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When Miami Bass Went on Trial
Miami bass made itself hard to ignore. Its force came from rhythm and low end, music built to be felt as well as heard. By the late 1980s, 2 Live Crew was among the Miami acts bringing that sound to a much wider audience. The group’s sexually explicit lyrics also brought officials into a fight over who could sell the record and what the group could perform.
The fight is often told as one obscenity case. It was several related events, and the distinctions matter.
Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro’s office sought to discourage stores from selling 2 Live Crew’s album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. The group and its record company went to federal court. A district judge barred the sheriff’s office from interfering with sales as it had been doing, but also declared the album obscene. In 1992, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed that obscenity ruling.
There was a separate criminal case after a June 1990 performance at Club Futura in Hollywood, Florida. Three members of 2 Live Crew faced obscenity charges over the show. A jury acquitted them that October. The concert case concerned a performance; the federal appeal concerned the album. Combining their outcomes into a single verdict would obscure what happened in each.
The court proceedings brought arguments about expression, artistic value and local standards into direct conflict. They also risked reducing the musicians to defendants in their own history. 2 Live Crew was a performing and recording group with an audience in Miami before the court cases made national news. Photographs of the group and its fans are now held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame holds material relating to the album litigation.
Remembering the music alongside the cases does not require every listener to approve of its lyrics. It requires taking the artists, their audience and their place in Miami’s musical life seriously. The dispute became a national free-expression story because officials tried to restrict a record and prosecute a show that people were already choosing to hear.
Miami bass was larger than 2 Live Crew, and a full history of the sound has many more artists to recover. But this chapter explains why the group’s name remains attached to more than a hit or a headline. Music made for Miami’s speakers and crowds reached a courtroom, where the argument over who could hear it became part of American music history.