‘Me So Horny’: the story behind 2 Live Crew’s explicit hit
It started out as a jokey, sexually charged party song, but, following its release in 1989, it exploded into a national scandal that literally led to arrests. Miami hip-hop group 2 Live Crew’s dirty-minded ‘Me So Horny’ was a genuine cultural phenomenon.
The song’s dirty lyrical content took its cue from one of its main samples, the line of dialogue “me so horny, me love you long time” borrowed from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, released only two years before the song came out. The resulting track is crude and misogynistic, but the scandal it caused was, it seems fair to suggest, way out of proportion.
When a lawyer from Florida named Jack Thompson heard the song, which opens the group’s third album As Nasty as They Wanna Be, he took it upon himself to oppose it. “I sent the lyrics to all 67 sheriff’s offices in the state of Florida, asserting that this album – which had already gone platinum – had a huge number of sales to kids under 18,” he explained to Billboard in 2019. He viewed the song as a pornographic work that kids should never be exposed to.
Alan Light, who once worked as a reporter for Rolling Stone, also spoke to Billboard about the track and its cultural impact. “At the time, the culture was more freaked out about sex than violence and… the fact that white sorority girls were dancing to this record is what drew Thompson’s attention,” he said. “Not just behind closed doors, but on a pop record.”
According to the group’s co-founder and DJ, Mr Mixx, the song and its lyrics were never meant to be taken so seriously. “I always perceived us as being comedy,” he said. “Which is what our records were based off of – if Andrew Dice Clay, Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor started a rap group with Dolemite – which all got lost in translation when the obscenity stuff came up.”
But even if 2 Live Crew’s intentions were in the spirit of fun, the authorities took the matter very seriously. As the song became a big hit for the group, the lawyer, Thompson, managed to convince a judge in district court to declare that As Nasty as They Wanna Be was obscene. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Following the declaration of the record’s obscenity, a retailer was arrested for selling it – and the group members themselves were attested, too, except for Mr Mixx, who, as the DJ, didn’t actually utter the obscene words. “We thought they were joking that we had to defend ourselves,” Mixx recalled of this period. “No record had ever been handled like that, with people getting banned or going to jail.”
The trial that followed garnered a lot of attention, and it became a free speech issue. This silly song had become something much bigger than could ever have been reasonably predicted. The group was, in the end, acquitted, and the ruling of obscenity was overturned. The song, meanwhile, became all the more popular for it.
For all of the scandal and debate it caused, 2 Live Crew maintained it was all just meant to be a bit of fun. “It was just about a guy sitting at home with his dick hard, flipping through channels and wondering if there was girl he could catch up with,” as Mr Mixx put it.