I had something of an epiphany today. Tipper Gore and the Parent’s Music Resource Center (PMRC) are to blame for the overload of profanity in modern rock and rap music.
I got to thinking about this after watching the new Twisted Sister music video and then reading an interview with Dee Snider in which he talked about testifying before Congress, and the warning labels on records.
It occurred to me that until Tipper’s knee started jerking, songwriters did a pretty good job of policing themselves. They knew that if they loaded a song with profanity and explicit descriptions of sex it wouldn’t get airplay, which meant they wouldn’t sell as many records. Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford talked about this after his band’s song, “Eat Me Alive” (lyrics here) was held up as an example of what was wrong with popular music. Forgive me for not having a cite, but this was in a magazine almost 20 years ago. Halford explained that the song was written one night when he and the rest of the band were drunk out of their gourds. They woke up the next morning and read what they had written, and were quite shocked. “We wrote that? Good lord!” Halford said it was so raunchy that “we censored it ourselves”.
The vast majority of songwriters censored themselves. Sure, they wrote songs about sex, but rather than explicitly describe the act they used creative euphemisms and double entendres. Often, the songs were written in such a way that the true meaning behind the words would go right over the heads of most children. Same with drug songs.
And sure, there were songs out there that had the “harsh” profanity in the lyrics, but these were usually album cuts that were never intended to be released as singles or played on the radio. The “F-word” on rap albums? Well, that was okay because it was still “underground” and the white kids weren’t listening to it anyway :rolleyes:. The rap that got airplay was pretty clean: MC Hammer, The Fresh Prince, Young MC, etc.
How many white kids had even heard of 2 Live Crew before the PMRC started shrieking? I sure hadn’t, and I was really into rap at the time. Before that, I remember being a teenager in church and having to listen to sermons from youth pastors about the evils of rock & roll, and being shown examples of “satanic” bands … and the examples given were, often, obscure bands I had never heard of, and probably wouldn’t have heard of, had they not been waved in my face by preachers.
So we got warning labels on our records and tapes and CDs. “PARENTAL ADVISORY! EXPLICIT LYRICS!” This would protect our children by allowing parents to know when the lyrics were nasty. Assuming, naturally, that parents have full control over every recording their child purchases.
In reality (as I see it) the warning label became a license to curse. Where in the past songwriters would perhaps push the limits but still keep it clean enough to get airplay, they now realized that they could say anything they wanted and all they had to do was put a warning (which most people probably ignore) on the album cover. I suspect that, without warning labels, many of today’s cursing singers and rappers would be producing cleaner songs. But they swear because they can. Tipper must be proud.
Please discuss.
(Mods: if this would be better in GD, please move it)
