪ Stick around, it's about to go down ♪
♪ Let's talk about filth ♪
♪ Yeah, taking it from behind ♪
♪ Dicks and tits and balls and clits and assholes ♪
♪ Everywhere ♪
♪ Let me hear you say taint ♪ - Taint!
- ♪ Ah, masturbate ♪ - Masturbate!
- ♪ Snail trail ♪ - Snail trail!
- ♪ Dutch oven! ♪ - Dutch oven!
- ♪ Out comes the shotgun ♪ - Shotgun!
- ♪ Golden shower ♪ - Golden shower!
- ♪ The cha-cha ♪ - The cha-cha!
- ♪ Rusty trombone, Rusty trombone ♪
♪ Girl on girl on guy on guy ♪
♪ Just don't get it in your eye ♪
♪ Here we go, filth! ♪
- Yeah, girl.
You know this man from his work
on "The Daily Show" with Trevor Noah.
Roy Wood, Jr.!
[cheers and applause]
College, if nothing else,
is an opportunity for you to experience other cultures.
I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.
Birmingham in the '90s was very black and white.
There wasn't a lot of diversity in the city.
So when I went to college in Tallahassee,
this was my first time experiencing
all these different cultures and foods and people.
And music was the one thing
that I really got my nose open to, man,
'cause I thought it was just, you know, Southern rap.
I thought it was just Outkast
and, you know, a little bit of NWA, you know.
And I got to college, and my roommate Kuda,
my homeboy, he put me on the Wu-Tang Clan.
[scattered cheers]
It was dope. I go, "Who are these dudes?
Why do they think they ninjas? Who are they?"
[laughter]
'Cause that's what I thought Wu-Tang was.
Just a bunch of niggas who think they Shaolin ninjas.
[laughter]
Yeah.
But the most moving music I got exposed to
while I was in college was Miami Bass.
Miami Bass music was amazing.
Hands down, Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew
is the most important rapper in the history of the genre.
Matter of fact, I'll double down on that.
Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew,
the most important musician of the last 30 years, period.
Last 30 years, Luther Campbell, 2 Live Crew--
all they did was make songs about sex.
That's it. Every song: sex.
They had song titles like "Pop That Coochie."
"Me So Horny,"
"Throw the Dick."
"Doo Doo Brown." I don't know what that one meant.
[laughter]
But the music was rhythmic, and it was just--
[imitating bass line]
And you could always hear a girl in the background
of every Miami Bass song... [imitating vocal hook]
[alternating bass lines and vocal hook]
But I don't know if it was sex or singing.
But you could hear it in the bass.
Oh, my God, the bass.
The bass of this music, man.
This is what originated, white people.
This is the stuff that was shaking your car
when a Cutlass would pass by you
in 1993...
with a booming-ass system
with that Miami Bass shit rattling the trunk.
[imitates bass line]
Luther Campbell's music was so obscene
that record store owners were arrested for selling it.
That's how crazy it was back in the day.
So Luther Campbell decided to be a little, you know--
He decided to you know-- "You know what?
"I got an idea to keep these shop owners
"from getting in trouble,
"I'm gonna label my albums
so that people know that it's vulgar."
He created what we know today
as the Parental Advisory sticker.
He created that, nobody else.
They still arrested him for obscenity
for performing hit songs, such as "Throw That Dick"...
[laughter]
And "Pop That Coochie."
[laughter]
But he was the only one that was getting arrested
that had the guts to take the government head on, man.
This dude took the government head on and won.
He won, and because of that,
any performer that you can name right now--
the only reason you can buy their shit
like a regular fucking American is because Luther Campbell
fought for the First Amendment
to be able to say whatever the hell
he wanted to say on a song.
[cheers and applause]
And...
He said a lot of freaky stuff.
He had a van. I don't even know how to describe this,
but he was a pioneer of promotion as well.
And any rap group that you see now
that has a van with all of the logos wrapped
and all the design-- Luther Campbell did it first.
They had a freak van.
That's what it was called. It was called Luke's Freak Van.
And the 2 Live Crew van,
you'd be outside a nightclub at 2:00 in the morning.
And you could hear this van coming from around the corner...
with that booming-ass bass subwoofer.
The license plate rattling.
[imitating bass line]
[imitating vocal hook]
[imitating bass line]
And you'd go outside, and you'd see this van
turning the corner, and it had the neon lights on the bottom.
It had neon lights on the top.
It was like one of them Scooby-Doo kidnap vans.
But it had partitions.
There were Plexiglas partitions in the back part of the van,
where you could look inside the glass,
and inside the glass is a woman
just shaking her ass.
I'm 18 years old,
and there is a van cruising by
with half-naked women just popping their ass.
And I did what any 18-year-old would have done.
I chased this van...
all the way up West Tennessee Street.
I'm running alongside the Luke Freak Van,
trying to get a glimpse.
That's what Luke Dancers were about, man.
Luke Dancers, they were like the Seal Team Six of stripping.
I don't know how to-- how else to describe them,
but it was just amazing stuff.
And that was a lot of my teenage years and college,
was going to Luke shows
and just watching all of this debauchery unfold onstage.
So imagine my delight couple years later,
I'm interning at a radio station.
And my boss comes up, he goes,
"Hey, I'm having a bachelor party,
if you want to come to this bachelor party."
I go, "Man, I'm 20. Y-you cool?"
And he says, "I don't care if you're 20.
Just come up. There's gonna be Luke Dancers."
[laughter]
The Grinch-like smile that came over my face
when I found out I had an opportunity
to be in the same building as the Luke Dancers!
So I go to this party.
Not only do I go to this party, I iron clothes.
I ironed an outfit like I was going to impress a Luke Dancer
with a crease in my khakis. "Well, hello.
Hello, Ms. Hip-Hop Stripper, how are you doing?"
So I go to this bachelor party,
and I'm sitting in the corner.
And I don't know if you ever been to a bachelor party
before the strippers get there,
but it's very awkward.
It's very awkward.
It's 20, 30 men just all sitting there, and they just--
[heavy breathing]
And they got their ones in their hands.
It's like the DMV but freakier.
It's just-- [heavy breathing]
[groaning]
Nobody's talking to each other.
And then off in the distance, we hear it.
[imitates bass line]
[imitates bass line and vocal hook]
And we all light up.
Everybody in the room lit up.
Like when you see your daddy's headlights
break through the blinds,
'cause you know he's taking you to the fair this time.
He didn't lie. He actually showed up like he promised.
I'm sorry. Did I open up too much right there? Was that--
[laughter]
We hear the music of the Luke Van coming.
We all rush outside, and what bends the corner
is not a van, but a bus!
This motherfucker had a freak bus!
A huge charter bus comes rolling down the street.
[imitates bass line]
Neon lights and the strobes and the sparkles.
It's 10:00 at night in a residential neighborhood,
and there is a stripper house rolling down the street.
Here's the best part, here's the best part.
He had all the graphics and stuff painted.
He had 2 Live Crew on the front.
And you had women like this, but the door--
The front door of the Freak Bus was a stripper's booty,
so when the door opened, it was like a stripper booty opened,
and then there's people walking out of a stripper booty.
It's strippers walking out of a stripper.
[laughter]
And I'm 20 years old,
and I'm standing there, and I'm just like, "Yo!"
What happens over the next two hours...
changed me.
Not only did it change me, it ruined strip clubs.
I ain't been to a strip club but two times since.
Like, it's--
It ain't worth it. I saw Seal Team Six.
We get back in the house, and they're taking--
I don't even know how to describe this tastefully,
but fucking-- they was just--
they had ice cubes, and they just tossing ice cubes.
And then another woman would catch the ice cube
and then she would toss the ice cube like some hot potato.
You ever seen the Globetrotters?
[laughter]
How they pass it?
[hums "Sweet Georgia Brown"]
♪ ♪
You've seen the Globetrotters before. They--
[hums "Sweet Georgia Brown"]
They come out in the room.
And, oh, my God, man.
They're taking alcohol, and they're pouring alcohol,
and they lighting it, and there's flaming titties,
and they're dancing.
They're dancing with flaming nipples.
You got to remember, this is 1997.
This is still dial-up porn,
so I've never...
seen any of this.
My only imagery of naked women is, like, "Playboy,"
and scrambled porn UHF.
One of them pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
One of the strippers pulled out a pack of cigarettes!
And I'm watching this, and I'm like, "Ma'am,
where--what is gonna happen with the cigarette?"
And she smoked the cigarette!
She smoked a cigarette!
She gave herself cervical cancer.
Like, I don't know how she--
She smoked this cigarette.
And I didn't have any ones, so I had to play the outside.
So I'm just observing.
And it's weird when you're in the midst
of something that chaotic.
You can see all the calm points in the room.
And just over the flaming titties,
like, just over them,
there's a man, and I can't really make him out
from that distance, but there's a man,
and he's sitting there,
and he's reading a "Wall Street Journal."
I'm like, "How can somebody be reading a 'Wall Street Journal'?
"They smoking cigarettes.
"How are you...
reading this 'Wall Street Journal'?"
So I inch closer to this man.
And I get a little closer, and I can make him out now.
It's Luther Campbell.
And I'm trying to figure out what to say to this guy,
what to say to this man
that's done so much for me at this point.
[laughter]
'Cause this is the same man
who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he won.
He legitimately changed the face of not only music,
but comedy.
And you see that from across the room, and it's easy--
it's very easy to put people in one box, you know?
But it's not fair, because we can be many things.
Is Luther Campbell a man that built his career
on some music that a lot of people
would consider disrespectful
and misogynistic to women?
Absolutely. You can make that argument.
But you can also make the argument
that he was one of the most important legal trailblazers
in entertainment in the last three decades.
You can be both things.
And I'm trying to figure out
how to put that into the shortest sentence possible,
because I don't want to interrupt this man,
and I-I really want to get back to the flaming titties.
[laughter]
And I creep over to this man,
and I'm trying to figure out what to say.
And before I could open my mouth,
Luther Campbell lowers his "Wall Street Journal,"
looks me dead in the eyes, and goes, "You're welcome."
[cheers and applause]
[dark electronic music]
I'm Roy Wood, Jr.
Thank you, guys.
♪ ♪