As Parenthetical as They Wanna Be

I clearly channeled this week’s episode well ahead of time, in fact just in time for the hellish days and I did not know it was coming.

I ain’t kidding—two weeks ago I created a gift for my two hip-hop listenin’ sons, a gift inspired in part by Luther “Luke Skywalker/Skywalker/Uncle Luke/Luke” Campbell. 

I don’t want to spoil their Christmas from me in case they are reading this, so I’ll just say the name of Luther’s crew has remained with me all these years, as has the name of that crew’s album (see: the headline above).

What I either forgot or never knew is Luther was party to a case that appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and established that a commercial parody can qualify as “fair use.” He and the rest of 2 Live Crew also had an obscenity ruling for their album “As Nasty As They Wanna Be” reversed by the Eleventh U.S. Court of Appeals.

He also had to pay some dollars to George Lucas for adopting the Skywalker name (if not persona). (Why didn’t he just go for the trifecta and also call himself Luke Lukather and perhaps sample that beat from “Rosanna,” creating the possibility of at least one if not two more pop culture/celebrity lawsuits [from Toto’s guitarist and the woman who inspired the song {I’ve now way over-used the word “also” and every kind of parenthetical character available in my iPhone.}]).

What this has to do with the evolution of Hip-Hop is, well, as Nate already noted in miniseries episode 1, the form pulls everything in.

What Nate noted this week and that I’d begun to notice is a pattern is that the form, when it evolves, almost invariably stamps itself locally and regionally as well (starting with the Bronx).