‘As Nasty As I Wanna Be’: Bad Boy Rapper Luther Campbell Eyes Florida Congressional Seat
Says he’ll decide before the deadline for entering the Democratic primary. Rapper Luther Campbell, known for his role as the frontman for 2 Live Crew, is considering a congressional bid in Florida's 20th Congressional District, where he would compete against Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick. Campbell, whose 1989 album As Nasty as They Wanna Be was the first in history to be declared legally obscene by a federal court, promises a raw and unfiltered celebrity-based campaign with a reality show twist, which is set to be filmed as a documentary. He hopes celebrities, musicians, and celebrities will help finance his campaign if he chooses to run. Campbell has previously run for Miami-Dade County mayor in 2011 and has had informal discussions with political consultants in South Florida to help run his primary campaign. If he chooses not to run, he would share the primary ballot with his older brother, Stanley Campbell, a candidate for U.S. Senate.
Pubblicato : 4 settimane fa di Marc A. Caputo in Entertainment Politics
MIAMI RAP LEGEND LUTHER CAMPBELL is strongly considering a congressional bid, promising a raw and unfiltered celebrity-based campaign with a reality show twist: It is to be filmed as a documentary.
Campbell, 63, gained national fame as the frontman for 2 Live Crew, whose groundbreaking 1989 album As Nasty as They Wanna Be was the first in history to be declared legally obscene by a federal court. That ruling was overturned in a precedent-setting case allowing musicians to make explicit songs without fear of jail to this day.
Since then, Campbell has shapeshifted constantly: owner of the first Black-owned Southern rap label; VH1 show host; documentary film subject and producer; Grand Theft Auto video game character; local philanthropist; columnist; political activist; and youth and high school football coach. He has developed kids into NFL talent, like Chad Ochocinco, and discovered world-famous rappers, like Miami’s Pitbull.
Campbell tells The Bulwark he hopes some of those players, musicians, and celebrities will help finance his campaign if he decides to run for Florida’s 20th Congressional District in a primary bid against incumbent Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.
“I’m living my ideal. I have the opportunity to bring something back to the community,” Campbell tells The Bulwark.
“And I get to fight these motherfuckers,” he says.
Who are the motherfuckers, specifically?
“Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump, and all these crazy-ass Republicans who want to divide us,” Campbell replies.
Campbell says he wouldn’t be censored as a performer, and he won’t as a candidate.
“I’m gonna be as nasty as I wanna be,” Campbell laughs.
In anticipation of his congressional bid, Campbell established a political committee in January called Don’t Stop Get It Get It, named after one of his trademark callouts that still can be regularly heard on urban radio station breaks. For the past month, Campbell has had informal conversations with political consultants in South Florida to help run his primary campaign. He has also been followed around by a Los Angeles-based documentary film crew, whose name he’s keeping secret for now.
Campbell says he’ll decide whether to run before April 26, the qualifying deadline in the state. The primary is August 20.
If he decides to run, Campbell would share the primary ballot with his older brother, Stanley Campbell, a candidate for U.S. Senate who faces former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell in the primary. The winner would take on incumbent Republican Sen. Rick Scott, a favorite in Florida as the state increasingly leans toward the GOP.
If elected, Luther Campbell would add an extra dose of star power to an already headline-grabbing congressional delegation filled with colorful members like Gaetz, Byron Donalds (Trump’s top Black surrogate on Fox), Jared Moskowitz (who has tormented House Republicans for their failed Hunter Biden probe), and Frederica Wilson (known for wearing brightly colored sequined cowboy hats that match her outfits).
Of course, Trump is also a Florida Man.
Often called by his stage name, “Uncle Luke,” Campbell unsuccessfully ran for office once before, for Miami-Dade County mayor in 2011, and came in fourth place with 11 percent of the vote despite barely campaigning. That election’s result comes as little surprise in Hispanic-heavy Miami-Dade, which has never elected a Black official to a countywide seat—nor does it capture the extent of Campbell’s national influence among Black voters and in Black culture.
In 2019, Campbell put then-Sen. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign into a partial tailspin by penning a harsh Miami New Times column that criticized her past as a prosecutor, her relationship with an older politician in San Francisco, and her marriage to a white man.
Harris embarked on a charm offensive and won Campbell over, leading to an about-face when he praised her as “a real sister” months later in another column. Harris and Campbell then sat down for a 26-minute video chat with the title “Defining Blackness: Real Talk with Kamala Harris and Uncle Luke.”
As vice president, Harris remains allies with Campbell, who was recently invited to the White House for an event this election season as the presidential campaign nervously eyes signs of deteriorating support from Black men.
“His voice is important,” Bakari Sellers, an adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential bid who brokered the sitdown between her and Campbell, tells The Bulwark. “Uncle Luke has his ear to the streets and his ear to the community. And although he may not speak with the same cadence or the Queen’s English that some folks are used to in politics, he expresses some of the feelings that Black men throughout the country are feeling. You have to pay attention to him.”
It’s impossible not to these days.
Campbell’s Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told was one of Hulu’s most-watched documentaries last week, earning coverage from The Tamron Hall Show to the New York Times to Stephen A. Smith’s podcast, where he mentioned his interest in running for Congress without specifying which seat. Campbell frequently holds raw, freewheeling X Spaces chats where no one pulls punches over race. And he’s an ever-present figure in Miami sports and entertainment. Campbell founded the Liberty City Optimist Club, which was featured in a 2018 docuseries partly produced by LeBron James. And he starred in another documentary partly produced by “Coach Prime” Deion Sanders for coaching Miami Edison High School’s football program into top contention in the state.
Miami-based filmmaker Billy Corben put Campbell in his award-winning documentary The U about the University of Miami’s championship football program, which Campbell supported by allegedly paying the student athletes bounties for big-time plays (he denies the allegation). Corben said a through-line of Campbell’s persona has always been his support for the Black community, which was evident when, after his mayoral run in 2011, Uncle Luke refused to endorse the eventual winner, Carlos Giménez (now a congressman), because he did not support certain projects in the poor Black areas of Miami.
“As transactional as it was, it was refreshing because Luke wasn’t saying, ‘What can you do for me?’ It was, ‘What can you do for the people? What can you do for the community? What can you do for my Optimist football team?’” says Corben, who called Campbell’s mayoral run “a lark to boost engagement for his Miami New Times column. It was amazing he got double digits by basically doing nothing.”
But for all of Campbell’s identity with Miami and the tough neighborhood of Liberty City, the congressional seat he seeks rests outside Miami-Dade and in Broward and Palm Beach counties to the north, running through urban, suburban, and rural farming communities. It’s one of just two majority-Black seats in the state, but unlike others in Florida or the nation, it has a large and influential Haitian-American, Jamaican-American, and African-American population.
Because of the district’s demographics, the victor in the Democratic primary is the odds-on favorite to win in November.
The incumbent, Cherfilus-McCormick, is a relative newcomer who twice challenged the prior incumbent, Rep. Alcee Hastings, an iconic Black leader in the state before he died in 2021. She won the seat in a special election by just five votes and then won her re-election in 2022. But she’s little-known.
Marlon Hill, a South Florida political commentator and local expert in Caribbean culture, says Cherfilus-McCormick has some advantages in the district as an incumbent and self-made businesswoman who’s the first Haitian-American woman elected to Congress from Florida.
But Campbell’s star power can’t be underestimated, nor can the fact that he has Caribbean roots as well, Hill says.
“He is a son of the rich tapestry of South Florida’s DNA, a mix of Florida’s immigrant history from the Bahamas, Jamaica, and other West Indian nations,” Hill says. “This is a Florida story.”