Parents Music Resource Center
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The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was founded in 1985 by Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator, later-Vice President Al Gore, to save us from the menace of filthy music.
Tipper was so upset to find her daughter listening to "Darling Nikki" by Prince, with the lyrics about masturbation in a hotel lobby, that she put two and two together and decided rock & roll caused teen suicide, murder, Satanism, drug and alcohol use, and worse.
The PMRC released a "Filthy Fifteen" list of the worst songs, some of which were obscure up to that point (like "Animal: F*** Like A Beast" by W.A.S.P. and "Strap On Robbie Baby" by Vanity), ironically helping their record sales quite a bit. They then instigated an August 1985 Senate hearing on "porn rock", at which testimony in opposition to the PMRC and censorship was given by Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister, and John Denver.[1] During the hearings the Recording Industry Association of America voluntarily agreed to start labeling potentially naughty records with the infamous "PARENTAL ADVISORY - EXPLICIT LYRICS" sticker, which quickly became known as the "Tipper Sticker". Eventually these came to be required for Hip-hop albums, for the sake of credibility - no sticker and you're just not ghetto enough.
The PMRC and Tipper Gore remained fodder for jokes and a target for free speech activists and musicians such as Jello Biafra and Rage Against the Machine for many years after. Eventually, Al Gore lost the 2000 Presidential election and his apologists blamed it all on Ralph Nader.
[edit] See also
- Moral panic
- Satanic panic
- Dungeons and Dragons
- Mothers Against Drunk Driving
- Backward masking
- Comics Code Authority
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Zappa went on to use recordings of the hearings on his track "Porn Wars", lampooning the controversy