Years back, a friend was visiting her boyfriend at his college. She came back from that trip horrified, recounting how her boyfriend took her to a 2 Live Crew concert on campus, where the entire football team came on stage, took off their socks and sneakers, and naked dancers did full Russian splits on the players' bare feet, ultimately riding their extremities reverse cowgirl-style. Things like that can sometimes muddy the legacy of anyone—especially in the eyes of a woman, and especially if you're one Luther Campbell. Call him what you want: Luke, Uncle Luke, Luke Skyywalker, but the mere mention of his name will conjure up a strong opinion. Or visual. Or perhaps a sense memory. Campbell's memoir, The Book of Luke, elicits layered reactions for some of these same reasons.
The casual 2 Live Crew fan may not even understand who Uncle Luke is or what he represents to the music industry. Luke’s candid memoir does an adequate job of breaking all of that down, punctuating it with social commentary that draws several parallels to the racial climate of America in 2015. Campbell was born in 1960, amid segregation. A common misconception is that places like Miami aren’t really "the South" per se, but Luke disabuses us of that assumption immediately. The book opens with an anecdote about Black workers having to carry ID cards to Miami Beach in order to work as janitors and maids, or risk going to jail. Duke Ellington would perform in Miami Beach clubs, but would have to stay overnight in the Black neighborhood, Overtown. There was also an epidemic of police brutality that poured into Miami’s nightlife. For those reasons alone, Campbell’s narrative of the space he claimed in Miami musical history deserves considerable respect; he made his way in an environment that took an aggressive interest in shutting him down.
From turf wars with DJs to rap slowly making its way to the Deep South, The Book of Luke provides an awesome story of hip-hop’s lineage and Luke’s part in that narrative. He started Luke Records, and is largely responsible for taking 2 Live Crew from a relatively unknown socially conscious rap group out of Cali and making them one of the most notorious groups in hip-hop history once he joined their ranks. Luke then helped launch the careers of both Trick Daddy and Pitbull (even the R&B group H-Town, known primarily for their one-hit, "Knockin’ Da Boots"). Luke knew how to make money in a way that very few musician and entrepreneurs did, and when his First Amendment rights were tested during Tipper Gore’s morality crusade, he fought back in court and on stage, making his shows almost grotesque in retaliation.
Then there is the third act: he finished it all off by getting married and having kids and coaching high school football. It’s the most warped version of a feel good ending. The man goes from being the reason we all know the "me so horny" sample to full-on Coach Taylor, once true love tames him. The filmic epigram "Luke still coaches football and is the greatest dad in Dade County," is about all that is missing here. It’s an unconventional ending to a tale that started off far smuttier, and it’s a notion that he repeats throughout the book—how people (mainly the media) viewed him consistently as the perverse, bizarro-world version of his truest self, and never the guy he presented himself as when there wasn’t a mic in his hand.
Campbell often contradicts that idea in his memoir, though, bouncing back and forth between not drinking and discussing how in one night he ran through multiple hotel rooms in an effort to break a record for how many women he could stick his dick in in the span of one night. There are sexual war stories, told through a sepia filter as if to suggest that raw-dogging was the work of "old Luke," but never really acknowledging the destructive nature of that guy. And that’s perhaps the most off-putting part of The Book of Luke.
Throughout this bawdy memoir, Luke could have used some moral clarity, or self-reflection amid all the tell-all retrospection. Perhaps after discussing the sale of "pussy" to a charged-up audience? Yet he tempers it with talks of bringing male strippers "for the ladies," as if to suggest ogling at a half naked man reverses the hypersexualized and sometimes misogynistic nature of 2 Live Crew’s music/aesthetic. Campbell’s defense of 2 Lives Crew’s work is rooted in race, citing how Andrew Dice Clay was never taken to task as harshly for the nature of his act, or work that de-humanized women. It’s a faulty argument at best—2 Live Crew set the bar for a version of rap music that arguably would have never been popularized if Uncle Luke hadn’t existed, or understood so exactly what he was doing. Even at the very end, when he leaves "the game," it’s because it’s gotten old to him. "It wasn’t a challenge anymore. It wasn’t fulfilling," he writes of his departure. And this certainly falls in line with a part of the book that is his most explicit attempt at self-defense:
At the end of the day, there’s one simple reason why hip hop historians and journalists don’t give me the credit I’m due. It’s because of Uncle Luke: the cartoon character I invented onstage, the loud-mouthed hype man, the King of Dirty Rap. Thanks to the 2 Live Crew controversy, Uncle Luke’s crazy nonsense overshadowed everything that Luther Campbell ever accomplished. Uncle Luke makes it rain at the strip club. Luther Campbell gives lectures at law schools on the First Amendment.
All copious sexploitation aside, there are also points in the memoir where Luke has gotten into legal squabbles with his own group over money, as he owned his own plane and the rest were pinching pennies. His argument? He put them on, he’s the reason they’re famous, and it wasn’t his fault that they didn’t manage their money as efficiently as he did, breezing past the fact that he collected checks both as the label owner and as an entertainer.
The self-congratulatory flexing runs rampant in the memoir as well, as Luke credits himself as the founder of Southern Hip-Hop, insisting he was the archetypal rap mogul, the "blueprint" if you will for success stories like Jay Z. And while that may be true in part, to take full credit for the reason most of his younger contemporaries are now running things broaches fiction. The biblical undertone of the book’s title is apropos, since at times throughout his memoir it sounds like Luke thinks he’s the Alpha and the Omega.
In the end though, Luther Campbell is an institution who made one of the strongest impressions in hip-hop history. While The Book of Luke is at times flawed in its approach to reveal who Luther Campbell is beneath the nefarious veil, the underlying story is undeniable. Few have done what Luke has in 54 years, and few ever will. For better or worse.