Recently I actually looked up the lyrics to Megadeth's "Hook in the Mouth" and learned that it's a very anti-PMRC song. I don't know a ton about the PMRC, except that they started the whole "parental advisory" stickers on some albums, and that they were very controversial at the time, with artists from several genres writing songs about them.

The thing is, these songs and the attitude that I sense, being separated by decades, is that there was a feeling that they were destroying freedom of speech. But I don't really see the reason for that amount of anger over a voluntary sticker. The way people sounded, you'd think they were trying to actually force lyrical censorship.

So was this hyperbole, or was there something to it? Can someone help me to understand this?

They were, or at least something similar. The sticker was the compromise if I remember correctly.

As far as I know, they basically promoted (and indeed tried to force) censorship, which is despicable.

Do retailers/distributors of non-negligible financial significance sell 'explicit content' that isn't labelled as such? The sticker may have been voluntary, but wasn't it de facto required if you wanted a chance of your album being made easily available (before the internet as we know it)?

They were trying to force their beliefs on everyone else, which is instant fuel for "fuck these people" pretty much everybody. The fact that they were specifically targeting metal music as this swamp of Satanists and perverts only made metalheads hate them more.

I can try, since I saw all of this unfold

The first thing you have to understand is that the PMRC was just one symptom of a much larger problem in 80s America. More and more, the media and different groups were blaming not just music but any cultural phenomenon for every problem. Someone got shot? It was Rambo's fault. Or Dungeons and Dragons. Things were spiraling out of control. Two idiots shot themselves just around the time the PMRC was created and one of them survived and blamed it on an inoffensive Judas Priest song. This incident kept on gaining steam and eventually went on trial. That was crazy shit right there that never should have even been considered. Thankfully, common sense prevailed.

The PMRC itself was rather harmless. Much of the "hate" was actually fake. For artists like WASP, whose only thing they have going for them is to shock, the PMRC was actually a blessing in disguise. If you were on the PMRC's shitlist, it kinda gave you "cred" with the kids. Of course, the PMRC had a hold on certain big chains but you have to remember there were a lot more stores back then fighting for the consumer's dollar. So a lot of experts contend that all this controversy actually boosted certain artists' sales (and I would agree with that).

The funny thing is that despite what the hearings make it look like (lots of rock and metal artists protesting) the PMRC was mostly concerned with suggestive (sexual) material from pop and rap artists. Stuff like Prince. This was basically an organization of sexually frustrated politicians' wives trying to find whatever meaning they could in life.

The stickers were harmless. It's the insanity surrounding all this, the fact that a judge seriously contemplated whether Judas Priest were responsible for two dickwads shooting themselves in the face. This is a pivotal point where America could have taken a really frightening turn for the worse.

This court case was one of the biggest pieces of shit ever. The two kids locked themselves in a bedroom, played the same song (Better by You, Better than Me for those unfamiliar with the case) for 12 hours straight while getting high. The parents were home, and instead of checking on the kids to make sure they were alright - one would expect someone with common sense to think something was wrong if they heard the same song over and over for twelve hours - they blamed the band when the inevitable happened. Thankfully, as Riffs said, the judge had common sense. Whatever happened to responsibility?

The worst part for me is that "Better by You, Better Than Me" is a cover, and on that same album there is "Beyond the Realms of Death", which is ACTUALLY ABOUT suicide. If they had seriously chosen a song with the intention of killing themselves, why the fuck not the latter??? I think the whole court case was just grief-stricken parents looking around for something to blame other than their sons or themselves, however irrational. It's always tragic when kids commit suicide, but I can't believe the parents didn't have someone in their lives who could tell them "sorry your kids are dead, but this lawsuit is bullshit." I bet they had some sort of predatory lawyer who deluded them into thinking they had a really good chance of winning, if only they kept paying him.

No matter how you (or they) put it, it was all about censorship. I believe the result has eventually been the exact opposite, and for certain genres, not having the warning sticker is a warning to potential buyers.

I also believe that this particular piece of idiocy may have had consequences that reached much further than the people involved believe. I wouldn't think it improbable that many US people of my own age still remembered the fact that Al Gore's wife provided her face for the campaign, and it would have had some effect on my own voting in the 2000 presidential election; it probably didn't give Bush many votes, but I wouldn't put it beyond a considerable number of people thinking in certain ways to skip voting for Gore, either.

Riffs pretty much nails it, except that he, IMO, does not stress the potential for a larger-scale cultural conflict enough. Have the same happen now, and the Christian right in the USA might give the ideas they held a much scarier depth and plenty of more steam. It's a thing just waiting to happen sooner or later, and the next time it won't stop at stickers.

I think even younger people still remember this well, I was 13 at the time of the 2000 election, and I still remember very well Tipper getting involved in this and thinking if I could vote it would be for Bush. Of course I was 13 and didn't really care about anything but the stickers getting put on cds and making it harder for me to get my hands on them.

Has anyone here watched the senate hearing with Dee Snider, Frank Zappa, and John Denver? It's quite the watch, really. Also, watch out for Dee Snider politely telling Tipper Gore to go fuck herself.

To have a real visceral reaction to the letters PMRC, you had to have been there. There have always been groups in the US that make their bones by claiming they know what's causing X problem in society, but this one had really solid political ties and was therefore really scary. It was headed up by Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore - Senator from Tennessee, later Vice President, and almost President of the United States.

What a fucking disaster that would have been. You know how the Fist Lady always has some cause to champion? Guess what Tipper's would have been?

Anyway, American youth culture had started accelerating in a unfamiliar direction starting in the late 1970s, and the older generation got into the habit of using everything, literally everything, that the younger generation was into as a scapegoat for undesirable behavior. Movies, music, video games, D&D, anything that was hugely popular with youth that adults found offensive became the reason for offensive behavior.

The censorship movement championed by the PMRC wasn't just a lot of hot air, either. They planted the idea that censorship was sanctioned, even desirable, and that it was part of being a responsible parent. Local parenTal groups sprung up all over the place and were quite successfull in their efforts in some arenas. In my hometown, the town council banned video games, for example. The standup console games that could always be found in the front of practically evey store of every kind in the 1980s? Not in Vienna Virginia. A local parental group also picketed (picketed!) local record store chains, and eventually the council decided it would be less trouble not to renew the leases of any of them. I haven't been back to Vienna in a few years, but the last time I was, I noted that there still aren't any video games or record stores in town.

The PMRC may not have been all that successfull on a national scale, pretty much all they got was those stickers, but they started the movement of officially sanctioned for-your-own-good censorship hysteria.

So from what I gather, most of the anger was faked, and the PMRC didn't do much? What was the idea before they compromised with the sticker?

They wanted music with explicit themes to be censored and unavailable to children and ostensibly everyone else as well. As said, they were trying to force their beliefs on other people.

What are you talking about? If anything, America is getting much more relaxed when it comes to censorship. Comedy Central for example airs South Park totally uncensored, which would have been utterly unheard of 10 years ago even for a non-premium cable channel. Yeah the Christian right has some power, but its power to push through wacky legislation is very limited to a few strongholds in Texas and the midwest. For example, you will never ever see Intelligent Design taught as a serious scientific theory in New England or west coast schools.

lol, they wanted to do WAY more then just put a sticker on cds. The advisory stickers was all they were able to accomplish...

failsafeman, I completely agree on those examples, South Park and ID, although I must point out that the censorship 10 years ago must have been voluntary, not mandatory. What they would have wanted to have was a mandatory process.

However, what I really mean is that the interest was rather superficial, on the level of individual lyrics and such, and was essentially more about limiting the availability of the stuff, not about outright banning anything, especially not ideologies or images. Today, it might get different forms, and as GTog pointed out, the effect might be considerable on local level. It's probably true that the free speech rules you have would make banning anything virtually impossible, since it hasn't worked on porn, either, but an astroturfed movement might cause much more scattered local harm than anything on federal or individual state level ever could.

This, obviously, is based on a view from the outside, which of course is a different thing than seeing stuff from within the USA, but I'd say that in my experience, the so-called "moral values" and other pseudo-conservative bullshit ideas get MUCH more air time and visibility in the US media, and seem to have a much heavier impact on the day-to-day running of things over there. Yeah, you can't take away anyone's freedom to express anything, but you can make it damn difficult to do certain things, and it doesn't really take much effort to make changes in leases, zoning, licences, permits, whathaveyou, to make the right not to hear your exercises of your free speech much easier to do for people who don't even know about your message... youknowwhatImean... And if this issue was to polarize to the level of the abortion discussion, as an example, I'd bet that it would lead to excesses on the very much local level, just like creationism has done; plenty of turmoil, and while the actual damage might in the long run be neglible, it would cause a HUGE hassle for a lot of folks. ID already has, and as you pointed out, it would never even be taught in schools where it really matters.

Black metal distros, the future Larry Flynts of the USA.

Hah. For a long time I thought the song in question was Beyond the Realms of Death, for that very reason. When I learned it was the cover song, I thought, why are they blaming Priest when the lyrics weren't written by them? And then I learned that it wasn't about the lyrics but because of a so-called subliminal message that said... "do it!".

Of course it was voluntary, as the FCC doesn't actually control cable channels, only basic channels that actually go out "over the airwaves." What cable channels have is their own guidelines for what they deem as acceptable content for their programming, which may seem like an arbitrary thing that's simple to change if the will is there until you realize that these guidelines are developed with an eye to keeping the all-important advertisers happy. A change as significant as Comedy Central's between 10 years ago and now means there has been a significant change in the way advertisers feel about such "vulgar" content being shown alongside commercials for their products, and these people do nothing but study public attitudes. If big advertisers don't care about vulgarity on TV, then that means their studies prove a majority of Americans watching CC don't care either. That may seem obvious on the internet where vulgarity is the rule, but it's a pretty huge shift for any sort of advertiser to make.

I came into this thread thinking I had something to say, but everyone here seems to be much more knowledgeable on the subject. These posts are a good read. especially that last one, Failsafe.

I totally forgot that song was on there

The PMRC and their anger wasn't fake....that's for sure. I still don't know why Tipper thought that buying her child the soundtrack to an R rated movie (Purple Rain) that the content would be tween friendly! And in her outrage she thought she could rally her friends in high places to her cause. I mean lets have the government tell you what's wrong or right since obviously she was so important that she didn't have time to investigate what her child was listening to. It was a real scary time in this country. I believe that, although some censorship has lightened up, other types have not and it's getting worse. Thank the gods we had Zappa, John Denver and Dee Snider and that they were able to make actual points rather than the talking points the government was spewing. There were actual Congressional hearings over this shit!! This was during Reagan, Iran Contra etc. And the government thought that music lyrics was the pressing business!! lol

Even today people still refuse to blame the perpretator whenever something bad happens, but they blame different things than in the eighties.


In practice yes, but it slightly ruins album arts.


They did censor Mohammed in South Park though.

They don't air South Park 100% uncensored; they'll leave in "shit" and "goddamn" and whatnot but nudity and "fuck" are still bleeped/blurred out last I saw.

A lot of bands seemed pretty happy with the parental advisory sticker, from a marketing stand-point. Kids buying metal are often after rebellion, and that sticker basically said "THIS WILL PISS OFF YOUR PARENTS".

To put some perspective on it, at the time it felt like the PMRC was a pretty big attack on Metal/Rock n' Roll, as it was a legal/political movement where nothing like it had happened before. I remember feeling like there might be a chance that the whole thing would be shut down completely.

There were also the religious crazies, showing up at shows telling kids if they went into the show they were condemned to hell, etc.

In retrospect it all feels like silly nonsense, of course. The "parental advisory" sticker became something that every band WANTED on their CD to help make it attractive -- i.e. exactly the opposite of what Tipper wanted (and also, interestingly enough, something that John Denver of all people predicted)....

But in my teenage mind, at the time, it felt like the PMRC were big bad people who might take away something that we really enjoyed.

Well put; this is exactly what I imagine. I'm also almost sure it didn't help their case that "Better by You" wasn't at all the sort of song they thought it to be.

Hey, what do you mean with this, Abom? I'm curious.

Well, it's about a guy who's going to fight in a war and can't face a woman to tell her how he feels about it, so he says "better tell her yourself"...maybe the person he's addressing slept with the woman and so he figures "yeah, enjoy it, I'm out of here". The point is, he's hardly about to kill himself; it's not even an anti-war or protest song.

But I actually had completely forgotten about the "do it!" thing, which is ultimately the most hilarious gambit in this entire situation. THe fact that supposedly erudite people thought they could get away with this kind of thing in court just staggers me.

Oh, got it. As Failsafeman said before, it would've made a lot more sense to take Beyond the Realms of Death* and blame it as the "suicide song", but they went for a song that not only didn't have anything to do with the subject, but also was a cover So yeah, stupid people say stupid shit. Nothing new.

*I'm a bit on the fence about Beyond the Realms of Death though, as I always thought it was about euthanasia.....

I always interpreted the song as being about a catatonic who shuts himself off completely from the external environment. he's still alive physically, but he's left the world behind completely, living exclusively in his own head, hence "beyond the realms of death".

Funny, I always intepreted it about an individual being in a hopeless coma, and when Rob mentions the guy's death, that led me to think that someone pulled the plug.

Beautiful lyrics, whatever they might be about.

The rise of the PMRC coincided with the rise of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right in America. Those groups came to prominence during the Reagan administration. During the latter half of the '60s and into the '70s, the US was moving in a more morally relaxed direction. Conservative Christians weren't really a powerful voting block. Many stayed away from politics. It was with Reagan that the Right reached out and politicized these people. Look at the epic rise and power of TV evangelists during that time.

The PMRC's concern was that these musical acts were leading the youth of America astray, morally. As I recall, they initially wanted to completely block the sale of certain music to people under 18. If you are in a pop, rock, or heavy metal band, you'd be pissed, too, as "the kids" are a huge chunk of your audience and your income. The parental advisory sticker was the ultimate compromise and of course the bands wanted it because that kind of stuff enticed kids to check those albums out. I do recall some little shit at Best Buy actually refusing to sell me a Suicidal Tendencies CD in 1994 because I was 17 (he was probably 16) and it has a parental advisory sticker. I came back the next day and bought it from a different cashier.

The whole Tipper Gore thing...she was the face of the organization, and many later came to believe was the fall guy. The group was founded by a number of politically connected woman, but Tipper was young and fairly attractive so she was good one to put up in front of the cameras. Had the group succeeded in their goal, they all could have stepped forward and taken credit. But they didn't, and Tipper ended up taking all the heat.

The whole Judas Priest lawsuit was a farce from the start. It was about 2 fucked up kids from 2 fucked up families. The families (probably spurred on by lawyers looking to cash in) decided to blame the music the kids listened to instead of looking at themselves. The whole notion of backwards messages was so laughable (and that was the supposed issue with "Better By You Better Than Me"; it wasn't the actual song but the subliminal messages hidden in it by the band) yet no one stopped to ask why a band would even want to encourage their fans to commit suicide. Bill Hicks had a great routine on how it was the band's way of getting out of a tour they'd already booked.

But none of this was actually new. In the 1950s, comic books were blamed from teen violence. In the 1920s, jazz music was blamed for loose morals. This shit happens over and over.

Here's an old documentary about the Priest trial. It features footage from the actual court case. Halford had to sing a capella and plays a record backwards. "I asked her for a peppermint"!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDsv_oG3KWY

Here's another example of the type of thinking the PMRC pushed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9856_xv8gc

Imagine someone like that with even an ounce of actual power.

Agreed though I do see the line "this is my life, I'l decide not you" and "and then he died" being about voluntary euthanasia.

Speaking of Vance v. Judas Priest and subliminal nonsense, this article by an expert witness to the trial is long-ish but very interesting and draws directly from this trial:
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/scientifi ... _testimony

The sad thing is the way the kid looked after he shoot himself(james Vance) became the the inspiration for one of my favorite characters in comics.




Yes arseface

Restless Records slapped a "Parental Advisory! Explicit Lyrics!" sticker on our first album just to bolster sales, because in the late 80s, most metal teens wouldn't even look at a record/cassette/CD that didn't have the sticker. The album only had one cuss word, which was misprinted in the lyric sheet as "mucking", so there was really no valid reason for the sticker. But we had it anyway... no clue if it really did help sales, but they swore up & down it did. Now, the re-issue doesn't have the sticker, and from what I know, hasn't sold nearly as well... could be the lack of that "Explicit Lyrics!" sticker. LOL.

Arseface

Pfwetcher iph pfwethy pfick-afs!

But wasn't Tipper Gore a Democrat?

Yep.