🔗 Share this article

Prince's iconic Purple Rain record had been purchased by over ten million Americans by the spring of 1985. One purchaser was young Karenna Gore. In their household, Karenna's mother was stunned to hear Prince perform on the song Darling Nikki: “I knew a girl named Nikki / I guess you could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby/ masturbating with a magazine.”

“I was astonished,” remarked Karenna's mother, Tipper Gore. “The vulgar lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned – then I got angry!”

Mothers and fathers becoming disturbed by their offspring's musical enthusiasms is nothing new, but Tipper was no ordinary Tennessee mother– she was married to up-and-coming Democrat politician Senator Al Gore. Determined to do something, Tipper reached across the Democrat-Republican gap to Susan Baker, wife of James Baker, the finance chief under Ronald Reagan. They brought in two more women and established the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). As all four women had husbands with strong connections to government, the US media nicknamed the committee “the Washington wives.”

The Parental Advisory labels likely had the opposite effect, making those albums more appealing to youth

The PMRC arranged a US Senate hearing for September 1985, its aim to increase parental oversight over recorded music. Even before hearings began the PMRC had remarkable momentum: funding came from Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love and Joseph Coors, owner of Coors beer, both active Reagan supporters, and the committee gained considerable media coverage, garnering support from the likes of Jerry Falwell, US televangelist and co-founder of the Moral Majority. The campaign emerged at a favorable time. While video nasties served as public scares in the UK, in the US Ronald Reagan's emphasis on “family values” had empowered the conservative Christians: with the surging popularity of MTV, the music video channel, musicians were now attracting increasing criticism from Christian organizations.

“At first, I didn't pay much attention to the PMRC,” says Blackie Lawless, leader of Wasp, one of the bands singled out by the organization. “Then it went on to have a huge impact, took on a life of its own.”

The US had experienced occasional outbreaks of music-related public outcries before. The mid-1950s saw Elvis Presley censured by segregationists for making “jungle music”, while John Lennon's 1966 observation “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus” led to bonfires of Beatles records. But there had never been a coordinated government attempt to censor music. As the Senate hearings commenced it became apparent censorship was now on the agenda.

For the hearings the PMRC compiled a list of 15 contemporary songs – the “Filthy Fifteen” – that they determined had “objectionable” qualities: sex, violence, references to drugs or alcohol, occult themes and profanity. Prince was linked to three of them, as an artist, writer and producer. The list also included Mary Jane Girls, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, all listed for singing very coy, pro-female sexuality songs. Heavy metal bands (then the most popular genre in US music) dominated: AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe, longtime targets of attacks by evangelical organizations, were included, along with newbies Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Twisted Sister and Wasp, who suddenly found politicians and religious fundamentalists calling for their music and videos to be banned from radio and MTV.

“I had been following all of this developing on the news so I wasn't completely surprised,” says Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, “although being called ‘enemy of the people’ was a exaggeration.”

In the Senate hearings the PMRC requested the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to develop a form of music rating akin to that used by the Motion Picture Association for film classifications. Their proposals included calling for printed warnings on album covers, requiring record shops to put albums with explicit covers under the counter, pressuring television stations not to broadcast explicit videos and, more concerningly, reassessing “the contracts of musicians who performed violently or sexually in concert”.

It wasn't only the musicians on the Filthy Fifteen list who voiced disapproval at the PMRC's campaign – veteran rockers Frank Zappa and Alice Cooper, both of whom had provoked controversy early in their careers, protested about what they saw as the PMRC serving as a cover for increasing censorship.

Cooper was a seasoned participant of censorship battles in the UK. In the summer of 1972 his eponymous group's song School's Out topped the charts in the UK, prompting calls for its censorship. “I sent Mary Whitehouse flowers and Leo Abse a box of cigars,” Cooper chuckles at the angry response from, respectively, the conservative activist and the Welsh Labour MP at the time.

The PMRC campaign 12 years later was more serious: for Cooper a troubling example of government overreach. “It was like they were saying to kids: ‘You can't see something or hear something because you're not smart enough to deal with it,’” he says. “If something is really violent or horrible it should be a talk between the parents and their kids, not the government and the kids.”

As the Senate hearings began, Zappa travelled to Washington DC. There he was joined by pop-folk singer John Denver – who, like Zappa, happily appeared as a witness despite not being included on the Filthy Fifteen list – and Twisted Sister's vocalist Dee Snider, who was listed. The trio spoke during the hearings as to why music censorship was a mistake. Zappa, dressed formally in suit and tie, provided the enduring image of the hearings as he debated with the PMRC and their supporters, saying that “the PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children [and] infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children”.

Denver, meanwhile, noted how his song Rocky Mountain High had been misinterpreted by those who considered it a tribute to taking drugs (when it was a celebration of Colorado's natural beauty) while Snider asserted the PMRC misinterpreted the lyric to Twisted Sister's Under the Blade – it wasn't about sadomasochism (as Gore claimed), but surgery.

Judas Priest's Halford did not attend the hearings, but says that the PMRC misread his lyrics, too. The committee claimed the song Eat Me Alive was about the forced performance of oral sex at gunpoint. Today Halford says it was in fact about gay S&M sex, although in 1985 he said nothing. The Brum rock god didn't come out until 1998.

The Wasp song on the list, Animal (Fuck Like a Beast), was, says Lawless, simply a direct celebration of sweaty sex. Not discreet but not offensive, either. “Originally I was going to attend the Senate hearings and speak,” he says, “but EMI – our record label – requested that we didn't go. They didn't think it was a good idea. Frank, John and Dee all did a really good job in speaking on artists' behalf, not that it made much difference.”

The three may have spoken persuasively but US record labels gave in before the hearings ended: the RIAA agreed to put Parental Advisory stickers on any album containing “controversial” content. This led to certain retailers – including Walmart (then the US's largest record retailer) – declining to stock albums carrying the stickers. “At the time the hard right pressured Walmart so they had no choice,” says Halford. “I would imagine that sales took a hit for every label.”

Lawless, meanwhile, claims that the PMRC Senate hearings threatened not only his career but his life. “In the US there was an element of society who thought: ‘The world would be better off without these people,’ and we began getting death threats. I was twice shot at – not in concert, thankfully, although once while we were playing someone threw a heavy glass jar and it hit me right on the top of my head and split my scalp open.”

Musicians replied to the PMRC in song: Judas Priest's Parental Guidance and Alice Cooper's Freedom both damned the organization, while on Wasp's Live … In the Raw album Lawless devotes the song Harder, Faster to the Washington wives: “They can suck me, suck me, eat me raw!”

The Senate hearings broadened discussion around censorship in the US while inspiring lawsuits against “offensive” musicians. San Franciscan punk band Dead Kennedys became involved in a court case not for their songs, but due to an insert of HR Giger's artwork Penis Landscape inside the cover of 1985's Frankenchrist album: a parent offended by their teenage daughter's purchase of the album sued the band. On 7 March 1990, Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra argued with Tipper Gore on the Oprah Winfrey show, with Biafra asserting Gore's defence of being “a liberal Democrat” was undermined by her PMRC support, noting how the committee had encouraged the Christian right.

Both Cooper and Lawless argue that that Tipper's motivation behind the PMRC was to help build support for her husband's 1987 campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination (Al Gore would be defeated, but later become Bill Clinton's vice-president, before losing to George Bush in disputed fashion in the 2000 presidential election). “Just as McCarthy used the red scare to gain more power, this was a campaign to establish a political base through suggesting musicians were bringing sexual perversion and the occult into children's bedrooms,” says Lawless.

Rap would soon overtake rock as the US's most popular youth music and gangsta rap's rhymes would attract even more outrage. In 1989, NWA and 2 Live Crew generated major disputes – the former for rhymes that, among other things, celebrated shooting LAPD officers, the latter over the explicit sexual content on their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. After a federal judge ruled the album to be obscene – an unprecedented verdict for a US music recording – Bible belt states began prosecuting stores that sold the album, and that hosted their performances. The US court of appeals would ultimately reverse the obscenity ruling, but by then the controversy had helped both outfits sell millions of albums – though the myriad legal battles would fracture both groups.

“I found the whole thing condescending and stupid,” says Cooper. “And putting Parental Advisory stickers on albums surely backfired as they became the ones kids wanted to buy.”

Despite the PMRC officially disbanding in the mid 1990s, its legacy can be seen in the Parental Advisory stickers that continue to be used on many US albums. In the internet age where seemingly anything, no matter how offensive, is just a click away, the committee's attempts to censor popular music now seems archaic. Still, there are echoes of their crusade today in the attempts to censor comedians such as Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“We are in dangerous times around the world,” says Halford. “I've lived long enough to witness history repeat itself.”