Stuff You Should Know - Was the PMRC censorship in disguise?

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

The Parents Music Resource Center in the 1980s was really just censorship in disguise. But it kind of backfired. Learn all about Tipper Gore's crusade in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And we're going to mind our P's and Q's because this is a family show. Everybody don't get all excited like we're going to drop the S-word or anything like that. Snacks. Or nuts. Yes.

Snacks. You just said it. Oh. We're going to keep it clean, but we are talking about some dirty, dirty stuff, stuff that should never be uttered by anyone. And I for one would like to tip my hat to Tipper Gore for being an American hero of all time. What?

Actually, what's funny is I was reading some of this, and we're talking about the PMRC as everyone will soon find out. And Ed put this one together, and he points out that yes, if you look at this, the stuff that they were trying to do, the Parents' Music Resource Center, they were basically saying like, we need to be able to have a heads up that this record album has lyrics on it that we wouldn't want our little eight-year-old kid to listen to. It's really all we're asking for. Well, that's not true.

The thing is, is that's not all they were asking for, and it's a slippery slope of doing that where you're basically ringing the dinner triangle for anybody who's got a beef with any dirty lyrics or any worldview that opposes theirs to come out and say, yeah, I like that idea. And while we're at it, let's put them in jail if they don't comply. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, but it's too late, the cat's out of the bag. And this all happened in real life in the 80s, which by the way, I'm on record as saying the 70s were the greatest decade of all time.

I think the 80s were one of the most interesting, at least. A lot of wacky stuff went down in the 80s. You got the satanic panic, the whole back masking thing that was kind of part of it. You've got this, a bunch of other stuff happened in the 80s too. No program was going pretty strong, there was a shuttle disaster even. I mean, it was an interesting, provocative decade. Yeah. So there you have it, Chuck.

There's the intro. Yeah, this was a commissioned piece because I remember very distinctly all of this going on when I was younger and paying pretty close attention as a music fan, what was happening, and not getting as a kid that it meant more than an explicit lyrics label. There was more at stake. But also as a kid, you probably were exclusively like, hey, man, they can't do that. That's not cool. That's censorship without understanding the nuance of that, the other position as well,

right? No, I was too young to spout soap boxy things like that. Right. So you're just flipping off newspaper pictures of Tipper Gore in your bedroom? No. I mean, I was little. I mean, I was like 11 or 12, I wasn't a discerning reader of the newspaper, I didn't know who Tipper Gore was.

Oh, you didn't? No. Were you? Yeah, I knew who Tipper Gore was. So you were like eight years old and you knew who Tipper Gore was? Yeah. I mean, she was on like Donahue and all these shows, like it was a big deal. Yeah.

She was the face of this whole thing. Yeah, I knew who Tipper Gore was. I'm not to imply that I was any more discerning than you were as far as reading newspaper games. I don't know her name, but I certainly had no idea who she was or what any of this meant at that age. Well, some people say knowing her name and by proxy, her husband's name was the whole point of all this, but we'll get to that later.

Yeah. So the Parents Music Resource Center, well, I mean, it was sort of an extension of the grand tradition of adults saying that new music is bad for kids. And that's been happening since there's been music. Yeah. It still goes on today. It's chamber music, Amadeus. Maybe.

It's quite possible. I mean, we should do an episode just on that. I'm being threatened by, with getting old. Threatened by youth. I guess. Yeah. But I think it's, you're projecting onto youth where you're really threatened by your imminent mortality is what it is.

Yeah. And you're just projecting it onto the next generation because it's weird and strange and you're being pushed out of control. Well, this, we can find the origins of the PMRC in this case in 1984 when Tipper Gore's daughter, I think she was 11, turned on her new Prince album and the song, a very awesome song, Darling Nikki came on with the very famous line about masturbation. And I remember being a young church kid thinking like, whoa, I probably shouldn't be listening to this.

Yeah. It was a dirty, dirty song. Did you keep listening? Yeah. Cause it's a, it's a great song. It is a great song. Yeah. And if you put it even further, it's a great song on its own, but in context with the movie

Purple Rain, that song shows up because Prince is trying to humiliate his girlfriend, who he's just struck because he found out that she was working for Morris Day, which is Prince's rival in Purple Rain. Right. So like it's a, it's a song to humiliate her, right? On its own, it's a great song. It is a, a racy song, but it also has context that Tipper Gore didn't have at her fingertips when she listened to that song.

Yeah. And she wrote a book a few years after that. Um, and I don't remember, I didn't own this book. You didn't read that book when you were 11. I read it when I was eight. No, I was 16 by this point. Uh, but I remember I had it for some reason. I might have done a, some sort of school thing on this.

On the PMRC? The whole thing? Cause I definitely had a copy of this book and it wasn't like, because I was like, this is great and awesome. Like I read it for some school project, but it was called raising PG kids in an X-rated society. And in it, she talks about how not only was she worried and afraid for her kids, but she was afraid herself about just these images that she was seeing on MTV, an Ozzy Osbourne

crawling out of a swamp as a swamp beast and instead of laughing at that, like everyone else on the planet, it scared her. Or just, um, taking it as part of your formative years that you eventually grow out of and don't do, aren't, aren't brought to worship or hail Satan as a result. Yeah. Cause she was a drummer. I mean, she was a musician. And an all woman band called the Wildcats.

Yeah. So she, uh, I don't know, it's kind of, a lot of this is surprising. It is very surprising and it's not like she was, you know, just a Democrat. Yeah. You know, well, so here's the thing that from what I've seen, if you were on the industry side of this, the opposing side to the PMRC at the time, um, you were pretty convinced. And I think some people still are that the, the whole thing that yes, Tipper Gore was like, this is, this is terrible.

I can't believe I listened to this as my 11 year old and said something to some other, uh, people see his friends with the round Washington and they were like, you know, we should do something about this. It would probably help Al's, um, exposure to the nation and get them ready for a run at the presidency. And that that was actually like this, the, the, the impetus for this whole quagmire was to make Al Gore a prominent national figure. Oh, really?

That's what a lot of people think this was. Interesting. I never heard that. You know, Tipper and Al's idea or whether they were kind of led into it depends on, you know, who you are, but that's, um, that's, that's very much out there in the zeitgeist that that was the whole basis of this entire thing. Huh. Well, I don't buy that.

Um, and in fact at the, uh, pre PMRC, uh, in Cincinnati, Ohio, there was a school PTA group, the Delcher Elementary School PTA, who also heard darling Nikki and also didn't think that it was just a great jam and they got all up in arms about it and drafted a statewide association letter, uh, that basically said, Hey, uh, recording industry association of America. We're just going to call it the RIAA probably on this show, but, um, maybe you should have a voluntary system of ratings, uh, kind of like movies do with the MPAA. That's the big deal.

Right. And they're like, call us back. We want to talk about it. And the IRAA never called them back. Yeah. They said, we'll get right on that. Yeah. Exactly.

Because they don't, they, they want to do that. They were scared of this idea to begin with. They were really worried it was going to hurt sales. If you have like a, an album that specifically says this is not for kids, there are some stores in some parts of the country that just won't carry that album and you want to be able to sell those albums. You want to either have albums that a store would be happy to sell or at least slide it in underhand at least so the stores don't know what they're selling and just the kids

do. Um, so they were afraid of this kind of idea, but they also, I mean, it's the music industry in the eighties. Like they could afford to be like, be quiet since an auntie school district. We're not listening to you. For sure. When Tipper Gore came into the mix with some of her friends from Washington, um, the dynamics of it changed for a number of reasons, not just because they were connected to government,

but because the RA, RIAA and government specifically, um, had something going on. Yeah. So they formed the PMRC in, uh, on May 15th, 1985, they got a grant for Mike Love of the Beach Boys, which is just further cement him as one of the leading jerks in the history of music. So why, why is he a jerk? Because I saw that I was like, why was Mike Love doing that? And I know, I know he wasn't the Manson one.

That was Dennis, wasn't it? The one who hung out with the Manson family for a little while. Yeah. That was Dennis Wilson. Okay. Why is Mike Love a jerk? Because God made him that way. He's just that way?

No. I mean, he's, he's, he's a notorious, I mean, I can't use words that I want to use, but he is a, just Google Mike Love jerk and go down the rabbit hole of stories about, uh, this guy. Does he yell like at basketball players, courtside and stuff like that kind of jerk? No, he's just, he just go read some articles. All right, fine. I'm going to.

He's just a jerk. All right. So it does not surprise me that he gave $5,000 to kick off the PMRC. But what you were talking about is, is the tape tax, which was very interesting at the time. Um, the recording industry was suffering or not suffering, but they were just beginning to struggle a bit with the fact that cassette tapes were pretty inexpensive or they could be super cheap if you got really cruddy ones.

Yeah, but the, the neon C three ones, those were expensive, the max L's. Yeah. I had the black max L's. But do you remember like the C three ones that had like kind of fluorescent and neon colors to them? No. Like the kind that Emilio Westavez and Charlie Sheen find in a minute work. No, I haven't seen that either.

Oh, great. You never saw a minute work. No. It's a good one. Is it? Okay. Um, yeah. So they, people were, you know, if you grew up in the 80s, you made tapes, you recorded

stuff off the radio, you made mix tapes, if your friend had a tape, you would dub that tape, you would set it in front of your speaker and record your albums. Do you remember figuring out how to record tapes that had been made so you couldn't record them? There was like a way that you could break off a tape. They were like these two things. If they were broken off. Well, there were two tabs on top, right?

If they were broken off, then they couldn't be either recorded from or recorded onto. I can't remember. It means you can't record over what's there. So if you make a tape you really wanted to keep, you'd snap those tabs. Oh, is that what they were for? Yeah. Okay. But you could put tape over those things and fool whatever, sense them and that you

could record right over it again. That's right. But do you remember being a kid and wondering if you were going to get in trouble for recording a song from the radio, like knowing that you were in some gray legal area that you weren't quite sure about? No. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, I didn't worry about it. I worried about getting in trouble for it. Not from my parents because they clearly didn't care. But my local law enforcement officers, the local government, maybe. Well, you've seen war games. Yeah. They'll come to your house. They'll come to your house and play out of your upstairs bedroom.

So the tape industry, the cassette tape industry was putting a dent in record sales and they were really threatened by it and basically went to Congress and said, hey, listen, I'd like you to pass an act, the Homadia Recording Act, that puts a pretty heavy tax on these cassettes, on these tape-to-tape decks that everyone's buying these days and then we want all that money. Like hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And the music industry was like, and we've got a great system worked out, 10% of all that is going to go to all the artists and then 90% is going to go to the record labels.

Some things never change. Right. And they had this thing, it was a house bill, HR 2911, and it was in the Commerce Committee. And the Commerce Committee was going to decide whether the RIAA got this tax money, a special tax just for the music industry to kind of offset some of these perceived album sale losses. That same committee, the Commerce Committee, or this committee in the, I'm sorry, yeah, the Commerce Committee.

So was decided to hold a hearing on the PMRC and its desire to start labeling records as explicit. So, I mean, that was a senatorial hearing. Was that the Commerce Committee specifically? Yes. Okay. Because I thought the conflict was the fact that members of the PMRC were married to people on that committee.

I didn't know that that was an actual Commerce Committee hearing. Yeah, I guess it wouldn't have been because it was HR 2911. So that would have been, the Commerce Committee then would have been in the house and you're right, this was a Senate hearing. So yeah, no conflict whatsoever, totally fine. Well, like I said, the conflict was the fact that four members of the PMRC were married to congressmen. Right.

So, there was a conflict there and basically the record industry wanted something from Congress and Congress now all of a sudden wanted something from the record industry, which was to label their records as potentially offensive to whomever, which is a big deal. And some people say that if the record industry hadn't been greedy and wanted the HR 2911 out of Congress, they probably would have fought this tooth and nail and a lot of people in the industry stood up and said, we're not going to take it, which will make a lot more sense in a couple of minutes and pushed back and did a lot of media tour and did a lot of interviews and spoke out about this and rallied like their listeners to say like,

this is wrong. And they may have successfully fought it had the industry ultimately wanted HR 2911 to pass this tape tax to pass. And so they decided that they were going to play ball. Yeah. And this was before the very famous hearing even happened. 19 record labels got on board and said, yeah, we'll do this, we'll figure out a good system. And so the very famous hearing on September 19th, 1985 with strange collection of humans,

John Denver, Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder, a twisted sister. It was moot at that point. So before we get into the hearing and we got to back up a little bit, let's take a break real quick. You want to see? Yeah. Okay. We'll be right back.

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Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

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Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So we should say, I got to amend something I just said. I can't believe this is so dumb. It's possible the record industry would have fought this a lot harder than they did had

that tape tax not been in existence as a proposed bill. But that's not to say necessarily that they did, because we got to give a little more background on the PMRC and what they did. One of the things that they were able to do because of their connections and because of their visibility was a media blitz. Over just a handful of months, they went from meeting in a church in Washington, D.C. I think there were originally like nine members or something to being on Donahue, The Today Show, editorials across the country.

They made this a topic of national, they made a national conversation about explicit lyrics on albums and whether the recording industry should do something about it. Overnight, they made it a thing. So as a result of that, legislation among the states started to pop up saying, forget whether the federal government's going to do it or not, we can do this ourselves. If you want to sell that record here in our state, you have to put a label on it. And I think there are at least a dozen states over a very brief period of time that came up with legislation, proposed legislation for this.

So the RIAA would have had a hard time fighting this off once the cat was out of the bag from the PMRC. They could have still tried to fight it. The ACLU was like, we're right here, you guys. Go ahead and pass one and see what happens. But it still would have been just a huge, enormous problem. So the PMRC did start this and some of the states took it up. So whether it was just the tape text or not or whether it was to try to stem off this

legislation, the RIAA said, okay, we'll play ball. And like you said, they said, okay, we'll do this. And then they still held that Senate hearing, which I think goes to further the idea that this was meant to bolster Al Gore's image because he was on that Senate hearing. Yeah. So what the PMRC called for was force explicit tags, rated X, and just, you know, they kind of followed the MPAA's example of movie ratings. Which we did a great episode on that too.

Yeah, that was a good one. Rated X for explicit sex or foul language, DA for drugs or alcohol, V for violence, O for occult, which meant anything that's not, you know, good, strong Christian values. Anything weird. And so to illustrate this, they trotted out what is now known as the filthy 15. And I think we should go through these. Oh, yes. The list of 15 songs and what they were tagged for.

I can't say all the titles. Darling and Nikki, of course, was tagged for sex. At the top of the list from what I understand. Oh, yeah? I think this is the accurate list. And I think like it may have been in some sort of order. Oh, I don't think they were ranked as like, this is the dirtiest of them all. I don't know.

This is the one that got tipper. Sheena Easton's Sugar Walls. You remember that tune? No, and I went back and listened and... Jerry's nodding. And I didn't recognize it at all. Yeah. This was her big image change song because she was sort of all American, not all American

because she wasn't American, but, you know, just sort of that clean image. Sure. And then she came out with Sugar Walls. Sure. And everyone's like, you know what? That's about right. Sheena Easton knows about sex. My God.

Uh, Judas Priest, Eat Me Alive, that's sex and violence. Depending on who you're talking to, but all right. If it's consensual sex and violence, is it really violent? Uh, I haven't heard a bunch of these, actually. Strap on Robbie Baby from Vanity, I've never heard that one. I haven't either. But I can guess what it's about. Sure.

Um, Motley Crue's song Bastard. For violence in language. I didn't know this song, but I looked up the lyrics. It is a rape revenge song. Oh, really? Yeah. It's about a woman, like, killing a man who tried to rape her. That raises a really good point here, Chuck.

And we'll get into this a little more, but I just want to point this out to everybody listening right now. I can't wait any longer. One of the great things about the PMRC is that they provided endless amounts of entertainment to people who were opposed to them by grossly misinterpreting the lyrics of songs. And that's a really good example. Yeah, for sure. Um, and there are a few examples of that.

Um, ACDCs, Let Me Put My Love Into You. I think that's sweet. It's a song about love. Yeah. Let me put my love into you. Yeah. Open your heart to my love. Uh, Twisted Sisters, We're Not Gonna Take It, which, it says violence for that.

That is hysterical because there's nothing violent in that song. Not at all. And like a zero. D. Snyder at the Senate hearings was like, apparently somebody saw the video and... With the guy from Animal House? Yeah. And mistook this cartoonish violence. If you want to know, this was, I collect cartoons and every single one of those acts of violence

was taken from some of my favorite cartoons of all time. So there's nothing in the song. No. So what's the, what are you talking about here? Why would there be explicit, an explicit lyrics warning on my album when there's no explicit lyrics and it's cartoonish violence in the video. But this was on the list of 15 that they used to say, this is a good example of what's going on in the music industry.

I read a good interview with him. It was like 30 years on about the PMRC and he said who they really wanted was Vince Neal because Vince, it was a party guy and not super articulate and it would have been a bloodbath. Did they confuse them because they looked similar? No, no, no. I mean, I don't think they accidentally got D. Snyder, but he said that's kind of who they wanted was Vince Neal.

But what they got instead was me, who D. Snyder very famously didn't drink or smoke or do drugs. It was very articulate, kind of well-spoken family man and he throws a little shade to the gore's way and he's like, I'm still married and the gores are separated and one of their kids was busted for drugs and like he's, he was even nice about it now. He's like, look, marriage is hard. I don't want to make fun of them, but it's just interesting that I'm the one that they were picking on.

I'm still married to my wife 39 years later. He also called her out because this whole thing started because she failed to read the lyrics of the Prince album before she listened to it with her little kid. And he's like, I've always read the lyrics or listened to an album before I've shared it with my kids. That's a parent's job. I've always done this. And like he goes even like when Tenacious D's first album came out, he said his whole

family loved it, but he made a version of it without one of the songs. I know it's one. I'll bet you do. Yeah. For his kids. So they could enjoy Tenacious D, but they weren't ready for this other song. D. Snyder is basically one of the top heroes of this, if not the top hero of this whole thing.

Yeah, for sure. And do you remember we met him kind of said hi. Oh, wait, where was that? The whatever show with Alexis and Jennifer, he was on at the same time as us. That's right. Yep. Because he was in Rock of Ages. So he was on.

Yeah. I totally forgot about that. It was wonderful. One of them was Martha Stewart's daughter. Is that right? Alexis was. Okay. Interesting.

Yeah. I totally forgot about that whole thing. You did? Yeah. Madonna, dress you up. Yeah. Madonna, if you read quotes from her about this, she's like, yeah, whatever. She doesn't care.

It's like a Tuesday for me. The band Wasp, if you remember them. We are sex perverts is what Wasp stands for. Oh, really? They were like a proto-Guar kind of and please don't kill me if you're a Guar fan and I'm way off. It makes sense to outsiders. Did that really stand for that or was that like kids in Satan's service?

No, that's what it stood for. They were like, there's like a big stage show and like human. Like he lawless, right? Yes. And he, I remember he wore a cod piece that shot out. It was wired to pyrotechnics and like shot sparks out. There was also a cod piece with like a saw, I think a chainsaw on it. Okay.

Kind of like a. Sure. It was a horrible scene in seven, but I think the one, the way he was approaching it was a little more funny and just kind of lighthearted than the seven one. Good Lord. So they're a song animal, sex, language and violence. It covered all three, but not a cult. No, no, no.

A cult. Def Leppard high and dry, parentheses Saturday night is about drinking. Okay. All right. And they even said like, yeah, it's about drinking. People like to have fun on Saturday night sometimes, you know, merciful fate into the coven. And I think that was King diamonds band originally.

Yes. He was merciful fate singer. So they, there's was a cult and it was like overtly a cult stuff like come, come serve Satan with me. It's fun. Kill your parents kind of thing. But don't really your little psychotic 16 year old. This is not for real.

This is just music and I'm trying to sell records by painting my face. Plus also one of the other points that I think a lot of people made too was you're not going to find merciful fates into the coven on Casey Kasem's top 40 ever. Like you would really have to go find this thing. Yeah. There were no songs on the radio. And even if you do find it, well, then if your kids listening to merciful fate, have a conversation with your kid about what they're listening to and what merciful fate saying

and just how real or non real it is, engage your child. And also you will not be the one parent in the history of the world that stops your child from listening to or watching something that they want to listen to or watch. Yeah. When it's impossible, when license to ill came out, I knew like every word on the album front to back and one of them, I was singing it out loud to my parents about smoking that dust at St. Anthony's feast. And they were like, it was funny.

They didn't say anything immediately, but they did look at each other and like a day or two later, they approached me and they're like, Josh, you know that song, that Beastie Boy song where they're talking about smoking dust? Are they talking about angel dust, PCP? And I was like, I don't know, probably and they're like, you can't listen to that anymore. Yeah. And but that's one of the points though that Ed makes in this article is that like a kid probably doesn't know.

And I think research has even shown that lyrically, people are more prone to bring their own experience into something, especially a kid. Well also, I legitimately remember, I can put myself back at that time and hearing that I wasn't like, huh, angel dust, maybe I'll give that a try. Yeah. Of course not. Thanks Ed Rock. That's a great idea.

I really didn't think like that. No. And I think most people don't. Ironically, if you're under the influence of angel dust, then lyrics are super suggestive. Probably so. But you have to do the angel dust first. Dio Sabbaths trashed, obviously about drugs and alcohol. That's not Osborne or Dio Sabbaths either.

It's not either one of those? No. Who was it? Ian Gillum? No, I don't even know. I had to look them up. That's fine. It sounds a bit like a little more melodic motorhead.

Okay. It sounds motorhead-y. It's not my kind of Sabbath. Mary Jane Girls in my house, I don't know anything about that. Dude, that's been in my head all day. Yeah. I don't know that group. It's a good song.

Is it? What is it? In my house. Is it rap or is it? In my house. Well, that doesn't clue me in anymore. You've heard this song before. It's not rap.

It's the Mary Jane Girls. Never heard of them. They were like a girl group that Rick James put together, super 80s, like sexy. It's fine. You would not bat an eyelash over it today. Right. Venom, possessed. Never heard of them.

Occult. Okay. Finally. This is great. Cindy Lauper with her very famous masturbation song, Shebop. So you knew it was about masturbation? No. Okay.

Until I read the words today and I'm like, oh, well that's about masturbation. Yes. She said that she felt a bop a day kept the doctor away. So she was recommending it and that's where she made that song. I got the impression she's a little embarrassed as an adult for having released that song, but not apologetic. No. Cindy Lauper apologizes to no man.

We saw a show of hers once. She's good. A concert? Yeah. I went to that Halloween party of hers one time. No. In the 90s, she has a big Halloween bash every year at her place in New York and my friend John Abraham was a member of the fan club and I think he could get like early tickets

or something. Oh, that's cool. So he got us all tickets and we went and I met Cindy Lauper and partied at her Halloween party, which was so much fun. She's like she spends a lot of time and money like helping out LGBTQ youth who've been kicked out onto the street by their parents. She's great. Yeah.

It's like a legitimately great person. Yeah. She's totally. And talented too. Very much so. She bop Cindy. She bop. That's right.

So that's the filthy 15. That's what they trotted out and this is when I guess we need to get in a little bit to the fact that it seems sort of okay, even me as a parent now to be like, well, you know what, there's nothing wrong with the rating system because as a parent, you want to know what's going on and that just helps us as a bit of shorthand for us. But it wasn't a voluntary thing because very soon what started happening is they started, people started doing interviews and on the PMRC people in the government and it was clear that they were trying to get, be rid of this stuff, get it out of stores, drive them out

of business. Yeah. Kind of that. Like we have, they have different views than ours. We don't like it. Yep. They considered themselves the moral majority, which was ascendant thanks to basically a pact with Ronald Reagan.

They helped get Reagan elected and Reagan like made the Christian right very prominent in powerful and American politics in the 80s. And I read this, one of my favorite things to do, Chuck, when we're researching stuff like this is to read contemporary articles at the time. Like they don't know the outcome and they also know tons of details that get lost to time over history. But I was reading this like long form LA Times article about this whole thing written right smack dab in the middle of it.

And they quoted this one guy who was like, this is part of a movement. Like everybody's looking at it like it's just about censoring records. They're like, no, these same people tried to get rid of the last temptation of Christ. They tried to get funding pulled for the national endowment for the humanities. This is like part of a larger thing that they're trying to do and they're trying to sanitize American popular culture to their tastes. And what you were saying, I think is that in interviews and at the Senate hearings, some of the people on the PMRC side, including PMRC members, basically said like, yeah,

we're trying to censor this, which it's one thing if you go into it saying that because then the people who are opposed to you know where you stand. But the PMRC, their whole position, they talked out of both sides of their mouth and one of the sides, the side that they said the loudest was, we're not trying to censor anything. We're trying to get the record industry to do this voluntarily. We just happen to be... Like you're a private group. Right.

You're married to these senators and these congressmen and like these cabinet members. And that has nothing to do with anything. But if you look at the context of everything, it was, it's voluntary, but if you don't do it, we're going to put you out of business or we're going to have the government do it. And that is censorship. It's also unconstitutional. When the government gets into that, that's unconstitutional. And probably every single law like this would have been thrown right out by the Supreme

Court. Yeah. Well, which is one big reason why this wasn't a law. There was never legislation proposed. It was always voluntary from a private group to a corporation. But Frank Zappa at those hearings said, well, wait a minute. If this has nothing to do with legislation, if this has nothing to do with law, why are we holding Senate hearings on a private group trying to get a private action, voluntary

action undertaken? What are we doing here? Yeah. And he really revealed like the theater behind the whole thing, got rid of all the set dressing and showed it for what it was, which was a stab at censorship. This guy, Jeff Ling, part of the PMRC said, do I think it should be out of stores? Sure, I do. I think labeling will do that.

Another PMRC member, Sally Neveas said, we want the industry to police itself. If they refuse, we're going to look into legal ways to stop what we feel is contributing to the delinquencies of minors. Pat Boone very famously said, that's what the Constitution had in mind. Self-imposed, majority approved censorship. So, I mean, they were blatant about it, about the fact that not only were they trying to legislate morality, if it came, push came to shove, they would try and do that. But to Pat Boone, straight up saying like, yeah, if the majority wants it, sure, censor

art, which is just really scary. Oh, it is scary. There was a woman named Judith Toth, who introduced legislation in Maryland for record labeling, and she apparently told Frank Zappa to stop worrying about civil rights, which is not a phrase you want to go down in history as famously saying. Yeah, and Frank Zappa is the last person I want to say that to. Vince Neil probably would have been like, all right, fine, where's the Jack Daniels? And even though there was a Senator, a Democratic Senator there named James Exon of Nebraska,

and he even said, like, what are we doing here? Well, okay, and I was like, hero, guys, a hero for saying that. No, not a hero for saying that. He wanted to know because he was in favor of censoring. Yeah, but he was like, there was no legislation on the floor, like, why is it here in front of the Commerce Committee? Right. And he was like, well, this is inappropriate then.

This is not right. But no, he was like, well, I thought we were here to censor things, it turns out. Yeah. If you watch the Frank Zappa testimony, it happens in the first couple of minutes, that whole thing. Oh, yeah. I watched a lot of this. I watched it back in the day, some too, but rewatched some of it.

John Denver was great. He had the most impact of everyone because I think they thought John Denver was going to come in there and Mr. Squeaky Clean, yeah, and Pat Boone it up, and he came out hard on a couple of things. He was like, first of all, you think my song Rocky Mountain High is about smoking dope. It's not. Like you're wrong. I wrote it.

It's about feeling the euphoria of nature. In the Rockies specifically. Yeah, in the Rockies in Colorado. And not only that, but you shouldn't be doing this, and they were like, wait, we called you in here because we thought you might be friendly to our committee. A two Denver. And he said, hey, I am friendly. I'm John Denver, but you shouldn't be doing this.

They all clapped. It's funny if you watch the Frank Zappa testimony, they introduced him, and my brain was like waiting for applause and like cheers, and I was like, oh yeah, it's a Senate hearing. Right. They don't do that there. They only applaud themselves. So yeah, let's pause for a second here and point something out, Chuck. We just talked about a Senate hearing where John Denver, Frank Zappa, and Dee Snyder

from Twisted Sister testified. That's a pretty significant Senate hearing. And the 80s it is. It really is. I think it is. I think it's landmark now. So you want to talk a little more about the hearings and then we'll take a break in a little bit.

Yeah, sure. Okay, so the guy who's most frequently, actually all three of them are, but Frank Zappa really kind of laid it down. He brought Moon Unit and Dweezel with him. And they were, I don't know if they got to testify, but they came so that they could testify as concerned teens who were worried about their free speech. And Frank Zappa really pointed it out. He said that, first of all, I think this is the parent's concern, not the government's

concern, and that I've got four children, two of them are here. That was Moon Unit and Dweezel, I just like saying both of their names. I want them to grow up in a country where they can think what they want to think, be what they want to be, and not what somebody's wife or somebody in government makes them be, which is pretty wise words. Although he does say, there's a little watchword in there, wife. Wife got thrown around a lot during this from the opposing side. And it just danced along the edge of being denigrating, I think, like you're a Washington

wife, go stay in your lane, don't worry about big stuff like this. It almost kind of smacked of it whenever it came up, Washington wives or wives or ladies. It just seemed just kind of denigrating here or there. Go back and listen. You'll see it. I heard it, but I had a different take than you did. Gotcha. And Frank Zappa actually was mislabeled too later.

He had a word lyric-free instrumental album that was tagged with explicit lyric. Because somebody in a record store was like, oh yeah, he testified against the PMRC. Man, it's so sad what's going on with his family. What's going on with his family? Just infighting, divided sides, suing each other. Oh no. That's awful. Are Moon Union and Deweyzel on the same side or opposing sides?

I believe, oh man, I went down the rabbit hole on this not too long ago. I think Deweyzel, well, I know Deweyzel and Ahmet are completely on opposite sides. And I think Ahmet and the mom have control of- I think the mom's dead. No. Oh, okay. No, I think they're in control of the catalog. And we're like, you can't play dad's music anymore.

And so I think Deweyzel and Moon I think are on one side and there's another sister. But yeah, it's a complete house divided. That's sad. It's really sad. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's all money. All right.

Let's take a break because I'm bummed out now. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. We shook off the whole Zappa drama. Well, now it's back again. So part of the problem here with these stickers was and is that, well, there's a few things. First of all, what we've been talking about with misinterpreting these lyrics, you've

got somebody else deciding, well, this is what this person meant when they wrote it. So it deserves a sticker, whether it's John Denver or Twisted Sister with their song Under the Blade was about, you know, the guitarist for that band was having throat surgery and was scared. So Dee Snyder wrote a song about being scared, going into surgery and going under the blade. And they thought it was a song about killing people with a knife. Exactly. So that's a big problem.

That's a big problem in and of itself. Well, you get past that by training somebody, right? I mean, you find an elite group of people who have all studied comparative literature extensively, probably of doctorates in it, and you pay them a significant amount of money to work at each record label to go through the songs that come out and decide which ones deserve a label. Yeah, the 30, 40,000 songs that come out each year. Right.

That's what you do, and that's what they did, right? No. Okay. I knew they did. No. And it's funny to go back to Under the Blade thing. Dee Snyder very famously was like, that's not about BDSM. That is all in Dipper Gore's mind, apparently.

Well, he... And Al got mad. Yeah. He got really mad. Oh, did he? Oh, yeah. In the hearing? Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, I didn't see that part. Yeah. He was really ticked off at Dee Snyder. So, yeah, Dee Snyder said that, and that became kind of a talking point on the opposing side was like, basically painting Tipper Gore is like this lascivious like pent-up housewife who couldn't stop herself from talking about BDSM and things like that. And then not just Tipper, but also some of the other people, they were kind of painted

as people who were just basically getting off on talking about this stuff on the Today show or Good Morning America, which like just brings them right up to the line between like earnestness and performance art. And like, they were almost saying like, these people are like putting you on almost. Because I mean, the idea that somebody's walking around getting off on is just such a cartoonish Freudian sketch of a person, but that's where the talking points were on both sides. This is talking about Darling Nikki masturbating.

All you want to do is talk about masturbating in the mass media. Right. And it was basically verbatim as a quote is what I just said. Well, I mean, that's the irony of it all is the word masturbated probably not been used that much in public like ever. Right. Then because of these hearings. And certainly not on Good Morning America or anything like that, but it was the very

people who were decrying it, who were the ones that were bringing it to the masses. Oh dear. And a few more songs, Ozzie's Suicide Solution Song, which is anti-suicide about alcoholism was promoted by the PMRC as a suicide encouraging song. Right. So they're just getting it all wrong. They are. So okay.

So you've got a subjective thing by definition, judging lyrics and interpreting them is pretty subjective. 100% subjective. You're not going to go to the trouble of training people to do this job correctly. Right. At least you're going to come up with a set of coherent criteria and guidelines that can be applied across the board. Right?

No. No, they didn't do any of that. And it wasn't applied across the board because in the end, and this was a survey in Portland, Oregon only in 1994, but let's say we could extrapolate this across the country, 8% of CDs and cassettes total had parental advisory stickers, 59% of rap albums, 13% heavy metal, 1% mainstream pop, and no country albums had stickers. Which is pretty rich considering there's a guy named David Allen Coe and Hank Jr. and Walk Tosh and all that.

All they sang about was drinking and doing drugs and getting fights and stuff. Yeah. Sex, violence. And drugs and drinking. Yep. Yep. And they had zero parental advisory. So that smacked a lot.

And again, that's an extremely narrow sample of record stores in Portland, Oregon. But it gets across some people's points on the opposing side like, no, this isn't about values. It's about what they're threatened by. They're threatened by rap music and heavy metal. They're okay with everything else. And this is proof positive of that. They probably didn't even run the country songs through the process.

Sure. That'd be my guess. I'm sure they just targeted groups, you know? So finally, well, like we said, the IAA had already decided pre-hearing that they were going to do this. And they said, all right, we're going to figure this out. Should just take us about five years. And what the plan may have been was like, maybe this will all just go away.

I think that, yeah, that was part of it. But I think also they realized that like they were going to have to, it would stem off that legislation and it worked. If you read some of the contemporary reports with legislators who brought legislation to their state houses, they say, well, since they agreed to play ball, we're sending our bill, but we've got it over here if they don't end up playing ball after all. So it really did work. But they did it like a couple of days or a couple of weeks before the committee, the

Commerce Committee voted on the tape tax. And the RIA didn't get their tape tax. No, they did not. But what did happen was those stickers in March of 1990 started coming out. I remember going to the store and seeing those for the first time. I got to buy that one. Well, that's kind of what happened too, in some cases. Do you know what the first album that had the first sticker was?

Was there a first album? If you could guess, yes, if you could guess what album that came out in 1990, just guess who would have gotten the first explicit lyrics sticker. Oh man. I don't know. Jane's Addiction. Two Live Crew. Oh, of course.

Band in the USA was the first album to get an explicit lyric sticker. Yeah. So, you know, these stickers started coming out and it had a ripple effect in a big way, but in a lot of ways. Everything from Stephen Tyler getting on stage and saying, thank you, Chipper Gore, because you throw some four-letter words on an album and now you're going to get another million in sales because kids were looking to buy those records. It's forbidden fruit.

All the way to the other side of the coin, which is Walmart or certain states saying, we're not even going to carry these records. That was part of it in stores. It also became an easy target for local law enforcement that decided that they were going to enact their own laws. Like in Broward County, Florida, which is around Miami, where Miami is, the Broward County Sheriff sent out some deputies with their badges full uniformed to go buy record stores and said, hey, just wanted to give you a friendly little heads up.

If you guys sell any more of those two Live Crew albums, we're going to arrest you. We don't want to, but we wanted to give you a heads up first. Two Live Crew found out about it, and we're like, that's prior restraint on free speech. And they won. They won in the Supreme Court, actually. But this kind of thing, it was like, as the Grabster put it, the censors were emboldened by the response from the PMRC's idea. And these labels were, hey, go after these guys.

And not just the records, like when artists came to town, they would get arrested for their performances. In 1989, nine performers were arrested in Georgia alone for their concerts. From Bobby Brown to Gene Simmons. Yeah. And that's what Dee Snyder and that sort of 30 years later thing said is, it worked in one way because they sequestered, which is maybe all they wanted was they sequestered a certain group of artists from the rest.

And that sequestration, like you said, range from now they're following where they're touring. And cops are going to show up there to, while we're at sand, not going to carry this unless you change this album cover or this lyric or the song title to something ridiculous. Like Nirvana's song, Rape Me, was very famously changed on the album, the title to Wave Me. Nothing about the song. But they didn't change the song itself. But if you look on the back of that in utero, it says Wave Me. But it's even like crossed out and then written in Sharpie Wave.

It's not, but it should have been. So it had a big ripple effect in a lot of ways. And I guess before this, they had always had radio safe versions of some songs. Well, yeah, you just weren't going to get radio play. Right. Well, it's like the albums need to be like radio safe, like you listen to in your home. Or else Wal-Mart, Wal-Salem or whatever. That's a big retailer.

It was even back then. So there was a negative, that slippery slope that the PMRC had carried the nation across. We started to slide down it. And actual legitimate censorship took place as a result. And then the way that all of this happened, the way it was able to happen was because there was a gatekeeper, there was a funnel for the record industry to the public. And the PMRC was able to go to them and say, you've got something, we've got something you want, you got something we want, we're going to make this happen.

And just by the fact that the record industry is not like it was back then, they're no longer the gatekeepers. Like if you make music, you can sell directly to your fans. You've got a few digital platforms that do some kind of explicit stuff and or labeling or something. They're still there. It's there. And I think if you still can buy a record, I didn't know anybody still bought like physical

CDs or whatever, but it can still come with a sticker. But it's just changed. It's just different. And if you listen to stuff today and then you listen to that filthy 15, you're like, you've got to be kidding me. So it's almost like the PMRC went and put their finger in a dike that didn't even really need it. And in doing so, they exploded in the floodgates.

The flood just came and overwhelmed them. And just by the number of songs that were released and the amount of just filthiness that was attended in those songs, it became normalized rather than the exact opposite, which is what the PMRC was working for. Yeah. And what didn't happen is our generation, which was the generation of the 70s and 80s, turns out we did not grow up to just be a bunch of degenerates that was going to be the ruin of our country.

It's true though. Because of music. And I think that that is ultimately like what parents tell themselves they're really worried about is that their kids going to become morally unhygienic and the country will go down the hill one way or another. But I mean, it just doesn't seem to pan out ever despite it being such an ongoing and old worry. Jazz was going to be the end of moral society, then rock and roll.

Yeah. It's true. Although I have to say the PMRC did give us Glenn Danzig's song, Mother, which is apparently an ode to Tipper Gore and the PMRC. Oh, really? If you go and read the lyrics, you're like, oh, okay. PMRC was in a bunch of songs. I mean, those four letters appeared in a lot of rock and roll songs, hip hop songs.

Yeah. They got a lot of attention and maybe that's all they wanted. Well, we just gave them some more. Well, they're no longer around. They broke up the band in the 90s. And do you know when? Do you know when Tipper quit? 95?

No, 92 when he became vice president. And then now you can see her sitting in with the Grateful Dead on drums. Smoking grass. He never did drugs. All she talks about is grass now. If you want to know more about the PMRC, well, I don't think there is anything more to know, but go look around, read some contemporary articles. It's fun.

And since I said contemporary articles, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this short and sweet. Remember in the olive oil episode, I said something about Greeks and Italians, like, what's the difference? Yeah. I got support on that. OK. From a Greek gentleman.

Apparently, it's a thing. He said, I think you'll be pleased, Chuck, to find out that you didn't offend anyone when you said Greeks and Italians are the same. In fact, there's actually a phrase, una facia, una raza. Remember in Greek, mia facia, mia raza, meaning one face, one race, often used to express the perception of close cultural affinities between Greeks and Italians. Oh, Nick. Keep up the good work, guys.

That is from Nick Contos. Well done, Chuck. And I bet you Nick Contos is Greek. I'm good. Hey. Does it matter? Yeah, it doesn't. Well, thanks a lot, Nick.

That was a very nice email to send to support Chuck because I left him hanging high and dry. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go under our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com, and you'll find our social links all over the place. I also have a website called thejoshclarkway.com, and you can send me, Chuck and Jerry, an email at stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.