Shawn Setaro
[2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell recently sat down with hip-hop personality and SOHH correspondent Shawn Setaro on his popular “The Cipher” podcast. Listen to the full interview and check out five gems he dropped during the Q&A.]
On how he came up with the Miami bass sound:
“We’ve got to have that reggae bass, we’ve got have the the tempo with a little calypso from the Bahamas, and then we’ve got to have that Latino [feel] with the congas and all that, and the tempo has to be at least 125 beats a minute.”
On Kurtis Mantronik of Mantronix:
“He probably was one of the most brilliant-minded hip-hop artist/producers that I’ve ever been around. He doesn’t get too much credit for his place in hip-hop, which is kind of sad. Kurtis was very, very creative.”
On 2 Live Crew not being the first explicit rap group:
“We wasn’t the first dirty rap group. We didn’t do explicit lyrics first. It was Schoolly D swearing on records. You had Slick Rick swearing on record. A lot of people think we were the only ones at the time, but technically, we wasn’t.”
On why there are mistakes on the labels of some early 2 Live Crew records:
“If you look at the original records, you’ll see all kinds of misprints. I was a young guy, not really knowing what I was doing. I was finding somebody to make a label, finding somebody to make the vinyl. I was actually in some of the vinyl pressing plants, pouring vinyl in the machines because I had to make these records so fast.”
On 2 Live Crew’s wild stage show:
“We used to do this pyro thing where we would have these bombs – they’d probably call them pipe bombs now. We would put gunpowder in, and I would tie the gunpowder up with electrical wire, and then we would stick it into the socket. And then it would spark the gunpowder and blow up, and it would leave you temporarily blind for ten seconds.”
To hear the whole interview, click here or listen below.
Legend.