Review: 'Me So Horny' and 59 Other Songs That Explain the '90s

Podcaster and music critic Rob Harvilla reminds us of the debts we owe to the tunes of that often cringeworthy decade.

Popular music today would sound a lot different if not for 2 Live Crew—the Miami rap troupe most famous for "Me So Horny"—who in the early 1990s fended off an attempt by the state of Florida to ban its album As Nasty as They Wanna Be for being too sexually explicit. Some record store owners who refused to stop selling it were actually arrested.

2 Live Crew eventually prevailed in court, forever securing a First Amendment right to rap about being really horny. But that's not all. While the legal battle was ongoing, the Crew dropped the epic dis track "Fuck Martinez," a profanity-laden anthem aimed squarely, or so it would seem, at sitting Florida Gov. Bob Martinez. But, in what Ringer podcaster and music critic Rob Harvilla calls "the greatest legal maneuver in the history of the concept of law," the group got a guy in Miami also named Bob Martinez to sign an affidavit claiming the song was about him.

That this important bit of free-expression history comes up in an episode of 60 Songs That Explain the '90s that is nominally about an entirely different song—Tag Team's smash hit "Whoomp! (There It Is)"—is part of the podcast's charm. Harvilla doesn't only deliver '90s nostalgia; he reminds us of the debts we owe to the tunes of that often cringeworthy decade.