Parental Advisory: How a content warning became the coolest thing in music
Fittingly enough, the biggest crackdown on adult content in music began with a Prince song.
Mary ‘Tipper’ Gore bought the album Purple Rain for her daughter Karenna, presumably because Karenna Gore had pretty goddamn great taste in music. The only issue was that Karenna Gore was 11 years old at the time and without wanting to sound too much like a cop, a song like ‘Darling Nikki’ is a lot for any 11-year-old. I know it’s nothing that most 11-year-olds don’t already know about, especially today. However, this is a song that begins with “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.” Gracious.
What made this worse is that Karenna made the mistake of listening to this record within earshot of her mother, who was utterly fucking scandalised that she could have bought such a thing for her pre-teen daughter. Obviously, the sensible thing to do is have a sit-down with your child and discuss what they’ve just heard, whether they understand it and if anything about it makes them uncomfortable. You’d think that a woman who married Al Gore would be somewhat open to “the sensible option”, but not in this case.
Instead, she formed the Parental Music Research Centre in order to crusade for the censorship of music, with initial investment provided (among others) by Mike Love of The Beach Boys. As if anyone needed proof that Mike Love is a dickhead. They began with a list of 15 songs that they considered to have “objectionable content”. This list, which had ‘Darling Nikki’ right at the top, was brandished as proof that something needed to be done about the violent, sexual content that was seemingly everywhere in pop music.
How was the Parental Advisory sticker introduced?
The list, dubbed “The Filthy Fifteen”, was their first shot across the bow and one that the music industry responded to with one of the greatest pieces of graphic design in the history of popular music. The irony is that initially, the Parental Advisory sticker was nowhere near enough for Gore’s committee. Their initial demand was that the RIAA introduce a rating system for their releases. In the same way that movies don’t get released without an age rating for their content, music albums would have the same.
Now, obviously, even if this were considered, it would basically be impossible to enforce. Despite the signs being there that the RIAA and the PMRC would eventually come to an agreement about the Parental Advisory stickers, the PMRC still had the clout to force a Senate hearing on what they described as “porn rock”. Seemingly for nothing more than press attention, the United States Senate was called to hear arguments for and against the labelling of music as having “explicit content”. If you’ve ever seen that video of a wasted-looking Dee Snider giving an articulate and thoughtful defence of freedom of expression in music, this hearing was where that testimony was given.
Now, the whole thing was a charade. As I said earlier, the signs were there that the RIAA were more than happy to label releases deemed to have “explicit content”. Probably because they were a lot savvier than anyone in the PMRC and knew that if you marked out all the albums with sex and swearing on them, the kids who wanted the dark stuff knew exactly where to look. This was proved entirely correct as, within a single decade, artists were negotiating with their labels for their records to have the “Parental Advisory” label put on their records due to the sales boost it gave them.
In the immortal words of Ice-T on his track ‘Freedom of Speech’: “Hey, PMRC, you stupid fuckin’ assholes / The sticker on the record is what makes ’em sell gold / Can’t you see, you alcoholic idiots / The more you try to suppress us, the larger we get.” Truer words, Ice, truer words.