🔗 Share this article

Prince's iconic Purple Rain album had been purchased by 11 million Americans by the spring of 1985. One purchaser was 11-year-old Karenna Gore. At home, Karenna's mother was stunned to hear Prince perform on the album's fifth track: “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 couldn't believe my ears,” remarked Karenna's mother, Tipper Gore. “The explicit lyrics humiliated both of us. At first, I was taken aback – then I got mad!”

Mothers and fathers becoming disturbed by their offspring's musical enthusiasms is nothing new, but Tipper was no ordinary Tennessee mum– 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 treasury secretary under Ronald Reagan. They recruited two more women and established the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). As all four women had husbands with political ties to government, the US media nicknamed the committee “the Washington wives.”

Putting Parental Advisory stickers on albums surely backfired as they became the ones kids wanted to buy

The PMRC organized a US Senate hearing for September 1985, with the goal to increase parental oversight over recorded music. Prior to hearings began the PMRC had significant traction: financial support came from Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love and Joseph Coors, owner of Coors beer, both active Reagan supporters, and the committee received 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 opportune time. While controversial films 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 ire 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 developed a huge impact, gained momentum of its own.”

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

For the hearings the PMRC created a list of 15 contemporary songs – the “Filthy Fifteen” – that they deemed had “objectionable” qualities: sex, violence, references to drugs or alcohol, occult themes and bad language. Prince was connected to three of them, as an artist, writer and producer. The list also included Mary Jane Girls, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, all named for singing very suggestive, pro-female sexuality songs. Heavy metal bands (then the most popular genre in US music) featured prominently: AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe, longtime targets of attacks by evangelical organizations, were included, along with newer acts 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 tracking all of this building up on the news so I wasn't totally surprised,” says Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, “although being called ‘enemy of the people’ was a exaggeration.”

In the Senate hearings the PMRC asked the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to create a form of music rating similar to that used by the Motion Picture Association for film classifications. Their agenda included calling for printed warnings on album covers, requiring record shops to put albums with explicit covers out of sight, pressuring television stations not to broadcast explicit videos and, more ominously, 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 pretext for encroaching censorship.

Cooper was a seasoned participant of censorship battles in the UK. In the summer of 1972 his self-titled 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 outraged 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 are not allowed to 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 conversation between the parents and their kids, not the government and the kids.”

As the Senate hearings got under way, Zappa travelled to Washington DC. There he was accompanied by pop-folk singer John Denver – who, like Zappa, volunteered as a witness despite not being included on the Filthy Fifteen list – and Twisted Sister's vocalist Dee Snider, who did appear. 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 sparred 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, in turn, noted how his song Rocky Mountain High had been misunderstood by those who deemed 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 did not concern 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 coerced act 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 blunt celebration of sweaty sex. Not discreet but not obscene, either. “At first I was going to attend the Senate hearings and speak,” he says, “but EMI – our record label – requested that we didn't go. They felt it was a wise move. Frank, John and Dee all did a excellent job in speaking on artists' behalf, not that it had a significant impact.”

The trio may have spoken persuasively but US record labels caved 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 declined for every label.”

Lawless, on the other hand, claims that the PMRC Senate hearings endangered 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 fired upon – not in concert, thankfully, although once while we were playing someone threw a heavy glass jar and it struck me right on the top of my head and cut 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 dedicates the song Harder, Faster to the Washington wives: “They can suck me, suck me, eat me raw!”

The Senate hearings expanded 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 upset by their teenage daughter's purchase of the album took legal action against 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 cheerleading, noting how the committee had encouraged the Christian right.

Both Cooper and Lawless contend that that Tipper's motivation behind the PMRC was to help gain backing 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 being defeated by 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 surpass 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 first-time 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 had the opposite effect as they became the ones kids were eager to buy.”

Despite the PMRC officially disbanding in the mid 1990s, its impact can be seen in the Parental Advisory stickers that continue to be employed 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 reminders 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 risky times around the world,” says Halford. “I've lived long enough to witness history happen again.”