Fresh Kid Ice of 2 Live Crew
MIAMI — Christopher Wong Won, a founding member of the Miami hiphop group 2 Live Crew whose sexually explicit lyrics triggeredanational debate over the legal limits of artistic freedom, has died at the age of 53.
The group’s manager, DJ Debo, said Wong Won, knownas Fresh Kid Ice, died Thursday at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Miami as a result of medical conditions he had suffered for several years.
2 Live Crew gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s for its Miami bass sound, sexually explicit lyrics and legal challenges.
A judge in Florida ruled that the group’s 1989 album “As Nasty As They Wanna Be” was obscene, leading to the arrest of a record store owner who refused to stop selling it. Won and 2 Live Crew frontman Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell also were arrested after performing songs fromthealbumat a showinHollywood.
A federal appeals court later overturned the obscenity ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear further arguments in the case from the group’s critics.
The Supreme Court sided with 2 LiveCrewin1994 in a separate case, ruling they had the right to parody other artists after they were sued for sampling the Roy Orbison song “Oh, Pretty Woman” on a clean version of “As NastyAs TheyWanna Be.”
The group’s 1990 album “Banned in theUSA” was the first to be sold with a “parental advisory” label warning about its content.
“They paved theway for a lot of artists to be able to do what they do on records now,” Debo said. “They fought in court for people to say what theywant to say.”
Wong Won was born in 1964 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and his family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1977. He was hip-hop’s first notable rapper of Asian descent, with a Cantonese grandfather, and he titled his first soloalbum“TheChinaman.”
Wong Won co-founded 2 Live Crew in California in 1984. Acouple years later, the group moved to Miami and was joined by Campbell.
After the group broke up, Wong Won released several solo albums. In recent years, he reunited with 2 Live Crew members for several performances. His memoir, “My Rise 2 Fame,” was published in 2015.
“We lost a legend,” Campbell said in a tweet expressing his condolences toWong Won’s family.