Watch as an audience of the Phil Donahue Show tries to make sense of the 2 Live Crew, who appeared on the show in 1990. When 2 Live Crew gets on stage, front man Luther "Uncle Luke" Campbell says to the audience: "Put your hands up in the air if you appreciate our kind of music!" When the audience doesn't respond, he declares, "Now we know what kinda audience we got!"
As the camera pans the audience throughout the performance, some folks look befuddled, some bemused, and other disgruntled. Despite these reactions, 2 Live Crew takes it all in stride and just has fun with the entire spectacle. Hot102 contextualizes the appearance:
This originally aired on The Phil Donahue Show in 1990 when a major topic was music and censorship. 2 Live Crew was certainly one group to push boundaries. Others were dealing with stickers on albums and singles with parental warnings about a song's content – which usually led to bigger sales anyway. 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be certainly qualified for a sticker. As if you needed more proof, their follow-up album earned the title Banned In the U.S.A.
And William Hughes from AV Club perfectly describes the performance:
And when it came to early-'90s controversy, no one was better at milking it for awkward, addictively watchable TV like Phil Donahue. Donahue—that proto-safe-space for America's housewives to catch the rising edges of the country's weirder, more transgressive cultural elements—actually played host to Campbell and his crew a number of times, usually as part of a wider conversation/shouting match about public indecency.
The group's most fascinating Donahue performance—at least in terms of pure Schadenfreude—has still got to be its first, though, from March 1990. To be fair, 2 Live Crew did change the name of their hit single "The Fuck Shop" for Donahue's deeply Midwestern-looking audience. (It went by "The Funk Shop" instead.) But they did not change many, if any, of the lyrics, creating the fascinating spectacle of the camera cutting back and forth between the band inviting young women to, among other things, drink their cum (and nothing more), and shots of well-coiffed ladies quietly losing their fucking minds at the indignity their pal Phil was putting them through.
You can see 1:30 version here, and a longer (3:40) version here.
