Federal judge rules 2 Live Crew's 'As Nasty as They Wanna Be' legally obscene

Why it matters

On June 6, 1990, U.S. District Judge Jose Gonzalez Jr. ruled in Skyywalker Records v. Navarro that 2 Live Crew's As Nasty as They Wanna Be was legally obscene under Florida law. This was the first time a federal court had ever ruled a sound recording obscene. Days later, the group was arrested at a Hollywood, Florida nightclub performance, after which a Broward County sheriff started telling record store owners they could be prosecuted for selling the album. The ruling was eventually reversed by the 11th Circuit in 1992 in Luke Records v. Navarro, in a decision that is still cited in First Amendment cases. But the 1990 ruling and the arrest were not minor. They were the moment the music industry collectively realized rap was going to attract a kind of legal attention nothing else in popular music was attracting, and they were the proximate cause of the major-label-distribution side of the music starting to ship records with built-in clean-version edits. 2 Live Crew won the legal fight. The genre has been carrying the legal weight ever since. You can hear the consequences in every sticker on every CD.