Life is like football. You win some, you lose some, and in the end, it's all a game where rich people make broke people work on a field until it kills them.
Take 2 Live Crew for example, a Miami based rap group mired in controversy, bad contracts, and over thirty years of lawsuits over ownership of masters, unpaid royalties, and trademarks, just to name a few.
Like football, we can talk about 2 Live Crew just like we do about athletes, reducing their lifetimes of experience to the few solid facts recorded on the field of play, or is it war.
Oddly enough, Mark Ross aka Brother Marquis, the group's main lyricist and writer, according to popular lore, media coverage, and various interviews, once sued Luke Records and Luther Campbell for unpaid moneys for his work. But in recent memory, both parties were codefendants in a case to reverse bad contract signings with Lil Joe Records, presided by their former accountant.
I once wrote a book with the group's cofounder Chris Wong Won, which is how my young illusions about the group's friendship were shattered by the vicious reality of the music business, which is that so many of the people in it end up hating and suing each other, after lying to and disabusing each other.
Anyway, the article seen above is one of many examples of this phenomenon and it's pretty interesting to see how certain iconic cultural artifacts play out over several decades time under the watchful gaze and heavy gavel of a federal judge.
Luke, Mark, and Chris, or their estates, RIP, successfully beat Lil Joe Records in a recently decided trial by jury to get the rights to their music back in their names, well deserved reversion to the actual artists of the works in question, but the messy story of how they got there is far more complex, treacherous, tortious, and tortuous than I ever would have thought when I started looking into it.
Tortious meaning full of infringement / lawsuits, and tortuous meaning full of twists and turns.
I know that Chris Wong Won spent most of his life working to get the rights back to the music of the group he helped start and make popular; and that his artistry helped pay various lawyers their not insignificant fees to win landmark cases for parody, free speech, and intellectual property case law.
But I don't know what he would say about how it has all resolved, or whether imminent appeals from his former label's former accountant are something he would be worried about.
Simply put, there's a lot more to this continually evolving and developing story, and somehow or another I know way more about it than I ever thought I would, so stay tuned