Is What We Are

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Is What We Are album cover
Album Information

Total Tracks: 8   Total Length: 32:47

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Hua Hsu

eMusic Contributor

Hua Hsu edits the hip-hop section of URB Magazine and writes about music, culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice, The Wire and various other magazine...more »

05.22.11
2 Live Crew, Is What We Are
Label: Lil Joe Records

Rap had gone viral by the mid ’80s, and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were among the first to tweak its formulas in perverse, new ways. Their gold-certified debut demonstrated that you didn’t need to be dexterous rappers or ace storytellers to move the crowd. Sometimes you just needed to take it a few steps beyond raw, as they did on the frat row shout-along “We Want Some Pussy,” the woodpecker funk of “Get it Girl” or the sinister classic “Throw the ‘D’.” They would eventually become unlikely champions of the First Amendment, beholden as they were to their own image and profits rather than the hierarchy of a major label.

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Its been a long time

acseaman

since I heard this album. It is like reliving the old high school days again. 2-Live is what we are -- word! and throw that D-. Very classic stuff.

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They Say All Music Guide

There was a time when many New York hip-hoppers refused to believe that rappers from Miami could record a gold or platinum album or give them any real competition. That was before 1986, when the 2 Live Crew’s debut album, 2 Live Is What We Are, came out on Luther Campbell’s Miami-based Luke Skyywalker Records (later renamed Luke Records). This LP did a lot to popularize Florida-style bass music, and like the gangsta rap that was coming from California, it demonstrated that rappers didn’t have to be from New York to sell a lot of records. Musically, 2 Live Is What We Are was a definite departure from New York rap — the grooves are much faster — and lyrically, the album put booty rhymes on the map. The 2 Live Crew wasn’t the first rap group to talk about sex, but this album did take sexually explicit rap lyrics to a new level of nastiness. With X-rated offerings like “Throw the D” and “We Want Some Pussy,” Campbell and his colleagues popularized a style of rap that thrives on decadence for the sake of decadence. These tunes are as humorous as they are raunchy; Campbell has often compared the 2 Live Crew’s booty rhymes to the off-color humor of Richard Pryor, Andrew Dice Clay, and Rudy Ray Moore — and, to be sure, there are some parallels. Like those comedians, the 2 Live Crew is genuinely funny — but only if you have a taste for X-rated humor. Anyone who finds Moore, Pryor, and Clay offensive should avoid the 2 Live Crew as well. But for those who do appreciate that type of humor, 2 Live Is What We Are is a classic of its kind. – Alex Henderson

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